Pastoral Reflections: Recent Episodes

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Proverbs 8:22-31 | Romans 5:1-5 | John 16:12-15

God our Father, who by sending into the world the word of truth and the spirit of sanctification made known to the human race your wondrous mystery, grant us, we pray, that in professing the true faith, we may acknowledge the trinity of eternal glory and adore your unity, powerful in majesty. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This feast, the Feast of the Trinity, is one of those times when I want so much to be able to awaken you to the mystery that is hidden in everything that God is and does. We are children of the Father God, but we are so slow to fathom and to accept and to take in the majesty, the wonder, the awesomeness of this God and what he’s done for us, what he’s doing for us on a daily basis.

We live in isolated worlds of our own concerns, our own needs, and I remember, when I first learned about my faith, my first understanding of this Judeo-Christian tradition that is my root to everything real in the world, when I think back to the time as a child I was learning about it, there was something so clear about the teaching I got. It was somehow God is very, very much there as a lover, but he’s also like a human father. He asks us to do things, and if we fail him, if we don’t do what he wants, he’s upset with us, and then we’re punished. And so there was something in that early image that was given to me that is so part of my unconscious right now that I deal with. It’s my first reaction to so many things. What have I done that I shouldn’t have done? What mistake did I make? How can I make up for it? Yet when you really listen to the fullness of the message of God — you can’t stay just in the Old Testament. You can’t even just stay in the New Testament. You have to stay in the reality of God’s relationship, which is dynamic and alive and effective in human beings’ lives. That has been going on for — millions of years? I don't know, but what I’m trying to say is that the revelation of God is an ongoing, uncovering, unfolding discovery of who he really is, and certainly in the Old Testament we have a certain image of him as a God who was very demanding in the beginning, and he kept changing his requirements of us, when we couldn’t respond correctly to him, to stay in a relationship with him. He didn’t expel us or get rid of us. He said, “Well, let me change. If I’m demanding that you must do what I ask for you to be in touch with me, well, maybe I’ll change that. If you’re not in touch with me and don’t do what I ask, I’m not going to leave you like I first said I was.” Actually, when he said, “I’ll still be with you when you mess up,” then he realized, “Well, maybe what I have to do is do something for you so that you will see something, be given something that will awaken your heart and mind to the way in which I’ve always wanted you to live.” And that issue of God wanting us to live a certain way, I thought, was somehow to please him, but it’s not at all. All he wants is for you and for me to live the life we’re called to live so that we can be experiencing it as it was intended to be experienced. It is marvelous. It is overwhelmingly beautiful and full and rich. That’s his gift to us.

First, he started with the law and his image as our Father, and we were told that these were the things that human nature was intended to be. Now try to do what your nature is calling you to do. Don’t follow a nature that is not really truly you. That’s just called evil, but it’s mostly — it breathes, and it lives in our indecisions, our doubts, our not being convinced of who God really is. He’s a loving father who created us in a world that is so beautiful and so wonderful, and what he longs for is that we engage in it, experience it and share it.

So look at the first reading. It’s a beautiful reading of this notion of when God created the world, and he created it with a part of him that this feast is asking us to become more aware of, the Holy Spirit. And this is so exciting to me to listen to this, because it so goes beyond anything your mind can fathom. That’s meaning you’re closer to the truth. If it all makes sense, it’s logical and practical and fair, you’re not anywhere near the kingdom. No, but here we have this image of this Spirit of God that didn’t come until later in terms of our being able to attach ourselves to the gifts of this usually feminine figure, wisdom, but in the story of creation, you see this part of God. This feminine, life-loving part of him was there at the very beginning. Everything that he created, she was there, and the feminine part of that story is, as everything was happening, she somehow was the artisan participating in its creation, the mountains, the hills, the waters, the skies, the stars, but the beautiful thing in that passage is she danced. She danced all around. She took delight in it. The word is play, but it’s translated in other translations as dance. So this part of God that is dancing and thrilled with creating this place for his people —and it says, “I love these human beings.” That’s an image I was never given of God, that he created this world for us and wanted us to experience it in a way that gave us extraordinary joy, and that’s what it really is.

It’s a world, it’s a life that we are supposed to be experiencing, and listen to this Trinitarian image. The Father is the one who creates. The Father is the aspect of God that is like a Father, like the one who gives life, creates. The Son is the manifestation of who the Father really is. So we have Jesus is the word. The word is truth. God is truth, Jesus, the word made flesh. So we have in Jesus then this beautiful experience of a human being filled with divinity who is living his life in a way that we are intended to live ours. He’s not living an extraordinary life in terms of something radically unusual that we sometimes think it’s that. No, he’s living the life that you and I are called to live now. Jesus said that. “All the things you see me doing, this ability I have to affect change in other people, that I have this love for them, this forgiveness for them, and I want to see them whole and complete, and wherever I go, this intention of mine is so intense that it changes people, that their bodies change, they get better, that’s what human beings are made to be.” That’s what our destiny is. What else would he be saying when he said, “I am the one who’s come to explain to you who you are, and everything I ask you to be, you have the potential in you to be. And I want you to be like me,” engaged in the world in a way that is so beautifully disinterested and almost discouraged by the selfish separation of stuff that human beings come up with of being better than someone else and judging and condemning. All of that has no place in the kingdom, because it’s all about this one thing we prayed for in the opening prayer. It’s all about unity. We adore, we worship the unity of this thing that God created, our life — our life in him, in each other.

If there was anything I could say today that I want to say so much it is that there is this unity that exists in the world, and evil has come to rob us of its fruitfulness, and what happens is we become judgmental and condemning and separate individuals competing with each other. How foreign is that to the intention of the God who created us? We are to be one, one in our love of the Father, one in our openness to receive what the gifts of the Son truly are, and then one in this mysterious thing that — this liturgy really does focus, it seems, more on the Holy Spirit than the other dimensions of God, but the Spirit is this thing that has to come later. I love that. When Jesus was talking about the Spirit, he said, “You can’t handle the Spirit, the wisdom, the understanding of the Spirit now. You have to go through some more evolution. You have to change. You have to understand more, but there will come a day when you’re going to understand. You’re going to understand something that is so powerful, so beautiful, and when you see it, you’re going to be astonished at what this God ultimately is up to. It’s going to seem so much of a surprise, so unexpected, so inexplicable.” And it creates in us a kind of curiosity, a bewilderment, a perplexity that could the world be really this good? Could there be something in this world that would bring us to a place, while we’re in this world, of great unity, oneness? Yeah. Look at the evolution of humanity.

I just spent time in Italy the last couple of weeks, and these beautiful little villages, these high-top little towns that are so beautiful were built on these mountaintops, because it was the only way to defend themselves from each other. And they had walls around these cities, and they would go to war with each other. Five miles apart, they would go to war over something. I don't know, whatever it was, political, social, economic, and these little villages right next to each other, constantly at war — not constantly but often at war. And you look at these places now. How could they possibly have been at war with each other? Think of the divisions we have created in the world overtime. They’ve evolved out of, I think a more primitive understanding of who we are, a less conscious sense of what human beings are, but look at the transformation. I’ll just take it in my lifetime, which is a good chunk, 80 years. So you look at it, and you see, when I grew up, a black and a white family never lived next door to each other. Germans in Cincinnati never married Irish people, because that was considered to be somehow lowering the German bloodline or something. All these divisions, and one by one they keep going away. They keep going away, and I pray they continue to keep going away until there’s a oneness. There’s a oneness that is there that is the promise of God. It’s all one.

What does that mean, it’s all one? It means it’s all interrelated. It’s all interconnected. When you separate yourself by judgment from someone else, it’s an artificial separation, because it’s not real. So it never feels right. It never produces goodness. It only produces pain and suffering. “I’m opposed to you. I refuse to forgive you.” It just feels unnatural to me. It just feels wrong, because it goes against the very work that we’re now in, and the work now is the work of the Holy Spirit, which is to awaken everyone’s eyes and minds and hearts to the oneness that is part of what God has always intended this world to be. And it will become, I believe with all my heart, more and more that way where, I don't know how many years from now, but it will seem so insane that at one time Germany was at war with other countries, that we were at war with Germany or Japan. That will seem like stupid, ludicrous stuff, because it didn’t produce anything but pain and separation, but as Paul mentions, a lot of times the pain and the separation that causes a lot of discomfort are those things that eventually develop character, that eventually make us more aware of the insanity of living in a world as if it’s separate, as if it’s not already connected.

I had this image, when I was getting ready to prepare this homily this morning, and I hope it makes sense to you. It was probably, let’s see, probably in the ‘70s, maybe ‘80s, no ‘70s or ‘60s, when we had our first pictures from outer space of the earth, this blue ball floating in the universe, and I think that must have had some major impact on our understanding of existence. At least all of a sudden, this thing that I thought was so big, so enormous, the world — how can God take care of the world, and then all of a sudden, I see the world is this little ball floating in this universe. It’s a tiny part of the whole universe, and then this universe may be — there may be many universes. This idea of big and small, important/unimportant, all these distinctions we make, they don’t really make a lot of sense, because just imagine God loving that blue ball as one of his most wonderful things that he created, and then the love that he has for that and the wonder that it’s sustained by his love. Well, that same love that he has for that planet and for the existence of everything he has for each and every individual. He loves you as much as he loves the planet, as much as he loves the universe, because you’re one with the universe. You’re the same. I know it sounds crazy, It doesn’t make sense to the logical mind, but what does make a lot of sense to me is the gift of the Holy Spirit, because if it’s one thing it’s wanting to accomplish — and I love that most often it is depicted as a woman who wants unity, who wants us to experience oneness, not division, not antagonism, not war. I think women hold together every family, and the feminine in every man holds together every family. All the divisions we have of masculine/feminine, gay/straight, black/white, whatever it is, all that’s imagined by us. It’s not real. We’re all different, all reflections of the one truth, and what a wonderful thing to celebrate on this Feast of the Trinity. This is the fullness of the teaching of Christianity, Judeo-Christianity, and it’s we’re all one. And anytime you judge yourself and break yourself into parts — I hate me — separations like that make no sense to the world, to the way existence is, and when they don’t and we live in them, it’s painful. It’s destructive. It robs of us the thing God created Jesus to accomplish, and that’s peace, the peace of the kingdom. That’s our gift, the oneness that brings peace.

Father, free us from every illusion, every misunderstanding of your kingdom, every part of us that somehow imagines a world that isn’t the world that you created. We humans, we create worlds that are toxic, separate us, create great suffering that’s unnecessary. So awaken us to this insanity and open us to a world that is working together with every part of every aspect of every problem so that instead of taking sides and working against the other side, we’ll come together under the direction and the love and the power of your Holy Spirit. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Acts 2:1-11 | 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13 | John 20:19-23

Oh God, who by the mystery of today’s great feast sanctify your whole church in every people and nation, pour out, we pray, the gifts of the Holy Spirit across the face of the earth, and with the divine grace that was at work when the gospel was first proclaimed, fill now once more the hearts of believers. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This Feast of Pentecost is the culmination of what we began on Ash Wednesday, weeks and weeks ago. What we’re looking at here is the fullness of what it is that God longs to share with you and me. The journey has been long, the work of God drawing human beings back into a place of wholeness, a place of peace, a place of freedom, and I suppose in order to understand more fully where we have been led, where we are now, after this great Feast of Pentecost, we need to look at where we began. And certainly where we began is in the garden when there was a lie presented to human beings, and the lie was, “Why not go in on your own? Why not do what you want to do? Why not be separate from God and yet not turn your back on him?” It’s subtle that lie. It’s like, “Why not be strong like he wants you to be, but be that on your own.” It’s almost like asking God to make me into something autonomous and capable of taking care of whatever God wants me to do, and then I’ll be rewarded for that, and I’ll feel good, because I’ll be the one that made it all happen. That image of separation, isolation is the key problem that human beings have, and in place of it, there is a call to unity, to oneness, to community. All religions — all religions have, in a sense, the same goal, to bind us to the God who created us, not in any kind of bondage sense but in a sense of being connected and, through that connection, to find fullness, to find wholeness. We’re made for a relationship with divinity. It’s not really an option if we’re going to evolve and develop into fully who God has created us to be.

So we’re looking at this moment now that we are in. We’re sort of going back to an historical moment in the church, and Jesus has walked this earth for three years. He has gone through his, confusing to many people — the end of his life is nothing like people expected. Everyone thought the Messiah would come into the world and be the great wielder of justice and would conquer all evil and would destroy all those who are evil and would save all those who are good, and it would be some kind of triumphant experience of good over evil. That’s the way everyone thought the world would be saved and should be saved. And then in comes this strange figure that doesn’t have any real credentials for power, in the sense that he came from a very simple background in this small, little town of Nazareth, and he comes onto the scene, and instead of wielding a great sword of justice, he seems to almost be soft on evil. And instead of forcing people to see what they have done and then to change or to be killed, he does something radically unexpected. He seems to engage himself in the lives of those who are failures with the sense that that’s the way he gets into their life. That’s the way he enters them, through their weakness, and then when he’s there, he teaches them that the only way to deal with evil is through forgiveness. It’s the only way to deal with evil. The only way to conquer it is forgiveness. It doesn’t make any sense to our logical minds. No, the way to deal with evil is to destroy it, to attack it.

So with that transformation in mind, we see this experience that the disciples and the church was having. Let’s say on Pentecost Sunday, it was all the church together coming into this place where there was this strong, overpowering sound of a Spirit that rushed into people, and it took the form of tongues of fire over each individual. That’s all very mysterious and miraculous, and I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have been there to see something like that. And yet the real mystery, the real miracle was not that but that something happened between human beings. People from everywhere, who spoke different languages, were all present, and somehow, even though they did not speak the same language, even though they weren’t on the same page, even though they perhaps didn’t have the same culture and therefore did not approach the world in the same way, one thing they could all agree on and feel and communicate between each other is this awesome thing that God has done, the awesome act of a God who redeemed us by not converting us from evil to good, because you can still work against evil with the same energy that you work against good. You can be totally separated from everyone and be the great warrior and decide that you’re going to go out there and conquer all the evil around you and in you, and you’re doing it on your own. That seems like a conversion from going around and trying to use people. You went from evil to good, but doing good in the same way that we achieve evil is not a real transformation. It may be a conversion but not a transformation, and what God’s gift through Christ is is a transformation called redemption. It’s effect is transcendence, and we become someone else, not someone foreign to our nature but someone because divinity dwells in us we have the capacity to go beyond our human limitation. That means we go beyond logic and beyond our way of thinking, beyond the way our culture has trained us. We don’t follow the temptation that was presented to Jesus when the devil took him to a high mountain and placed him before the world and said, “Look at this, how it all works. People have power over people, and they have authority, and people look up to them, and they’re frightened of them, and they can make people do anything. Why don’t you change the world by using the tactics of the world.” Jesus’ response was, “I’m not going to worship your way. I’m not going to surrender to your way of the world, but I’m going to use something radically different. I’m not going to save the world by forcing people to do things, by frightening them into doing things, by using my power over them. I’m going to enter into them, forgive them, dwell with them, and in partnership with them, we’re going to be a force, an awesome force in the world that is not a violent force but is a powerful force for transformation.” That’s what we want. That’s the goal.

We call that the gift of the Spirit, people being filled with this unique Spirit that filled Jesus, that transformed the world, and as the second reading makes clear, there are different forms of it. So there again you’re seeing that there’s a way in which the world, I think, when it uses its own worldly power, is almost always going to work for some kind of uniformity, everybody marching to the same beat, everybody doing the same thing, all the moral laws being followed exactly the same by everyone. That’s a great shadow of religion, laying the same moral responsibilities on everyone, no matter who they are, what their situation is, sort of bypassing their own story but just wanting everything to be the same. When we see religion doing that, we know that it’s trapped in the ways of the world. So when we look at the Spirit’s manifestation in people, what is clear that Paul is saying to Corinthians is that we have to look very carefully into the way the Spirit works so that we don’t fall into the trap of trying to evaluation everyone as if they have to have the same gift, the same spirit, the same qualities of life. Some people, maybe their destiny is to be weak throughout their life, to even maybe be a burden to people. Maybe that’s their role. It makes sense to me. Why doesn’t everybody just shape up, and why hasn’t religion worked over 2,000 years where we all just start doing the right thing? If that were the call, if that were the reason that Jesus came to the world, to make everybody doing the right thing while they lived here, then he’s a miserable failure, but if it were something more hidden, more mysterious, more subtle, if it’s all about us living in relationships that are both positive and negative and learning how to deal with the positive and negative, how to support and enhance and encourage the positive and to meet the negative, not with force or demands but with this mysterious thing called forgiveness — and that’s what we see in the gospel, this awesome story of that moment between Easter and Pentecost, the moment that I think clarifies for us in ways that we couldn’t imagine. It clarifies for us what Jesus was really about when he suffered and died and rose. He comes back, an awesome thing. He comes back and speaks to his disciples. Wouldn’t you have loved to have been living at that time and seen that experience. The way it’s described in scripture, in one of the writings of Paul, when Jesus came back, he first appeared to the 12. Incidentally, Paul doesn’t mention the women, but that’s more of a cultural problem. But he appeared to Mary Magdalene, to the women, to his disciples, and then he appeared to 500. Imagine that, being in a room with 500 people or in a field with 500 people, and there’s Jesus resurrected, and he looked different. People never recognized him at first, but there he was, radiating this amazing wisdom and radiating this presence that was transforming by its very nature, the presence that he longs for you and me to have in this world. It must have been an awesome experience, and then he appeared to all of his apostles.

He’s appearing to them, and what is he saying? If you look at the heart of this message that is in the gospel, it is a simple message. “I’ve come into the world to save it, and the way I’m saving it is to go through an experience that unites humanity and divinity, and that is to be able to live in this world in a way that goes way beyond human nature — way beyond human nature.” Jesus was truly transformed from his simple human nature to divine nature to be connected so deeply to divine nature in that baptism where he was filled with the Spirit, the Anointed One, the Empowered One. He said, “What a power looks like in the kingdom is nothing like power looks like in the world. I’ve not come to wield a sword to kill and destroy that which is evil, to condemn and to scream at people. I’ve come to be in them, with them, support them, love them, forgive them, and that’s what I’m asking you to do.” Jesus is saying, in the gospel passage, when he says to his disciples, “What I want you to do is realize something. My Spirit in you, my gift of redeeming you, my invitation for you to live not just with humanity but to be connected naturally and comfortably with divinity, to be comfortable with God in you,” and then to do exactly what Christ did, to fight evil with the most amazing, surprising ammunition, and that is to forgive it. He makes a simple statement. He doesn’t say, “Go and forgive everybody, or I’m going to be really upset, and I’ll condemn you if you don’t.” He said, “No, just realize, recognize, be aware that, when you forgive another person, when you forgive them, you release them from their sins. And when you don’t do that, somehow their sins are retained.” What does that mean? Does it mean that, if we try to remove someone’s sin by hating them, wanting them to be destroyed, yelling at them, condemning them, we’re doing nothing but allowing their sin to be there, but if we do forgive them, somehow they are freer to be freed from it? It’s a great, great mystery, but I think everyone knows the difference between being loved into wholeness or being judged and condemned into wholeness. Why is it that we think so quickly, or why is it so easy for us to imagine that, if I just tell everybody where they’re messed up and tell them how messed up they are and how screwed up they are, that they’ll turn around and say, “Oh, wow. I didn’t realize I was that bad. Of course I don’t want to be bad. I want to be good.” There’s so much guilt and shame in people who are not doing well. There’s a burden. There’s a wound. There’s a heaviness, and then you come on them and tell them that they’re — affirm all their negative feelings about who they are. Where are they going to have the stuff to pull themselves up and say, “I want a greater power than myself to transform me, because I’m worth it”? They’ve got to be loved. They’ve got to be supported, and the way you do that is understanding and compassion and empathy. Those are things that are so underestimated in their power to transform so we can transcend that kind of wound inside of us that keeps us in places of darkness and imprisons us in places where we don’t feel that it’s worth — that we’re worth even working on.

Most people don’t go around and say, “I’m not worth it. I’m not going to change. I’m not going to develop. I don’t want to.” No, they just go into a state of kind of unconsciousness and get distracted with a whole bunch of other stuff. So it’s easy — it’s easy for people, I think, so somehow miss the most amazing gift that God has prepared for us and the greatest gift he’s empowered us with, and that’s the gift of forgiveness and the gift of being able to be a source of awesome, awesome power to the heart and to the soul of someone struggling. Medicine is a good model, I think, for the way God’s forgiveness works, and when somebody’s weak and there’s something broken, we don’t put stress on it. We rather take it, clean it, open it, bandage it, support it, try to leave the pain of it and wait for something not coming from us but something coming from deep inside of every human being, this gift of God that will always, always achieve the healing we allow it to do.

Father, on this day that we consider the birthday of the church, the Christian church that you founded, bless us. Bless us with an awareness of the gifts that have been given, with a keen sense that, as we surrender to your way, to the way of the Spirit, we will find the goal that this great faith has always promised us, and that’s the goal of wholeness and the goal of peace and the goal of entering fully into your kingdom. And we ask this Christ, our Lord, amen.

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Acts 1:1-11 | Ephesians 1:17-23 | Luke 24:46-53

God, our Father, make us joyful in the ascension of your Son, Jesus Christ. May we follow him into the new creation, for his ascension is our glory and our hope, and we ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

These next three Sundays are very important feasts that we’re focusing on, and this one is the Feast of the Ascension. Then next Sunday is the Feast of Pentecost, and then we close this Easter time with the Feast of the Holy Trinity. What I can sense the church is doing is trying to put us into the right disposition, the right place to begin what we call ordinary time throughout the summer months and through the time of advent when we listen attentively to the teaching and the experiences that people had of this figure Jesus. So I want to start with a kind of broad-stroke picture of this mysterious thing we call redemption, which God came and became one of us and saved us from something horrific.

So let’s look at it. First of all, I just want to start with the image of God creating human beings and setting them on this earth and taking a risk, a chance and giving them the one thing he didn’t give to any other thing that he created, and that was free will. So he has now created these beings that can actually turn away from him and reject him and do anything they want to do if they set their mind to it, and he started with them in a beautiful, idyllic kind of place, much like we begin our own lives in this world in childhood. Everything is in harmony, and everything seems one, and it’s a beautiful time. And then as we develop and as the story developed, we see that all of a sudden, independence and autonomy begins to fill the human race, which is symbolized in Adam and Eve, and what we see in them is this choice that they make to basically be autonomous from God. That’s one of the fundamental things we see in that story in Genesis, that they thought they could be equal to God. They could know what God knows and have what God has but not necessarily because he’s steadily giving it to them but because they can possess it. That was the lie that was given to them, and the result of that is that they had to struggle on their own then. If they chose to be on their own, God said, “Okay, I’ll sew you some clothes, and I’ll send you out into the world. And it’s going to be tough.” So then he gave them the law, and the law was something to help them in their choices and to guide them. They struggled and struggled to follow the law and really basically couldn’t do it very well at all. There were those moments that are very powerful when God looks at the human race and just says, “This is just a mess. I’m going to start all over again. I’m going to get rid of them all.” And he saves a family and then continues the work.

It’s an interesting story, not unlike our own stories of struggle with understanding who God is and how we surrender to him, but anyway, it took the course eventually where God said, “The only thing I can do is come down and show them, more dramatically, more clearly, who they can be.” That’s what Jesus came into the world to do, is to show them who they can be, human beings filled with spirit, and they needed something. They needed something that would break open their hearts and their souls to the presence of God, because Jesus, it seems to me, came to teach, more than anything else, the teaching of presence. So he came into the world to do something to open men and women to this mysterious power of God dwelling within them, partnering with them and enabling them to do this work in a new context, in a new — it’s a new creation is the way it’s described in scripture. So the work of Jesus is to come in the form of a human being and then to say, “Look, this is what potentially human beings have within them, this capacity for divinity to dwell within them. It’s what you rejected back in the garden.” And it changes everything. So we have this thing called redemption.

Then when Jesus went through the process of redemption — and the interesting thing about redemption is it has something to do with surrendering and submitting to a destiny that God calls us to, and there’s a kind of dying to it that is so essential. And that’s what Jesus did. He gave in to a plan, and the plan seemed so ridiculous to the disciples that they thought it was not a good plan at all. So they really basically felt that this was a stupid idea. When Jesus gave in to his destiny and gave in to what it is that God was calling him to, even though it looked to the world as if he was truly destroyed, but he wasn’t, it was in the act of surrender that he gained all this ability to come back, in a sense, and be with his disciples. So what he wanted so clearly to show them is that, when we do the grieving and the suffering that is so part of our lives, when we go into that and accept it, we come out of it a new person. We come out of it, in a sense, in a risen form, and so Jesus makes sure that they understand that those things that are destiny for us can never destroy us. They can only bring us to fuller life. And so Jesus comes back and spends 40 days with his disciples, and they’re absolutely, totally convinced that he isn’t gone, that he wasn’t destroyed. Forty days with a person who was dead in a bodily form would convince anybody that this is a mysterious, marvelous, wonderful thing that they are experiencing.

And then when he gets ready to leave that time that he spent with them in a resurrected body, that’s where we pick up the story today, and in both the Acts of the Apostles and in the Gospel, it’s so clear what happened, that he was with them. He told them that there was going to be something given to them, and this is the part that I can’t explain it. I don't know exactly how it worked, but what Jesus was saying was, “I have to return to the Father so that, when I return to the Father, then it’s possible for my Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of my Father and myself, will come and dwell within you. So I have to do all these things. You watched me go through all the things that I had to do in terms of my death, suffering and passion. Then you see me rise, but then I must go back to the Father, and what I’m going to do, when I’m with the Father, is I’m going to be your advocate. I’m there for you. I’m there to continue to be a source of grace and teaching for you, and the way it comes to you is in the form of Spirit.” So the Spirit is going to come, and what’s important about the second reading, from Ephesians, is that it says what is promised is wisdom, wisdom that brings knowledge of who God is.

So what is the work of the Spirit in you and in me? And we’re going to celebrate that next week in Pentecost. What is this gift of God’s Spirit in us producing? Well, let’s look at those two images. It’s wisdom, and you know that wisdom is something that goes beyond logic and goes beyond cause and effect. It’s a kind of understanding of something where we’re wide open to allowing something to happen that doesn’t make a lot of logical sense, but we believe it. We know it’s true. So this wisdom is given to us, and the wisdom is regarding the full nature of who God is. And if you’re going to look at who God is, you’re looking at what he’s doing for you. So the ascension is the invitation on the part of Jesus to his disciples, to all of us, to be open, radically open, ready to receive this gift of wisdom that’s then going to show us who he is. Then I’m thinking to myself, “This is such an interesting image. Who is God?” Who is he to you? I have a sense of who he is to me, which is radically changed since I was 18, 19, 20 years old when I went in the seminary. I don't know if I had any sense of — I knew God existed. I knew that he was a personal God, and I believed in Jesus, but I think what I basically felt about God is that he came into my life to tell me all the things that I needed to do in order to please him so that I could get the reward of eternal life or the reward of a good life. So it seemed to me that primarily what I was looking at, when I thought about God, what I was grasping in my imaginations, was a kind of good teacher who would tell me what to do in order to get what I needed. What I realize now is there’s that dimension to Jesus. He’s a good teacher, but what’s so often not understood, and what I think we need the Spirit to help us understand, because the way it unfolds is totally mysterious, is that we have a God who has created for you and for me an entirely new world — a new world, something radically different and that, if we understand it fully and we surrender to it, enter into a new creation. And there are dimensions to this new creation, and one of them is a kind of unity, a oneness.

I love those images in the Old Testament, in Genesis, of Adam and Eve in the garden, and there’s always the sense of such harmony and oneness and walking with God, and everything is connected. And yet in this world that I live in, so often I can go through a day, and I feel nothing more than being scattered. My attention’s being pulled in 20 directions, and I try to cover all the things that I’m responsible for, and then I hear things that are going on in the world that worry me. There’s oil spilling in the Gulf, and then there’s this war, and there’s this economy, and there’s these problems on Wall Street. It doesn’t seem to have any kind of unity or connection. So what I’d like to see happen to us is that we would be open to this idea that there is a gift that is given — it’s called the Spirit — that comes into us, that when we are open to it and notice that, St. Paul says in this letter, that what we need to do is have the eyes of our heart see it. That’s so much the image of wisdom, the eyes of your heart, not the eyes of your mind but the eyes of your heart. That just says to me that it’s more in the area of feeling. It’s more in the area of intuition. It’s more in the area of something you kind of know without knowing how you know it, but if you could believe that this promise is real, that God is really creating for you and for me a way of seeing the world where everything is interconnected, then if you presume that it is — it’s not that you can figure out first that it is and, “Oh, now I believe it is,” no. Presume that it is, and then begin to wait, to begin to sense and to feel the connections. It’s a very, very important exercise in terms of our spiritual lives to have some way of sensing that every single thing that’s going on is somehow connected to the other things that are going on that are connected to the needs that your soul has, that your heart has, that the culture has, that everything has. It’s all working together for the good. That’s the promise, because if you don’t have the sense — if you don’t have a sense of God as an agent in the world that is working for you and doing radical things for you, then it seems to me he ends up simply being a tour guide through this whole thing and a teacher that tells you what you have to do and not to do in order to get to the goal. And that’s such an over-simplified, impersonal, shortsighted way of imagining this God.

When Jesus says, “I’ve come into the world to give to you something so radically new that it changes everything, and there’s a unity in the universe because of what I’ve done. There’s a oneness that we need to be aware of” — that kind of language is all through the New Testament, and I often wonder what was that so electrified the converts to Christianity. And I don’t think it was the fact that there was just this story of a man who died and came back. I don’t think that would have changed that much. It would be such an interesting thing, to believe that that happened, but it’s got to be that that event did something more than just present a human being who was dead and then came back and then somehow went up to heaven. There’s something that he did in that act that is so essential. If you think of it as divinity coming down and entering into this whole messy sort of thing we call life and somehow charging it with connection and grace and unity, then you begin to sense something that’s very exciting, very challenging to be a part of.

So my prayer with you this morning is that we somehow open our hearts, the eyes of our hearts — love that image — and somehow enter more fully into this place where we’re more conscious of what this God has done and is doing for us and what it means that he dwells within us and what this wisdom really is that helps us to see exactly what he’s doing within us. It’s like first we believe, and then we experience, not experience and then believe. So believe with me in this most amazing promise that has this figure, Jesus, ascended into heaven, and he made a promise. The promise is real and has everything to do with a new life that he’s inviting you and me to live, that we could not possibly live without his help and without his teaching and without his presence.

Father, on this Feast of the Ascension, we ask you to awaken in us a longing for what it is that you promise so that our hearts will be open to the mystery of your gifts, especially the way they mysteriously work in our lives and draw us into a place of oneness and wholeness. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Acts 15:1-2, 22-29 | Revelations 21:10-14, 22-23 | John 14:23-29

Grant, almighty God, that we may celebrate with heartfelt devotion these days of joy, which we keep in honor of the risen Lord and that what we live in remembrance we may always hold to in what we do. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This Sunday is one of the Sundays of Easter. Next Sunday we will celebrate the ascension of Christ back to his Father and then Pentecost, the birth of the church, the birth of the coming of the Spirit that awakens our hearts to fathom and understand and grasp the mystery of God living in us and with us. Then we’re back to a couple of other feasts and then ordinary time. So what I want to try to do in my words today is to summarize something that I believe is truly essential about everything that Jesus has brought into the world, particularly how he’s impacted our image of what religion is.

When we look at the first reading, it’s fascinating, because one of the shadows of religion is control, controlling people, not awakening them to a life that they potentially, when seeing it, will want to follow it, not awakening them necessarily to this incredible mystery of God’s Spirit dwelling within us, mingling with our humanity, but it sometimes comes back to simply telling us what to do, controlling our life. And so this new thing, this Christianity is out there, and it’s so exciting, and people are feeling that it’s about being changed, not about being told what to do. And a group of converts, Jews that were converted to this new way of life, felt that it was not fair that those who were converting as Gentiles didn’t have to go through all the things that the law required of them, and they were saying, “Well, they should be circumcised. They should follow the rules, the laws.” And what they wouldn’t grasp, couldn’t grasp, no, salvation is a gift. It’s a gift. It’s won for us by someone. It’s not earned, and I thought it so fascinating, when I listened to the reaction of the people to this group of people who come and say, “No, you have to be circumcised. You have to follow our rules.” What they heard and was perhaps actually expressed — it was expressed in this passage. “Unless you do this, you can’t be saved.” Does that sound familiar? Unless you join our church, you can’t be saved. That’s what I learned as a Catholic. That idea was shattered in the Vatican Council. It was so dramatic that I think most people just sort of didn’t hear it. It’s not saying that all religions are the same. It’s saying that any religion that holds the truth, that teaches the truth is valuable, and it’s a source of salvation. The truth is what saves people, not a particular domination. The more the denomination reflects the truth of the gospel, the more true it is to what Christianity is.

So we have this image that is there in the very beginning. Why would we think it’s not going to be there all the time? That’s the shadow of religion controlling people, telling them, “Unless you do what we say, you are not going to find favor with God. We are in charge of that relationship.” But the interesting thing is there’s something in human nature that knows the truth, even though it hasn’t been fully understood and explained by the gift of the Holy Spirit, and so when we’re told something, we don’t know exactly why it’s wrong, but it doesn’t feel right. It upsets us, and we’re kind of afraid. And that’s what’s so interesting about this first reading. It’s reminding us that, in religion, there is a shadow of people in authority deciding what we must do in order to receive the favor of God, and when we are told we can’t receive the favor of God and it doesn’t seem to make any sense to our own sense of who God is, then yeah, there’s a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear. So we see in that first reading a description of something that we need to be conscious of and aware of and careful not to fall into its trap.

Now, the second reading gives John’s incredible mind — he just had these visions, and if you’re like me, a visual person, they’re so rich. I can just see what he was seeing and then hear the meaning behind it. What he’s saying is he sees this new religion, this new — we call it Christianity, as opposed to a narrow view, a controlling institution, which I’ll call religion, but then he looks, and what he sees is a new city. Where’s it come from? It comes from heaven. What is heaven? Heaven is the place of the truth. So coming from heaven is this image of the way we are called to live in a relationship with God and each other, and it’s magnificent. It’s beautiful. It’s like a stone, jasper. I had to look up what jasper’s qualities are. It’s a stone, and it’s really interesting. It’s not something — you can’t see through it, but it’s filled with all different colors. But it’s been attributed with the power of helping somebody be really grounded in the earth and in reality, very strong stone, and here’s this image of the reality of God’s relationship with us. The earth is the real, kind of grounded, not inflated sort of thing we can do with our imaginations, but it’s the truth. And it’s transparent, or it’s translucent. It’s filled with light. No need for sun, no need for moon. Whatever it is, this is a place of enlightenment, and what it’s founded on is so interesting. The number 12 comes up often. As we know, it’s one of those perfect numbers, a very interesting, important number. Two 12-hour sections make up a day time-wise, 12 months out of a year, 12 zodiac signs or whatever. I don't know if it’s 12 zodiac signs or 12 Chinese signs, but whatever. Twelve is amazing. So what we see is this city, is a community circled by a wall, and the wall is founded on these 12 apostles. Interesting. That means the apostles are people who had a direct experience with God’s presence in Jesus, and so it’s like this city is founded on this incredibly important thing called the experience of knowing God in a way of experiencing his presence. And then it’s a building that has this energy in it, and it flows out. It flows out in every direction, north, east, south, west to whom? To these portals that are guided and protected by angels, which is the 12 tribes of Israel, which is, in a way, the church, everyone, every human being, and the overwhelming that that’s so beautiful in this image is that there’s no temple — no temple, no little place inside of a big building that is run by human beings who determine who is able to come in and who is able to receive. It’s that shadow of religion. “We own it, and we will ask you to do what you have to do in order to get whatever you need from this God. But we have him. We have him. He’s ours.”

Then we hear Jesus, in the gospel, talking to his disciples and saying, “It’s Christianity that I’m establishing for you. It’s all about me dwelling inside of you. We will dwell with you. My father will come and dwell with you.” What happens when divinity is in your humanity, your humanity is enlightened. We don’t know what the potential of humanity is. We have so many extreme cases of people in the world being able to do things that are just absolutely beyond anything we could imagine. Autistic children can do things. There’s a man, I heard — it was on the Internet or something, but I saw he went over the city of Manhattan in a helicopter, maybe a 40-minute ride or something, came back and had a 19-foot long canvas and a Sharpie pen and completely redrew all the buildings in Manhattan in perfect proportion, a human. So when we talk about God’s presence in us awakening the full potential of our humanity, we may be one-tenth of the way that we’re going to eventually be. But what it is, what I want you to feel is, when this indwelling presence is there, we are evolving more into the fullness of what humanity can be, and I would call that consciousness. And the person that we’re given, the presence in us that’s given, it’s different a little bit than the Father and the Son. It is the Spirit that awakens our imaginations to what this relationship with what the Father and the Son inside of us is really going to do. It’s amazing.

So that is an image that I’m trying to depict of what it is we believe in, we as Christians, in particular those of us who are Catholic. We believe in this beautiful, beautiful way in which God has described his relationship with us, and it’s so different than the one from the Old Testament. But one thing you have to always remember about the Old Testament, it began 6,000 years ago. That’s when Adam and Eve were created, and then 4,000 years ago, there was Abraham. I don't know. I used to think, as a child, that those people were just like us. I don’t think they were. I think they were much less evolved and definitely more violent, and when we see God of the Old Testament dealing with them — and he uses a lot of control. “Do this, or I’ll kill you. Do that, or I’ll punish you.” But isn’t that the way children have to be treated, and in a way, we were all children then? And rules and laws were important, but oh, how important it is to let go of that old image of our relationship with God and welcome the new one that isn’t based on a law but is based on presence. It’s not based in obedience but about responding to what God is giving us, and when we see what he’s giving us, it’s so much about accepting us and supporting us and not causing us any undue stress or pressure and giving us peace and giving us a kind of fearless life. What a beautiful image that we have in that, and yet so often we confuse it by the people who get in charge, and I’m one of them. It’s a shadow of being a minister. You’re in control of the place. You control whether you build something new or you don’t or whether you spend money here or spend money there, and then it just flows over into the way we tend to maybe direct people. And we say, “No, this is the only way. Do this, or you’re not a member here. Or do this, and you can’t be saved.” I’m embarrassed to say I get caught in it. We all do, but it’s all about that demon called control.

People don’t want to be controlled when they reach a certain level of evolution. They want to be believed in, and all God is asking — he says, “If you just believe, have faith in what I am, who I am, what I am to you, how much my affection and my love is there for you and how much I respect your freedom, and I want you to respond freely to everything I’m offering — I don’t want to force you into anything, but just believe in me. Have faith in me.” And that means having faith not in a set of rules and laws but in a relationship, a relationship of incredible intimacy and honesty and truth. That’s the heart of being a Christian.

Father, free us from everything that keeps us from understanding who you are, what your intention is with us, how you long for an intimate relationship with us where we’re truly transparent and honest. Help us never be afraid of surrendering to you. It’s not a loss of our freedom. It’s a surrender to what we’re made for. So bless all ministers, like me, and keep us free from that temptation to control instead of to awaken, to somehow take people’s freedom away and give them fear instead of giving them the peace and the joy that is your gift to all of us. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Acts 14:21-27 | Revelations 21:1-5a | John 13:31-33a, 34-35

Almighty, everliving God, constantly accomplish the Paschal mystery within us that those you have pleased to make new in holy baptism may, under your protective care, bear much fruit and come to the joy of life eternal. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

You may have noticed that in these Sundays of Easter we no longer are reading the first reading from the Old Testament but rather the Acts of the Apostles, which is an interesting work, because it is a description of the way in which the church evolved, how it began to take form. It’s so interesting to me, because it focuses on gatherings, gatherings of the disciples with followers and the celebrations that they felt, how enthusiastic they were, how they saw people change, and you see in that first reading of today’s liturgy, you see the church being formed. There’s these credible, spirit-filled disciples, and they’re going around, and they’re finding communities of people so excited about this new way of life. And then they’re leaving people there to guide them, like elders, and in a way, it’s the beginning of the institutional church.

What’s so interesting to me about all institutions is they have a kind of shadow that they have to struggle with. It seems like they all begin with the intention of being of service to some cause, some need, some work, and then corruption can slowly slip in. They end up being not so much focused on a ministry but somehow protecting themselves, and it’s so interesting that the early church was founded on the collapse of an institution, the temple. One of the things about the temple that always strikes me is that it was a place where God dwelt, and therefore those who ran the temple, in a way, had the advantage of being enabled to connect with God. Then they would share that connection with people, and they became a kind of intermediary. Then they would, in a sense, dole out the grace, the forgiveness of God. It had gotten so bad that they were anything but real teachers. They were not putting people in touch with God, and Jesus was so clear in his condemnation of the Pharisees, blind guides, blind people leading other blind people into a pit. They did not see who they were or what they were there for.

So we see in the second reading a kind of — sort of battle cry, in a way, of those who came to overthrow the temple and its authority. The description is so clear in the vision of John in the Book of Revelations. He’s seeing the proclamation that this God no longer dwells simply in a place that is run by a certain group of people who can then make people available or make God available to them. No, God’s dwelling is in us. God’s dwelling is in his people, and it’s so interesting that that indwelling presence of God was given so generously, so freely that it was never considered to be something that you had to earn or be cleansed for in order to receive it. The receiving of it was a cleansing. So there was a radical shift, not only in where God is but what it takes to receive him, and it’s interesting to me — I grew up in the church of the ‘40s and ‘50s and then experienced the Vatican Council. I remember one of the major changes in the council was the way it saw the work of laity and, in particular, the holiness of the laity. It was saying very clearly in those documents of Vatican II that this incredible, incredible acknowledgement of the presence of God in our lives was to be done by a person who received it as a gift, not as somebody who worked and struggled and sort of renounced all of the things that weren’t really of God and then, in a way, earned this indwelling presence. No, it was given to human beings as they were, and nothing is more clear in the scriptures than who it was given to. It was given to the gentiles, the outcasts, the sinners, the no-goods, the broken people, the poor people. That just ran in the face of everything that the Old Testament was grounded on in terms of the temple and the requirements of the law. You see why they were so excited.

In fact, it’s interesting. The synoptic are like a three-part play, each of them with the same theme. The God/man comes into the world and saves us and fills us with divinity, and in Matthew, the focus in that first act, you’d say, is the fact that God is telling each and every person what is true. So in Matthew’s gospel, we’re all learners, students, receiving wisdom, and in Mark, it’s different. We’re followers. He talks about what it’s like, once you believe and understand the truth, how your life changes, and then Luke, the one we have now in this cycle of the church year, we have this wonderful image of people being so celebratory about this incredible, wonderful thing that’s happened, how glorious it is what God has done.

So in John’s reading today, we see this beautiful image of God announcing through him, through this vision, “Tell the world. God has come, and his dwelling is within you. Don’t go looking for him somewhere, but go within.” And this indwelling presence is what transforms us, and it’s not up to us and our human will and our discipline to prepare ourselves to receive it. No, his presence is what transforms us, very important. So we see that truth being celebrated in this vision of John, and then you see the response in Luke’s gospel. “God, you are so glorious. What a glorious thing. You have given us glory also. You have promised us something. You’ve come to give us this new life, and we are just overwhelmed by it. Your glory is you choosing to live within us, and our glory is our willingness to accept it.” What a perfect description of those early celebrations when people got together to break bread and drink wine. They must have been always so celebratory. “This is all happening to us. Can you believe it? Can you believe it?” And sharing stories, which would have been like the scriptures we use today, sharing stories about the transformation in people, how compassion and empathy started to well up in communities, and people were shocked as they watched these Christians do things that didn’t make any sense to the old law, where you weren’t supposed to help people who were being punished by God by their suffering. And so they saw something so radically new. It must have been so wonderful, those early celebrations, and yet we call the very celebration we have now, the Eucharist, we call it thanksgiving. We’re supposed to come together week after week and celebrate with a community these wonderful things that are going on in our lives. It’s so interesting that instead of that we often come together and try to figure out what the scriptures mean and then go through a ritual that is very routine. Sometimes it has this really intention of relaxing us and putting us in a kind of zone, and sometimes that zone, we go off into what we have to do later that day and what we have to take care of this week. Our minds drift, go through a ritual of eating and drinking this gift of God’s presence, and it tends to be routine. “Did I leave my purse back there? Should I get it back?” We’re human. It’s okay. It’s okay, but that’s why the scriptures come back over and over again and try to engage us in the beginning of this incredible thing we call spirituality. Spirituality, it’s not being holy. It’s not being good. It’s about a way of life.

I want to stress something. I mentioned Vatican II and its insistence on the dignity of the human person to receive holiness as a gift, not to earn it, but that council went on to say a lot of things about us, the laity. I find it interesting now, where we’re surrounded by news of our hierarchy. Their failure, perhaps, to be transparent is at least a big issue in the press, to say the least, and so many people, when they see the hierarchy failing in some way, it threatens their whole sort of sense of the integrity of the church. Like, “Oh, my gosh. What if they’re not telling the truth? Where do we go? They’re the professionals. They’re the ones that are modeling for us a way of life.” But that’s really not the church. It’s not what we’ve been taught. It’s not what — in a way, I would say, Vatican II gave us a way to imagine what we’re in now, and if it weren’t for Vatican II, I don’t know if we could have done it the way we are invited to do it now, with forgiveness and understanding and not letting it threaten our existence as a valid representation of Christ, the church. The church doesn’t seem to have the integrity that it should have if it represents God, but does the church really find its full representation in the hierarchy and in the clergy? Not really. If you look at our tradition, the real promise in the New Testament and in the gospels is each individual, each person that opens themselves to this mysterious indwelling of God as they are, they find themselves evolving very quickly, being transformed into people that are like the Christ. That’s what nurtures, creates, sustains this thing we call church. It’s the laity, and it’s not to say the hierarchy is not important. They have a very important role, but the church is really formed by the witness of the transformation that is happening in people who claim to believe in this thing that seems almost impossible to believe in, that God is living inside of me, and I’ve been changed. My ability to do things, which I didn’t have before, I now have, because he’s in me. And I don't know how to describe this mysterious union, but it’s like becoming one with something, someone.

So it’s not that we go around preaching and teaching all the time, Francis’ great line about preach and teach the gospel always, only now and then or when necessary use words. So when you look at it, I guarantee, most people are drawn to Christianity because of Christians, and most people leave Christianity because of Christians, not because of the institution, but the institution has a role and a responsibility to witness something that they seem to be failing at today. But nevertheless, it’s still important for you and for me to recognize what is the plan of God, the heart of God. He enters into human beings. He transforms us. We become more like him, and as we witness that to each other, the power and the strength of this mysterious thing we call grace gets stronger and stronger and stronger. It’s all done, in a way, by each of us engaging in a spirituality, a spiritual life. I spent so many years of my life trying to get rid of all my weaknesses and all my failings so I could somehow represent God to the world, and I don’t think people are that impressed with people that are so pure and so holy that they don’t really fall into the trap of what everybody else falls into. That other-world holiness thing has never been very effective, but what is effective is seeing someone just like me, with all the same faults and frailties and mistakes and foul language or whatever, doing things beyond what a normal human being does. We see it so often in tragedies. We see it in school shootings and those kinds of things where people become heroes, and they’re selfless and care for others and go way beyond what normal human nature might do in terms of self-preservation and self-interest. You see that, and you say, “Oh, wow. This is so encouraging. That’s the church.” It doesn’t matter what religion it is. It doesn’t matter which denomination, rather. It’s people loving and living selflessly and, somehow in that act, transforming other people to live selflessly and transform others. That’s where it is. Maybe this day and age we’re in is a call to look at that more seriously and to take hope that we are truly the church.

Father, your presence is our ticket. The ride is the life you’re calling us to live, that’s like the life you lived, loving, forgiving, healing. It’s our destiny, our surrender, our acceptance, our belief that this presence in us is so effective, so powerful, and the task is just to allow you to flow through us. We enjoy accomplishing things, and in this case, we have to enjoy you accomplishing things through us. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Acts 13:14, 43-52 | Revelations 7:9, 14b-17 | John 10:27-30

Almighty and everliving God, lead us to a share in the joys of heaven so that the humble flock may reach where the brave shepherd has gone before, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We continue the journey of the early church in these Sundays after Easter, and one of the strongest images in the early church of this work that God was now doing, so much more personally through the God/man Jesus, was always directed toward this taking them on a journey and bringing them to a better place, a better land. The Old Testament is filled with the image of God working through others, Moses, other prophets, trying to get these people to make this journey with them. They would take them to a new place, a new land, and Jesus continues that. We still see this idea of the God, now God/man leading people to the promised land, and the focus is on his, not so much his guidance to get there but what he does when he’s with them.

We saw the foundation of the church or the beginning of the church last Sunday rather in the gospel. It was Jesus talking to Peter. He said, “Peter, if you’re going to lead my church, two things are necessary. You have to fall in love with me. You have to see me as I am, because if you do see me for who I am, you will love me. And then your task is to take that same love that you have for me and to direct it towards those you care for.” Every minister, every leader of every congregation that calls itself Christian is called to love those that he’s serving and to guide them to a place of fulfillment, of richness, or no longer an empty, dry, hot desert but to a rich and cool and moist, green, fertile place. It’s a beautiful image of what our life is intended to be by God. So it’s interesting also to me that one of the main ways in which the early church imagined this God/man was not as a man hanging on a cross dying for us, as we do now, in terms of our Christian symbol, but it was always the symbol of the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd, that’s the images we have over and over in the earliest places of worship.

So how do we regain this image of this church we belong to, knowing its goal is to bring us, not so much to this place, but to awaken our imaginations and our understanding to the fact that we have been already taken there? We’re there now, and the point is the kingdom is now. The kingdom is present. We’re not so much working to get there. We’re there. It’s a gift. It’s given to us. The first reading, we see, in a way, a strange reaction on the part of the Jews when the message of Jesus began to become clear to them. You see it in the time when Jesus first announced that he was the Messiah. He was with his Jewish community, and he was telling them that this time is now, and what’s happened is there’s this work that is now being accomplished in your midst. It’s you’re being freed from a burden of the law, and you’re being given this freedom from stress and from being imprisoned by rules and regulations. You’re free. You’re loved as you are. You don’t have to work on making yourself into something to receive these gifts, and that, I think, is what made the Jews so angry, because they lived in such a strict practice of regulations, rules and laws that they did. And they were good in the sense that they made one constantly aware of their relationship with God, but it also had a shadow to it. It was always somehow performing for God so you knew you had his favor, because when you notice the way Judaism looked at those who were suffering and struggling, it was always the punishment for not doing what God asked. So the motivation for being a follower of the law was more than just, “I want my life to be engaged in my relationship with God. I want to celebrate it always.” It was more like, “Please accept me if I do everything I’m told.” So when the disciples come along and speak to these people and say, “All those things you’ve done all your life in order to receive the hope of a new life, no, the new life has been won for you. It’s already given to you. You don’t have to earn it. You just have to receive it. You’ve been given life — given life. It’s in you. Now your task is to live with God in you. Live as if the kingdom is now.” That’s such a different focus than earning it, and if you can imagine, it’s sort of like, if you worked all your life to buy something and you still hadn’t gotten it, and then this group comes in and says, “Oh, we’re giving those away. We just give those away.” You’d say, “Wait a minute. I’m jealous. It’s not fair.” And so the Jews rejected this incredible, beautiful mystery and message of Christianity. God is with you. God is in you. You are in him. Don’t try to earn that. Just accept it. Believe it.

The image in the Book of Revelation that is the second reading, it’s saying, “You’ve already been cleansed and washed in the blood, so you are all that you need to be.” Now that you are that, what do you do? Just sit back and say, “Oh, great. It’s all been done”? No. You listen to what it awakens in you. What does it awaken in you? Well, if you can imagine that the leaders of the church, first and foremost, have to be like their followers, you look at what Jesus said to Peter. He said, “All right, your ministry is to share with people the mystery of the love of God.” So you’re filled with that love, and then you want to give that love to the people around you. In the process of giving it, you’re nurturing them. You’re nurturing them. You’re serving them life. So that’s the main thrust of this religion that we belong to, this faith, and so when we look at Peter’s requirement to feed and feed and tend the flock, I want you to think about what that is. What is it we’re feeding each other? How do we tend to each other? How does the church do it for us? How do we do it for each other? I want to use an image that James Hellman — he was a professor of psychology when I was at the University of Dallas. His lectures were just amazing, but he gave one on the difference between needs and wants and desires that stuck with me forever. So I want you to imagine that this feeding that we are to do for each other, the church is to do for us, is giving us the thing that we need, essential thing. Needs are like air, water, food. When you think about what we give to each other, what is the thing that we long for more than anything else? What is the essential thing we need in order to engage ourselves in this new life that God has won for us? The only word that comes to my mind is truth — truth. Please tell us the truth. Without it, we’re lost. Without it, we’re kind of empty.

Think about the way you feel when you look at leaders of companies, leaders of — politicians or leaders of the church, worse, when they get up and they seem like they’re lying? What does that feel like? What happens? It’s like, “Oh, my God. I have to be able to trust these people. It’s the core of what I need from my friends, my family, my church, people I elect, my doctor. I don’t want to hear something that’s going to make the doctor more money. I want to hear the truth of what I need, what really works.” So it’s one of the things that I think is so important to understand in this work of Christianity. We’re here to give, always, each other the truth, and what that means is we don’t have to say everything we feel exactly, but we’ve got to be authentic — authentic, truthful, honest. What you see is what is, that kind of thing, and then the wants, what we want is community. We want something that feels nurturing, that fulfills this longing we have for intimacy with other people, with the world, with the animals that we love. We want that. An isolated life is torture. In fact, one of the things we do in our prison system, which seems like real torture, is to put somebody in solitary confinement. What’s that other than a completely separate sense of self from all that’s around us? We want the communion, union, connection. We do, and that’s such an integral part of the teaching of Jesus. He says clearly, over and over again, it’s our capacity to love others that is so satisfying for us. It really does fulfill deep, deep wants. I want to be effective. I want to be loved. I want to love. It’s the most natural thing. And then the one I really want to talk about is desire. We need the truth. We want community, but what do we desire? What’s the deepest longing of every heart? Well, if you look at the teaching of Jesus, it’s pretty clear. He’s saying, “What I want you to do is do what I’ve done. Follow me.” What did he do? He was engaged with the God who created him in doing the ultimate work that God longed to see happen, and Jesus, the man, entered into a relationship with God where he was very hard to distinguish between his work and God’s work through him or God’s work in him. And he changed the world by engaging in a work that was his destiny — his destiny.

I don't know how I can tell you what your destiny is. I don't know exactly how you can find your destiny, but whenever you’re doing the thing that’s somehow deep inside of you, that’s when you know, “That’s what I’m here to do.” And there is something like that in us. If we don’t believe that, then I guess we can’t ever really understand what satisfies our deepest longing, but there’s something in you that you know you are called to do. And when you’re doing it and — not even whether it’s effective — that’s what Jesus is teaching us. If you do what you’re here for, if you’re called for and you do it with as much integrity, honesty and truthfulness, whether successful or not, you have done what you’re here to accomplish. I love that image. I’m here to be who I am and become more of who I am and be who I am for the people in my circle of family and friends, and somehow in that role, I believe that this God, if I offer my life and my understanding to him, if I say, “Show me. Show me. Teach me. Reveal to me. Awaken me to the truth of who I am,” he will. He will. It would be a horrible thing for him to say, “This is what I’ve made you for, but I’m not going to tell you what it is.” No, he shares it with us. He tells it. It’s this thing that — you might just say one way to imagine it is the call to serve — to serve, and if I make it into something like gigantic work, like to —I don't know — write the definitive book on some subject — that’s near to my heart right now — or just doing something that’s extraordinary, it’s not that. It’s somehow engaging in something that feels natural. It feels like, “This is what I was called to do.” Then when you’re engaged in it, there is going to be a response, and the response is — I don't know how to describe it, but it’s satisfaction. It’s some — I don't know — sense that it of itself is the fulfillment of the joy you’re looking for, and it’s not about whether it’s received or used or applauded or whatever. Wow. How different is that for many of us who end up learning at a very young age that the way we end up with community and unity with people is to please them and to do what they ask, and if we don’t, we lose their favor, and therefore we feel isolated and alone? Nothing could be more destined for failure than forming your life in a way that would be what others want or desire and therefore love you.

I suppose for that very reason it’s so important that the core message of Jesus is, “You are loved. You are my Father’s delight.” He wants nothing more than to do what you really do want, and that’s to become who you really are. And I love the phrase in the scripture today. “Nothing is going to take this out of my grasp of being able to accomplish it. If you want it, it is yours. I promise. It’s my Father’s will for you.” Sometimes I feel like Christianity is calling me to do something that feels like I’m denying everything that I am or trying to repress everything that’s not good in me. What a shame to fall into that trap when it’s the most exciting, most amazing partnership with a God who says, “We will succeed. We will achieve this incredible goal.” Amen.

Father, your promise seems at times too lofty, too great for us, and yet you see within us the potential that you, Father, have created, and you know that we are capable of greatness, not because of our own strength but because of what happens when you dwell within us, when you become one with us, when you enlighten us. Thank you for this gift. Let us trust in it constantly. It’s the truth. It’s the truth. We’re never alone. We never work out just of our own strength. We are yours, and you are our shepherd, and we know your voice. Amen.

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Acts 5:27-32, 40b-41 | Revelations 5:11-14 | John 21:1-19

May your people exalt forever, oh, God, a renewed youthfulness of spirit so rejoicing now in the restored glory of our adoption, we may look forward in confident hope to the rejoicing of the day of resurrection. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Last Sunday we explored the mystery of God living within us, God announcing to his disciples how present he was after his death, how much he wanted to be a part of their ministry throughout their lives. How unusual and strange it must have seemed to them that he was saying, “I want to live inside of you and guide you and be with you, and together you and me, we will do wonderful things — wonderful things.”

I’m often envious of those people that lived at the time this all happened. I wonder what that must have been like, because the change to me has always been there, meaning I’ve always lived in a redeemed world. I don't know what it was like to live in an unredeemed world. I know what it’s like to live around people who don’t believe in a renewed, incredibly beautiful world. Maybe that’s part of the way we identify with this time, but this was Rome that they lived in, well, Jerusalem, but Rome occupied them. Rome was the great power, and it was considered not to be just a government but a god. The emperor was god, so there was the god of the world of Rome, and there was the God of Israel. And how dramatically they were exposed to be so different, so radically different, yet I would think that, when the disciples were thinking of Jesus being — the Savior being the new king, that they had a lot of that baggage of politics and power and strength over people as they imagined what it would be like to sit on the kind of position of authority that Jesus would have when he became the new king.

But what was revealed was something quite different than the way the world works, and so we see in this first reading the influence that happens to a human being when they’re living in doubt and confusion. It’s interesting. When you look at the disciples as 12 men, there was one who understood the heart of Jesus. He knew him. He understood him. He was the first one that arrived at the tomb. He was the one who laid on the chest of Jesus in a very famous painting, showing he understood the heart of this man, the essence of Jesus, and he was there at the cross, never doubted him, always believed, one extreme, and then the other is Judas. Somehow the image or the sense of the world in Rome at the time, this powerful force that sucked life out of anyone and anybody that could make an entertainment out of people killing animals or killing each other, he bought into that world and couldn’t conceive of what Jesus was really talking about. So he rejected it all. So in these two extremes — well, the other ten were like all of us, sort of believe, sort of don’t. I don't know. When you listen to this first reading, you get a sense of how they changed, how radically they changed, and what changed in them was their conviction of what was true, that Jesus was the one who was to come to save the world. His presence in them changed them dramatically from a person of timidity of fear and shame, when he died, into these powerhouses of truth. They stood up against the other god, the emperor, his ambassador there and just said, “We do not change our mind because you don’t agree with us. We are so convinced. We know the truth, and we will never, ever be silenced.” Just such a dramatic change for those men, and that was within a matter of weeks, days. We’re not sure, but obviously it isn’t the way human beings normally change. It takes time, takes a lot of time, but this — well, they had three years to watch and to see this image of God in Jesus, but it wasn’t until that image entered into them and became one with them that they became the truth. That’s the beauty of redemption. We’re not teaching it, talking about it. We are it. That’s it. We are it. When you truly are transformed into a body that is filled with divinity and your presence is resonating this energy, this youthfulness, this excitement that is founded in the truth of what is revealed to us about the world about ourselves, about our interaction with it all, our destiny — we are all integral pieces of this incredible, marvelous plan of God, whose intention is that the fullness of all things that he made, everything, every life form, with God in us and we in God are going to participate in their finding their fullness. It’s an amazing destiny — amazing.

So in the second reading, we have this image of the church in heaven, let’s say. We have the church on earth, church in heaven. Church on earth is us, the church, all believers, the world, animals, insects, and the world of church in eternity is made up of this God now celebrating the lamb, the sacrifice that’s been offered, the gift that’s been given to the world that’s unlocked this potential that was somehow enslaved and caught in blindness and stress. It’s been broken open, and we’re all of a sudden participating in something so wonderful that the only response to its wonder and its awe is just this incredible voice of praise and honor, glory. So you see an image with God on this throne with Jesus in God and God in Jesus. So just imagine it’s the Trinity sitting there, as it always is and always has been, but then there is this sense of everyone around them having this response. The elders were considered the — they’re the leaders of the church in the eternal world of life after death, and they’re all bowing and surrendering to this incredible power. It’s like an image of what the church in the world has to do. It has to free itself from its obligation, self-imposed often, that they are going to save people through doling out the sacraments and the things that save people. They get caught up in that and — no. It’s all done by this incredible servant God for us in the form of a God/man who was the image of who we’re to become. It’s a beautiful, beautiful image.

So this is the thing that I’m wanting you to feel about redemption, the thing we’ve received. It’s a power to see past all the lies of the world. It’s a freedom from all the fears. The disciples were so afraid of even identifying with this man Jesus for fear of what might happen to them. It’s like being out of that prison of fear, and then all the stress that comes in life, with the kind of inner critic we have and the shame we feel, all of that is blasted apart. And we can see, and we’re carefree, and we are at peace. And you wonder sometimes if it isn’t really the task of believing that first and then experiencing it, believing that that’s what has been given. When we try to do it ourselves, we’re using our humanity on our own. At least that’s what I’ve always done, and that never is enough. And then we still wallow in shame and fear and blindness. It’s all about that image of the elders kneeling, bowing before this awesome gift being given, and we have to do the same.

So now we’re going to look at the gospel, and it’s going to talk about that implanting, in this small group of men, this wonder, this enthusiasm, this youthfulness for their role in the world. So it’s an image that picks up almost from the Lord’s Supper. Remember, that is when he gave himself to these men in the Eucharist, and he told them he needed them to go forth and to preach and to teach [unintelligible 00:10:44] to the priesthood. Now it’s like, okay, let’s look at those images being actually rooted in an experience for the disciples. So you have just a small portion of them, and they decide to go fishing, which is what they did for a living, but it’s also what God promised they would do for the kingdom, to be fishers, fishers of men. So they’re back at their job, fishing. It’s almost like they went back to the way they were, and perhaps that was part of where they were at that time. When you change, you become aware of something. It’s not completely, fully who you are, but let’s just say it’s the critical mass of who you, and you say finally, “I give in to it completely.” But here they are fishing. It’s at night. So there they are in blindness and darkness, and so here’s the light talking to them from the shore. I love the fact that he calls them children. It’s almost just a sweet way of saying, “You’re just beginning to see all this. Take your time. You’re still children in this,” because they were confused and in awe and wondering still. And so he just tells them how to do it correctly. “Fish on the other side.” It’s just another way of saying, “You’ve got the right intention. You know what you’re doing. You’re trying to catch these fish, but let me help you, because when I help you, when I’m in you, helping you, I’m going to give you what is right, what is successful, what is fruitful.” So they do it, and there’s this enormous catch of fish. And so it’s only one of the disciples, obviously the one I’ve already spoken of, the beloved John — he recognizes, “This is Jesus.” He says it to Peter, and Peter — I don't know. It’s really interesting. It used to be the translation was he was naked, and he put on clothes and then jumped in. This is a little different. He was lightly clad, maybe without a shirt, and he puts his clothes on, but I wonder if that isn’t a reference to Adam and Eve’s reaction to the presence of God when they were still ashamed, covered themselves up. And then as they come, Jesus feeds them and then makes a very interesting point. He gives them this nourishing food. In a way he’s saying, “Your work of catching men, women, children, drawing them into this new life that is so clearly seen and so freeing and so peace-creating,” he’s saying, “When you do that, you’re going to find such enormous satisfaction. Your work itself is going to bring you the peace that you long for and the joy you long for.” Then he makes a very strong point about how this new church is going to run, how different it’s going to be than the temple. First of all, he just says, “It has everything to do with how you believe in me. Do you believe in me because I exist, or do you love me because of what I do for you, that I open your eyes, that I free you from slavery, that I bring you peace?” When you see something beautiful and life-giving, you love it. So three times Peter denied him. Now three times he affirms that he loves this man Jesus. He loves this God Jesus, and Jesus says, “Well, I am the people you are going to serve. I am in them as I am in you, and when you minister to someone, you’re ministering to me. And you must do that out of a love — out of a love — out of a love that is not in any way, shape or form caught up in judgment, condemnation, criticism. But the same love you feel for me now at this moment, I want you to feel for them, and when you have that love for them, you’ll create the church that I always longed to see.”

Father, we pray for your enlightenment, for the longing that you have within your heart to enable us to see the plan that you have prepared for us and your invitation to not only call us into this work but to be the source of the success of that work, but you humble yourself to need us. You don’t need anyone. God doesn’t need people in the sense of he’s not complete. It’s just that he chooses to depend upon his creation to participate with him. So bless us with this joyous responsibility and this amazing honor to be a part of not just being drawn to you but drawing others to you also, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Acts 5:12-16 | Revelations 1:9-11a, 12-13, 17-19 | John 20:19-31

God of everlasting mercy, who in the very recurrence of the paschal feast kindle the faith of the people you have made your own, increase, we pray, the grace you have bestowed that all may grasp and rightly understand in what font they have been washed, by whose Spirit they have been reborn, by whose blood they have been redeemed. We ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

The focus of this first Sunday after Easter is divine mercy. Another word for that is love. A more appropriate word for my words that I want you to listen to is that these gifts that redemption won for us are somehow given to us through a mystery of God’s presence within us. So I want you to think of mercy as unmerited love in the form of God’s presence in you, imperfect, sinful, struggling, trying. That’s the mystery.

Every year we go through the paschal mystery, and there’s the three things that stand out so powerfully that — the Eucharist, establishing this mysterious ritual that is the heart, I think to what it means to be a Catholic. We have this unique way of understanding the Lord’s Supper that is different than other Christian denominations. They’re not all different, but most are, and we give it an amazing amount of power and strength and attention called the real presence of Jesus in this host, in this wine, this nourishing food, this mysterious forgiving drink. It separates — I won’t say separates, but it unifies what sin tries to separate. Then we focus on his death, and the most amazing response he has to the whole thing was it comes to an end. There’s this overwhelming sense that he’s saying, “Look, I don’t know what to do other than to say, ‘Father, don’t hold any of this against any of these people. Forgive them. Forgive them. Don’t let this act they’re doing separate them from me.’” And then he rises, and when he rises, it’s not just that he’s alive again, but it’s the promise he makes while he’s alive again. And that is, “I’m going to live inside of you. As real as you see me right now after my death, walking, talking, touching you, talking to you, it’s going to happen to you, inside of you.”

That’s the mystery, and that’s what this ritual called Eucharist is all about, making this reality present. And the most interesting thing about this reality that is present, it is definitely something that changes our life, but more importantly, it is something that, when it becomes part of us, we become instruments of changing other people’s lives. I love that thought — you’ve heard me say it over and over again — that the real work that God has chosen to do is not directly between himself and each individual, but rather he works with each individual so that we can work with each other. The real healing, the real transformation, the process of evolution and coming further and further into the truth is witnessed by people who are filled with God rather than God directly appearing to people one after another, because it would make no sense for him to appear to us if he’s in us. It’s interesting that the God in us is, yes, for us, but it’s also for everyone around us. And when God is in someone else, that God is there for us. So it’s almost like he makes each of us the healer for the other instead of directly healing us, if that makes sense, but let’s go back to this set of readings, because they’re very, very rich.

The first image I want you to feel from this first reading is that this thing that happened at the death of Jesus and his resurrection and his final ascension had this profound effect on these followers, these believers, and the effects were always signs and wonders, signs and wonders. In fact, when you think about the scriptures and the way they’re written and how we’re asked to believe in this presence of a divine essence inside of us, the way we’re asked to trust in it is part of the way in which it manifests itself. It has to be believed in. This presence of this God inside of you and inside of me, the paschal mystery makes it so clear. This is not something you earn or you work for, like the Old Testament seemed to encourage us in a world that was binary, a world that had both divine in it, and then it was kind of at odds with the material world, the sinful world. In this kind of split that was there, we were always struggling against the negative forces around us it called sin. We kept working at it, and we kept failing at it. But it seemed always it was our task to do something right to please God so that God would come to us. That’s still in us. We still have some quality, some — I don't know if I’d call it a quality — a human part of our nature that feels unworthy of a God to come into us when we’re not purified, not clean. That’s the shadow of religion, the shadow of the Old Testament. It’s the shadow of a lot of religions still today, this dichotomy between God and the material world, as if they don’t blend together. They blend perfectly together.

When I’m talking about the natural world, I’m not talking about a sinful, destructive force. I’m really talking about the humanity that he has given to you and me. Humanity is not in opposition to divinity. They’re made for each other. They’re different, but they’re so complimentary that it’s almost impossible to think of one being what it is without the other. I’m not saying God needs our humanity to be God. No, but to do the work that he wants to do in the plan he set up — I’m not saying he’s limited to anything other than what he chooses, what he plans, but it seems to me that God has decided that he wants to use you and me to be able to accomplish his work in the world. And as we are used, the more we are used, the more we become more integrated in this mysterious connection between divinity and humanity. You can’t be fully human without divinity. Divinity won’t be fully effective in the plan that he has made it to follow without humanity. It’s amazing.

So we have signs and wonders, signs and wonders, and when you think about that, what is different about humanity when divinity enters into it? Well, look at that story. These men were, at one point in their life, completely disbelieving anything that they couldn’t understand. They couldn’t grasp fully even what Jesus was teaching. It was too radically different than the way they were trained, and then something happened, not slowly, not organically like, “Okay, we’ll ponder this, and we’ll work on this, and we’ll work on our discipline, and we’ll try to get better and better. Then eventually we get to be really amazingly like Christ.” No, they became like Christ instantly, and they were doing the same thing that he was doing when he walked the earth. They were affecting change in people just by their presence, not by a long serious of teachings, but by their presence they were doing what Jesus was doing with his presence when he was in the world. So it’s clear you’re seeing this miracle of what I would call incarnation, divinity in humanity, and we still have such a hard time believing it, that he actually dwells in me. But that’s the story. That’s the ritual we go through. When we receive him in Eucharist, we receive his presence, and when that presence is in us, it’s his grace, we call it. That grace then does the work, and we are the carrier of the work. Without our acceptance of it, our belief in it, because it’s a gift — it can’t be earned, but if we accept it and believe in it, then that’s our work part. That’s what we do. I will be used by you. I will.

So in the second reading, we have this strong statement of John the evangelist having this vision of Jesus standing right there with him and saying, “I was dead, but now I’m alive. Now I’m in you.” So John had this sense from this vision of God really saying, “I was dead. I’m now alive, but I’m alive in you.” He’s meditating on his work to teach and to preach, and it’s like this was a vision he had that showed John, once again, that this miracle that he’s preaching and teaching is not like the Old Testament where it’s about disciplining our will and overcoming our weaknesses and then becoming pure and good enough for God to come into us. No, it’s believing he comes into us exactly as we are. So you can see how important belief is, trusting in not the reality of this alone but that it happens to anybody that chooses to allow it to happen to them. This is not some kind of super gift that is given to holy people. I know the Vatican Council had such a strong thing to say about holiness. It wasn’t something that one earned through a very strict, rigid set of rules and laws and went through a life of renunciation. That somehow connects to a world view that is a dichotomy. It’s binary. It’s like, well, there’s the bad world and the good world. There’s the material world. It’s all bad. The spiritual world is all good, so the two don’t really mix together. So if you give up, like they do in a monastery — they go there to be holy, and they give up marriage, and they give up money. Those are two strong drives that can get people in trouble in terms of their selfish nature. I’m not saying that’s all wrong or all bad in any way, shape or form, but if you take it too much like that’s the only way you become holy, then these stories don’t make any sense.

Thomas, who doubted for so long, he was going around miraculously healing people, changing their lives by presence. Wow. When you think about it, when we do believe in this — and this is the thing, I think, the genius of Christianity is. When you believe in the miracle of God’s presence in you and you carry that to other people and your presence brings it to them — just like when people walk up and receive the Eucharist, it’s like I receive this mystery. I believe in this mystery, and then it takes root in us again. It’s not like it wasn’t there before, but somehow mysteriously it strengthened. But it would only work if you understand that that is given to you not to make you holy but to carry that presence to the people around you, to be Eucharist to people. That’s the beauty of this sacrament of God’s presence. You receive it so you can give it to other people, and you see the classic image of people in the Catholic Church. They’re all going to communion very devoutly. Then they get in the parking lot, and they start screaming and yelling at each other, back to the usual, and the anger and the frustration we have in the parking lot is human. It’s our humanity. It’s okay, in a way, but that doesn’t identify us. That doesn’t say then that I’m a non-believer, therefore a non-communicator of the grace of God that has been given to me to be given to someone else. It’s mostly that we just don’t realize it. We don’t understand the full scope of this incredible Eucharistic miracle, this miracle of God’s presence, this way in which ritual enhances, the way it’s constantly calling us to believe in it, and the wonderful thing about this, when you think about it, think about how it frees you from any kind of ego-centric reaction to your ability to be able to do things for people. It’s not you. Yeah, it’s you, but it’s not just you. To separate yourself from the presence of God is as silly as simply saying, “I can work without my body. I can work without my spirit, just my body.” The two are absolutely connected. What we say to each other, how we act around each other is one thing. Who we are around each other is everything. People don’t love how we look, how a lover looks. They love something about them that is their essence, and their essence, when it’s filled with divinity, is not other worldly. It is just richer and more complete and more honest, authentic, real and beautiful.

The mystery of God working through you, through me, being a source of healing and health and wholeness, it’s almost too easy. It’s almost too good to be true, but it is true, and it does work. And it is God’s plan, and all it takes is belief, strong conviction, belief. So my prayer for you now is just that anything that blocks you from that surrender, that, in a way, loss of control, because you’re not the one that makes people better — you’re an instrument that God uses for him to make them better. It’s not easy. I like to make things better and control things and all that, like I’m sure you do, but that’s not where it is. That’s not where the power is. So I just pray God will free us from any of that excessive self-fullness, if that’s a word, and bring us into the selflessness of his presence. Amen.

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Acts 10:34a, 37-43 | Colossians 3:1-4 | John 20:1-9

Oh God who on this day, through your only begotten Son, have conquered death and unlocked for us the path to eternity, grant, we pray, that we who keep the solemnity of the Lord’s resurrection may, through the renewal brought by your Spirit, rise up in the light of life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Something happened when this God/man came to the end of his life. He was trying to make a point, a major, major truth he wanted to reveal, and like any of us when we come to the end of a long journey of trying to accomplish something, we realize it’s about time to leave. You would go back to the core things you really wanted people to know about who you were and what you came to teach and how important it was and how it would change their life. So our church, Christian church, has taken up a wonderful tradition, rooted in the Catholic history of Christianity, and it’s this thing about celebrating three major truths in three days, four days including Sunday. So it’s really a meditation that goes over Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and I want you to look at those very quickly with me as I can get into, then, the heart of what I believe God is asking me to share with you on this day.

This is the core of God’s teaching, the core of what he’s asking from us, what he asks us to allow him to do for us, a partnership, a cooperative work. The first thing we learned on Thursday was, as Jesus was leaving his disciples, he realized that they had not fully understood yet what he was teaching, and he knew somehow that the time that he was going to go through, meaning his death and resurrection, would confuse people so much about who this man really is. After all, it wasn’t the Romans that killed the Christ. It was religion. It was the temple, the envy, the jealousy, the rage in the leaders in the temple as they saw someone coming to undermine the very core of what they claimed to be, their special gift, their power to reconcile humans with God through an elaborate system of sacrifices. God is a God of justice. He wants justice, so if you’ve done something wrong, you have to pay for it, and so one of the ways you would pay for it is to give something away that you own that’s precious, that’s valuable. And that would balance the world, and that was where the world was before Christ, a world of justice. And it was essential that we developed that, or we couldn’t have lived in communities, couldn’t have become great nations. So one of the things we realize is that this Jesus said, “All right, one of the things I want you to understand most especially is this work that I came to do with you, inviting you into my world, letting you watch me, this kind of strange thing,” he might say, “That I did, that I was always more interested in you watching me do the things I do than explaining what I’m asking you to do,” a radical change from the law. The law always told people what they needed to do. Without question, they had to follow it, or they would be excluded, cursed, punished. But here Jesus has something very new. He wants to say, “I want you to see something in action, and if it’s attractive to you, if it feels truthful, then come and follow me, because you’ve got it. You’ve got the beginnings of this incredible insight that human beings have longed for from the very beginning, insight as to who they are and why they’re here, and who is this divine force in the world.” So he wanted them to know he would be with them.

So the Eucharist is established on Thursday. Jesus is saying to his disciples, “Look, I’m leaving you, but I’m not leaving you orphans. I’m with you. I’m going to give you two things. I’m going to give you my body, which is your nourishment, just me, my presence in you.” That’s what he’s leading up to, getting them ready for. “I’ll be in you. I’ll be living with you, so you have me with you forever. I’m not leaving. I’m staying, and there’s one thing — if there’s anything you learn from me, it’s one, clear, concise thing you have to believe in. You’re forgiven.” And when you experience forgiveness and not judgment and condemnation from everyone around you and from any institution — it’s what we mostly live under. It passes for the mysterious thing called love, someone controlling your actions, telling you what to do, approving, disapproving, all of that. He wants us to get out of that system as fast as we can, and then something shifts inside of us. Instead of working for things that people would like us to do and then getting their approval, we take on this beautiful image of who we are as people, servants — servants, so simple.

I love the way he talks about service, because he’s talking about a meal. He’s asking his disciples, “If you’re at a meal and there’s an important guest at the head table, who’s more important, the guest at the head table or the waiters?” Well, the guest at the head table is the most important person. But in terms of the experience of eating a banquet dinner and not having somebody cleanse you of the dirt of the road coming in, of not serving you wine or serving you that, or maybe you wait for your meal till you’re starving or whatever, the most important person for the experience is the waiter who’s there to make sure you have everything you need to enjoy this experience of honoring this great guest. So what do you say is the most important if you’re looking at it from what you need — what you need? That’s the thing Jesus wants to put us in touch with, our needs. We have wants, things we’d like to have, but needs are those deep inner longings of our human nature that God created, and he knows what we really appreciate, what we know we really long for. And when we receive it, it makes us joyous, and then to know that that’s also the thing that brings us joy when we do that for other people, and that is to serve, be there for each other, forgive each other, respect each other, don’t lie to each other, don’t break promises, don’t destroy each other, don’t envy each other. It’s so beautiful, so simple. So he’s got those clear teachings.

Then we shift to his death, and the radical thing about that death is the way in which he was asked to surrender to it. Before it happened — he resisted it for a while, but then he gave in. And what happens to him? Well, in that moment of his giving in to the way it’s written, to the way life is, to the way his life was intended to be, even though it wasn’t his first choice as a human being wanting to succeed, which we all have that in us, it came to a moment where he was absolutely, to me, the most quintessential of what it’s like for a human being to be filled with divinity. We have in that moment on the cross, when he looked out and said, “If I wanted to, I could change all this in a minute, but that’s not what I want to teach you, how to make the world into what you want it to be as quickly as you would like it to be. No, that’s not what you’re here for. You’re here for something much more mystical and mysterious. You’re here to do everything you can to change and to grow and to become, but there’s a moment in which you must go back and accept exactly the way it’s written. And when all those obstacles are in the way, no matter what they are, a disease, a disappointment in work, a friendship, a marriage that’s dissolved when you’re still in love — when you can say, “I forgive that. I accept that. I accept it as part of the work, as part of what it means to be human here,” and I have some sense, if we listen to this story correctly, that if at that moment — at that moment, there was something mysterious that happened that I don’t always pay attention to in that story. And that is he dies, he says, “It is finished,” and everybody that’s watching this sees these signs around them. There’s a total eclipse of the sun. There’s an earthquake. There’s thunder. There’s lightning. There’s wind, all manifestations of a power of a God, and they all walked away saying, “We’ve done a terrible thing.” How could that be? Everybody there one minute jeering, spitting, ridiculing a figure that they believed was somehow getting their people in trouble because he was angering the Romans or whatever their motive was for saying, “We should execute him,” it all melted away in a second when they saw something that they could never imagine doing — a human being forgiving 100 percent, 1000 percent the worst thing that could ever happen to them by people who are freely choosing to do it. He said, “They don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know what they’re doing.” I think that’s such an insightful, unbelievable, clear image of what it is to be a believer. You take on not the teaching of a religion or even the customs or moral laws of a religion, and then you surrender to that, and that makes you holy. No, it’s much more of an interior transformation, and that interior transformation is that you begin to see the world with a completely new vision, a new understanding. Yeah, we work hard to change and to grow and to become, but if we ever lose sight of the fact that we’re not in charge of that, we’re not the ones who determine how we are to grow and the people around us are to grow — unless we give up on that seductive power thing that we love as human beings — “I’m in charge of this whole thing, and I’m making it happen just the way I know it should happen — the way I know it should happen.” That’s what we have to forgive, that incredible, insatiable desire for control.

Redemption, renunciation, two words. They somehow fit together, but the church calls us to renounce things. What is it calling us to renounce? Sometimes it seems, if we oversimplify and maybe are caught in a very excessively moralistic, cult-like religion, we might feel that, “Well, I must. I must, I must, I must do exactly what I’m told. That’s it. So I renounce any of my wants, my needs, my feelings. I become a nobody.” And there’s something in that that is mysteriously attractive also to human beings, because we don’t have any responsibility on our own. We just give in, and that’s the other temptation. One is to control everything. The other is to not have any influence on anything at all. Those are the typical opposites we find in every issue that is a struggle for human beings. It’s always the struggle between the opposites, truth and lies, self-centeredness/selflessness, giving/taking, killing/saving, condemning/forgiving. It’s everywhere, and if we think that there’s a way in which the one, the opposite of the negative side of that opposite, if we think if we get rid of that, destroy it, we fall back into a very, very ancient, hopefully outgrown way that cultures can live by going around destroying everything that isn’t the way they want it to be. And we know that we’ve had that kind of history in our past, but we have a new history, a new beginning, a redemption.

Redemption is a recovery, a returning to something lost, something that’s a gift that brings us back to the thing that we lost. We don’t have to pay for it. We don’t have to earn it. What we have to do is receive it and know that we need it, and what is that thing we return to? I want to call it the life force, goodness, integrity, love, the things that God created in us in a way that wasn’t complete when we began to become conscious. He’s got us in this process, this program that we’re involved in that is about us, and whatever we do with our story affects everybody else’s story. This incredible union and communion of people living together, working things out, that’s that core that is the goodness that’s pushing that which is always damaged and sometimes even destroyed by abuse, but that’s the thing that we’ve recovered in this mysterious sequence of actions of a Messiah, because it means we go through those same stages of staying with ourselves, nurturing ourselves, surrendering to the way things really are.

And then this amazing thing called resurrection — resurrection, a new life. The disciples were in complete disbelief that this could happen, and I’d like you to think about this one thing. Are we in that state? Are we in the redeemed state? Do we really not believe that’s possible? That’s the question that Easter asks us every year. Do I believe in this incredible miracle?

Father, the world has always been in need of your message, always longing for the unity it promises, the peace that is its greatest effect on our soul and our relationships, so I beg you to bless our time, our country, the world with this understanding of how important it is that we get past differences and stop attacking and destroying each other and move closer and closer into the oneness that is our inheritance, acceptance, striving together for the same, incredibly marvelous goal of union with you and with our true self and being instruments that serve one another. So bless us with this grace. Especially bless my listeners, Lord. They’re very special to me, and whether you’re a first-time listener or that you’ve listened for 30-plus years, it’s my privilege to be able to bring you the truth of what I pray God is sharing with me to share with you. Amen.

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Luke 19:28-40 | Philippians 2:6-11 | Luke 22:14—23:56

Good morning. Today we’re celebrating Palm Sunday. It’s the celebration of the Passion of the Lord. It’s the culmination of all these Sundays we’ve had during Lent that continue to awaken in us an understanding of who God is and what he’s offering us and how it is that he came into the world as a human being and invites us to ponder every single thing that happened to him in his struggle to bring this new world to life. The world I’m talking about is a world with him. Intimacy with God is the core of the work of the Passion of Jesus. He was a human being filled so much with divinity. It’s impossible to say how this works, but we say that he’s also God. But his humanity and his divinity, you can see them both struggling, and in this incredible story that we find in St. Luke, this long gospel that almost excludes, by its very nature, a long explanatory homily. It’s something — I want you to do something unusual, and that’s just to go back and to listen to it over a couple of times and wait for something in it that is there for you.

Images are so rich in scripture, not so much the words but the images. If you can imagine, we’re looking at an image of God in the presence of a human being. So close is this union that it is actually God, and here is God, this awesome, creative force entering into our world and showing us something about who he is and who we are and the intimacy that that difference, in a sense, is designed to become one when we understand this story. The story is so incredibly important, and this is the one time when the church doesn’t encourage a homily of any kind of length. Its usual response is that we should all sit in silence and think about what we’ve just listened to, and there’s so much in it that I go back to it. I’m suggesting that you go back into it and listen to it again and watch for something that seems so perfectly tuned for where you’re struggling right now. That’s the beauty of inspired scripture. It’s more than just saying it’s the truth. It has a way of awakening things that are deep inside of us that are hidden.

So let’s do this as a — how about a combined homily? When I do a homily, I have to go back and listen to the readings over and over again and see what is in it that really moves me. Well, you’re going to be my co-homilists on this Sunday. You just go back and listen to this story and then wonder about it and feel what I pray is the absolute guarantee of anyone who seeks life through these stories, that you will find that life. Just as Jesus promises in the midst of all the darkness of this last part of his life, there is life. There isn’t just destruction. There is life. So it’s a perfect way to prepare ourselves for the greatest of all feasts next week, the Feast of the Resurrection, the feast of new life being born inside of us and bursting forth out of a tomb of darkness. It’s so powerful and beautiful, and the world longs for it so desperately right now as we struggle with the confusion and the darkness that we see all around us. That darkness can bring light. The Passion of Jesus proves something about that whole process of giving in to evil, and somehow through that process of knowing that you will conquer it, a new person, a new life is born. And that’s the heart of the message of scripture: new life, life in light, life in love. Amen. The opening prayer: (The prayer is not included.)

My dear brothers and sisters, since the beginning of Lent until now, we have been preparing our hearts by penance and charitable works. Today we come together to herald with the whole church the beginning of the celebration of our Lord’s Paschal mystery, that is to say his Passion and resurrection, for it was to accomplish this mystery that he entered his own city of Jerusalem. Therefore with all faith and devotion, let us commemorate the Lord’s entry into the city for our salvation, following in his footsteps, that being made by his grace partakers of the cross, we may have a share also in resurrection and in his life.

Nourished with these sacred gifts, we humbly beseech you, oh Lord, that just as through the death of your Son you brought us to hope for what we believe, so by his resurrection might lead us to where you call. And we ask this through Christ, our Lord, amen.

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Ezekiel 37:12-14 | Romans 8:8-11 | John 11:1-45

By your help we beseech you, Lord, our God. May we walk eagerly in that same charity with which, out of love for the world, your Son handed himself over to death. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We’ve come to the fifth Sunday of Lent, and I’ve said to you, over and over again, these five Sundays carry five themes that the church fathers, who gave us this liturgy of the word the way we turn to scripture and offer reading after reading — it builds on the one previous and prepares us for the next. They’ve chosen these five themes to be, in a sense, the heart of the message of Jesus, the heart of the message. That’s why it’s given to those who are about ready to be baptized in a simple overview of these five Sundays.

The first is the temptation where we find out who Jesus really is. He is like us. We are like him. God is in him, because we are like God. So we see this humanity and divinity in this figure, and what it’s struggling for is the truth. It wants to know what’s true. It wants to simply trust — not wants, but if it finds the truth, it knows it will be safe, and somehow it won’t buy into the lies of the world. That’s who we are. That’s what we come into the world as, and we are moving in that direction.

Then he shows us that he has this wisdom, this enlightenment, and he shows it to his disciples in the transfiguration. He says, “What I’m doing for you is not giving you a knowledge. I’m not telling you what to do anymore. I’m opening your heart, your essence to what is real. I want you to be alive. See what’s real.” Then we see that.

The next one is basic, the woman at the well, and it’s the fertilizing the fig tree. It’s always that there’s this thing that we have to be given. It’s called grace. It’s called God’s presence, but it works inside of us, and it nurtures that thing that we need to become who we are.

Then last Sunday was all about seeing. “I want to see,” the blind man. That’s the one on cycle A, but in that story, it’s the church that can’t see what Jesus is really doing, refuses to see it, denies it. And it’s the older brother in the one we read for this cycle who refuses to see the message of God in this beautiful image of a son returning to his father. After he sinned, he’s forgiven.

Now, this last Sunday is always the raising of Lazarus, the ability to live, and what I think is interesting in the cycle C that we choose, we have the gospel today, which is all about somehow receiving the primary, most transformative gift we can receive from God, in terms of our developing all these areas that I just talked about. Forgiveness, it is life.

So let’s go to this set of readings and see what I can draw from it to help us understand all of this more and take it in and make it a part of us. The first one is the Book of Isaiah, and it’s important to know Isaiah is one of those books of the Bible that is unique in one very single thing. It talks more about the ministry of Jesus than any other book of the Old Testament, and when you look at it, it’s like it’s describing the whole thing — the whole thing. And it’s beautiful, and one of the things we listen to, in this particular passage of the Old Testament, is something that I think is at the heart of what I would call the conversion process that we’re involved in as followers of this figure Christ, the conversion. It’s from a lower level of consciousness where we are the center of our universe and everything is about us to another level of our ability to become who we are, a level of consciousness where we are dedicated to and living for the work of service, wanting to care for people. From selfishness to other-centeredness, that’s the movement, and so what he’s saying is, “Don’t look at the past,” in this particular passage. “Don’t look at things in the past. I’m doing something new.” And the images he talks about, Isaiah talks about, when he’s talking about doing something new, it’s the work of Jesus, and it’s not about judgment. It’s not about condemnation anymore, but it’s about creating a place for people where there’s water and life, and they can grow and become who they are. And they’ll be sustained by the very life that they’re leading, which is a great image, this land, Promise Land. It’s a way of life that nurtures and feeds you with the things that you are made for, not the things that the world promises that don’t really fulfill you, and so we have this beautiful reminder. We have to shift from one world to another, the Old Testament to the New Testament, and that’s not something that happened in the past.

That’s not something we all went through as a religion, and now we’re all living in the present. No. The reason why that Old Testament/New Testament is so essential is because every single person that’s coming into this world is going to make that crossover from the old to the new, from self-centeredness to other-centeredness. Why would I say that? How did God work with people in the Old Testament mostly? How did he reach them? He reached them primarily by telling them that there was a nature that he made them to be. They have a nature that they should follow, and that was the Ten Commandments. “And so I want you to be careful not to do the things that are against your nature.” He gave that, told them, “That’s all you really need.” They made more laws out of it, as you know, but nevertheless, what it was doing is saying, “You do this, and if you don’t, I’ll punish you. I’ll destroy you.” No, when someone tells you that, what are they convinced you probably will do? At least, if they want you to follow this new way, this law, rather, the old law, then they’re going to say, “Please, whatever you do, think about, when you do it, that you might be destroying yourself.” So he’s playing off of a self-centered human nature, the part of human nature that’s self-centered, and that’s how he worked for the first whole section. We think perhaps the Old Testament is 2,500, 3,000 years. So all that time basically, even though he’s preparing them for something else, he was working on their self-centeredness.

Then Paul talks about it in the second reading, and he goes, “I remember the old way, and I don’t want to have anything to do with it.” Isaiah said, “Don’t think about the past. Think about what’s now.” Paul’s saying, “All that stuff, all my following those rules and laws, I see that all as rubbish compared to what I see now.” And what does he see? A forgiving, loving God who is on our side, who wants nothing more than for you and for me to grow and evolve into our higher level of consciousness, which is our goal, to be lovers, servants. That’s what we’re here for. He counts on people understanding that, seeing that. It’s interesting. I don’t think it’s necessary that every human being go through this transition perfectly. No, that would be based on the fact that all of us are individuals, separate from each other. We’re not. We’re all one, so it only takes a few people to begin this work, and then it begins to be sort of part of who we all are as a people. Then it becomes more and more accepted, and then all of a sudden it reaches a sort of critical mass, and then everybody gets it, the difference between living for self or living for others. It’s there in our DNA to make this change, and Paul said, “I’ve made it, and I can’t believe how wonderful it is. Again, I just think all that other stuff was wasted time, because I have been given something inside of me that I live now with that enables me, not to follow the law out of some great, new selflessness discipline, but out of my heart, I just know this is what I need to be. I just want to be this.”

So let’s look at this image then. Let’s look at the woman as the part of all of us that comes to some moment in their life when they realize the difference between the old and the new. What’s the old? You are asked to surrender your will to a God, and you are to perform as he calls you to do it, and if you pass that test, you will be acceptable. That’s pretty much the Old Testament. It’s what a lot of people think religion still is today, an organization that tells you what to believe and what to do, and if you do it, they will save you. If you don’t, they’ll kick you out — old way. So the new way is different. Instead of condemning us for those things that we do that are not right, instead of telling us that we’ve made a mistake and we’re going to pay for it, and whatever pleasure we got out of it, you might think again about doing that, because it’s created all this pain in your life, this separation, this isolation, this emptiness. He just wants us to feel that. So here is the Old Testament at its best, or worst, I might say. Jesus is teaching. He’s the new teacher. He’s the new — he’s the enlightened one who’s going to open our hearts and put some kind of living water inside of us, and then we’re going to see, and then we’re going to live.

So here’s the beautiful, beautiful story, a woman caught in adultery. Adultery, what is adultery? To adulterate something means to choose something less when you have something more. There’s something about religion at the time that seemed unfaithful to the God who created it, because they were so resisting this gift of God’s wisdom in this person Jesus. It’s like they were unfaithful to God. So we’re talking about their sin here in this woman, because while he’s teaching his incredible, life-giving teaching of forgiveness, which is 99 percent of everything he taught, when you no longer will be condemned for what you do. You will be loved and forgiven. It made no sense to those who were working out of a self-centered model, because they’ll say, “Well, everybody will take advantage of that.” They couldn’t feel it or see what it was doing for them, but the woman in the story is a perfect example of that old system. And so it turns out that she’s brought to Jesus not because of — if the crowd had brought Jesus this woman, I wonder what the story would have been. I’m sure he would have forgiven her, but he made a major point of seemingly disinterested, as he traced his finger on the ground. I think that’s such an interesting part of this story, like he’s not going to fight this fight with them. He’s tried that before, and it didn’t work. He’s called them all kinds of hypocrites, but he didn’t do it this day. He was much more subtle, and he said, “Okay, if this is the law and you all want to do this,” obviously that’s what most of the people thought they were supposed to do, “Well, go ahead and do it. Go ahead, but by the way, I’d like you, Pharisees, to throw the stones. Would you do that? Go ahead.” They knew deep in their heart they were not attached to the true God. In some way, they knew something. That’s why Jesus was so threatening to them, and so the beauty of this is here’s the presence of a forgiving God in the minds of these men who taught there was no such thing as a forgiving God, only a punishing God, and they’re somehow caught in a few seconds of saying, “Oh, my God, I’ve been guilty. If I forgave her —,” If this is true, there must have been something in them that must have thought, “Oh, my God. This would be wonderful.” It seems that one of the things that’s going on in their head is they’re saying, “Okay, I know I’ve done some things.” But it had to be deeper than that. Maybe they saw the crowd. Maybe they saw their eyes and went, “Oh, my God. This guy — this is so different than the religion we’re used to. We always kill people that don’t do what the law requires. That’s who we are.” But when you’re doing that, what are you doing? You’re not only condemning an act, but you’re condemning the human being along with the act. There’s no separation between what they’re doing and who they are, and Jesus bypasses what they’re doing and looks at who they are. And he said, “Oh, my God. I love you so much, and you’ve so much more potential than this. And I want you to know I believe in it, and I trust in it. I’ll be there. I’ll enter into you, and I’ll give it to you.” My God, what a different religion, a God who’s on our side, not judging us and condemning us but who enters into us.

What he’s saying is, “You’re like me. I made you in my image, so you are basically wonderful, beautiful beings, and I want to affirm that. I don’t want to tell you you’re worthless when you fail as a human, because that’s part of humanity. I want to tell you that that failure doesn’t disturb or bother me in terms of my love for you, because I know what you need more than anything else is to believe in your own goodness, which I will awaken in you through grace, through redemption. I will let you feel it.” And when you feel it and you know you’re loved, something shifts inside of you. I don't know how to describe it. It’s called redemption, but you become some kind of new creature that forgets about the past and the old system and enters into a system that is so life-giving and so fulfilling and so natural.

Father, you promised us abundant grace during this holy season. We long for that grace that frees us to see the truth, who we are, what you ask of us. So we thank you and praise you for this gift, but we ask most especially that, through this end of this great season, as we re-enact the death and resurrection of Jesus, we will not only be thinking about what it is but we will experience it. We’ll go through a death ourselves and a resurrection. That’s your promise, and we welcome this great gift rooted in your love and your forgiveness and your deep desire for the fullness of life for everything you’ve created. Amen.

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1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a | Ephesians 5:8-14 | John 9:1-41

Oh God, who through your word reconcile the human race to yourself in a wonderful way, grant, we pray, that with prompt devotion and eager faith, the Christian people may hasten toward the solemn celebrations to come. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Our opening prayer encouraged us to be enthusiastic, excited about the coming celebration. It seems strange, in a sense, that we’re working toward the crucifixion of our Savior, and that would be something we would want to back away from, in a sense. But obviously in that act something was given, something so powerful that everything was changed, and we don’t focus on the crucifixion as a thing we’re celebrating. We’re focused on what it created. The effect of it was the most amazing, explosive expansion of the work of Jesus with those that he loved. In his resurrected state, he was most effective.

I always find it interesting that Jesus spent three years with his disciples, and toward the end of his career, when it looked like he was not going to be able to accomplish his task here on this planet, he had to face the amazing rejection of who he was. I know he knew that he would be rejected in a sense, because he was changing things so radically, but I don't know if he understood, as a human, that this reaction on the part of the church, which was standing for the will of God, the way that God works with us — when he was trying to change that, help it to evolve into its next level, they were so resistant, because they felt they were losing something, something so important. And they were right to be afraid of Jesus, because he was robbing them of the one thing that they felt was their greatest asset, power over people, the power to use their influence to make them do what they should do, in the mind of the religious leaders, and the motive that they used, the motive was the most primitive motive that has always been there for people, fear. “You must do what we ask you to do, or you will die. You will be destroyed. You will be rejected by God. You’ll be punished forever.” What an amazing power to have, and it was intoxicating for them, like it is for every human being, to have that much power. So the institution that was then the temple was the most powerful place for the Israelite people, and Jesus came along to put something in its place, a new temple, the temple of the individual, that God no longer was limiting himself to being present in the arc of the covenant in the center of this powerful place. No. He said, “That was necessary for a while, but now I’m ready to take the next step,” the most dramatic step, the most essential step of moving away from dwelling in an institution that’s run by human beings and then its benefit is doled out for something that they are getting back, which was the sacrifices. That was a big business, but more than the money they were making, it was the power that was so intoxicating. And they found that they could live a life that looked like they were doing what everyone else was asked to do, which was really, in a way, an affront to their very human dignity, their individual rights to make decisions about things. It robbed them of an evolution that they had reached that was ready to flourish, and it couldn’t flourish in that system. And so he changed it, and he did it by the most unusual way, by dying, by giving in to their evil.

I don't know how many times I’ve sat and wondered, “Why? Why that?” Why give in to evil that’s the antithesis that, let’s say, the institutional church throughout the Old Testament, the institutional church still in this time that we live, an institution that’s run more by the egos of the people running it, runs into this very, very sticky place of demanding obedience instead of engaging people in the process of becoming? “You must act as if you have grown and developed and changed. That’s all we ask. Act as if. Do always what you’re told to do, and you are who you’re intended to be.” Well, nothing could be further from the truth, and nothing could be more, in a sense, abusive than to take someone’s God-given right to make decisions and to grow into an awareness of who God has made them to be and who they are. That is our dignity. That is our value. That’s what we’re here for, and for someone to rob it of us is sinful, abusive, controlling. And so Jesus said, “Well, I have to show people what this is really like. I’m offering them something different,” which they’re having a hard time with that, not having to follow the rules, not having to do the things that they were told to do. It creates all kind of shame and guilt in them. It was really hard for people to follow Jesus, as it still is, but here’s what he said he’d do. He said, “All right, I’m going to show you sin. I’ll become sin.” That’s the second reading. “I’ll become sin so I can save you.”

How did he become sin? Because he was manifesting the truth of a system that is — I hate to use the word demonic, but let’s just say that it works against the work of God. A system that works against the work of God then, when God came into that system to fine tune it, to change it, to help it to see more and grow and face its problems, its shame, its guilt, do all that, they couldn’t do that. And Jesus said, “Okay, well then, I can do one thing. I know I can do this. I’ll show people who you really are. When they understand who I am, and they will understand it, I will show them the sin that the institutional church gets caught up in, and that is the rejection of the very God that they claim to be speaking for, to be following,” a God that robs people of their dignity of being the new dwelling place for the Holy Spirit inside of us, guiding us, directing us, directing us, showing us what we need to do. So the crucifixion is an image of the effect of a way that the church can fall into a role that is truly abusive.

So now we know that, when Jesus rose, he was able to show his disciples so many things that they couldn’t understand before. So he set a seed in people, and one of the things they must have realized — once they began to feel the fullness of that seed of wisdom and understanding, they began to understand all these stories in the scriptures, all these things that happened in Jesus’ life. They began to put it all together, and it must have been like this rush of insight and understanding. And so they began to figure out, as we try, as I try to help you — we together try to figure out these stories. And this one is very interesting, because this is the Sunday of the series in Lent when we try to look at the greatest gift that God is giving to human beings, and that is to open their eyes and to remove blindness. Jesus called the leaders of the temple blind fools leading other blind fools into pits. They didn’t see what was real. They didn’t see the truth. They didn’t see what God’s inviting them to look at, and so we have this story, this beautiful story of the Father, who in the Old Testament is someone who is very much insistent on us becoming something before we’re loved — before we’re loved. We come into the world in the Old Testament, and right away we have a problem with God. We disobey him, and he’s angry, and he kicks us out. He doesn’t want to be around people who are growing and changing. He wants only people who are fully formed. Can you imagine that is the mindset, how insane that is when you know human nature?

So we have a story here of two sons. One is the Old Testament. The other is the New Testament. The Old Testament is the man who has done, from the beginning of his conscious life, he’s always done what the law requires, and he’s dutiful, and he’s righteous, and he’s lonely, I think, and alone in his achievement. He did it on his own, and then we have the New Testament character, this younger son who, as a human being, begins his journey toward wisdom by making mistakes. That’s the way most, 90 percent, of us learn, allowing his nature to take its course, to follow it, even though it was self-centered and shortsighted, but when he asked his father for everything that the father owed him, the father was willing to give it. “Here’s your freedom. Money’s freedom.” Takes his inheritance and goes off and does what most adolescents do, what most adolescent adults do, what most all of us do, is he squandered it on things that he thought would be so satisfying. “Ah, I can have sex. I can have great entertainment. I can be in the hottest spot in the world.” It’s the same for us today. And then he goes through what we call conversion, regret. Somehow he’s empty, and he realizes why he’s empty — because he’s chosen the things that don’t satisfy.

The interesting thing in that first reading, we heard about the people getting to the land that was promised to them. That land feeds them. No more manna is necessary. The life that God asks you and me to live will feed us and nurture us, give us life. If we choose a way of life that is not according to what we want and need truly, our true self, we’ll be hungry all the time, and when we’re in that painful place of hunger, one temptation is to pick something that just separates us from the feeing level, so diversion, entertainment. Do something. Don’t think about it. Drugs, alcohol, all that, that’s so common. That’s our story, and so what he’s doing is he’s showing us in this story that this is what he — he’s open to us doing this. This is fine with him. This is the way we learn. So he’s always offering us love when we are at our worst, and I love that, when he comes back, he has no way of thinking, or we, the listeners of this story, have no way of thinking that he went and said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I just messed up.” Then the father said, “Oh, now I love you.” No, the father loved him when it could have been that he was coming back to get more money. He loved him because he had the courage to try whatever he thought was really his goal. He was courageous in a sense, risked a lot. It seems funny for me to say it to you. It’s better to sin and risk things than to be a good person all your life, but I guess that’s what I’m saying. That’s what the story says. I should say that, because the older son had no sense of the process that God had offered us as human beings, and the fact that he was so resistant to the celebration means that he had some deep resentment in him, because he thought he was doing all the things he had to do so he would have God’s love. And God loved him anyway, and so how could he celebrate something that was so devastating to the way he thought his life should be led?

Father, your love, unconditional love, is for us hard to grasp, hard to understand. We’ve been told so often that our sins so displease you, our humanness displeases you. Free us from that misconception that we’ve been given of the way in which you love. Your love is always there, and you love us in our sinfulness, not because we’ve left it or disciplined ourselves into turning away from it. No, we need you to do the work of conversion, so we need your love. So please open the hearts of all to this great gift, freedom from the fear that they’ve been given that somehow our sins separate us from you, from your love. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Exodus 17:3-7 | Romans 5:1-2, 5-8 | John 4:5-42

Oh God, author of every mercy and of all goodness, who in fasting, prayer and almsgiving have shown us a remedy for sin, look graciously on this confession of our lowliness that we who are bowed down by our conscience may always be lifted up by your mercy. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Cum era buerant. It’s a prayer of a pilgrim who questions if he’s on the right path as he journeys and worries that he may be in error. There’s something about this path that God has given us, and for some strange reason, it remains always nebulous, always hard to grasp. It’s like we’re always in this cloud of unknowing, but we’re given enough information. We’re given enough to make a decision whether or not we want to be on the path — the path. If there’s any way for us to figure out the path, it is to go to the story of Jesus, the Messiah but not simply to look at him but to look at the whole picture, from Adam and Eve to the stories of the incredible time that Jesus spent on this earth as a resurrected body and was so effective in his powerful teaching.

So it’s one basic story, and it’s clear that the beginning of the story is all about leaving a place of slavery. So we have Moses in the first reading. He wants to free people, and he’s being called by God to do just that. But freedom is really an interesting thing. The freedom from slavery would be I am no longer going to be forced to do what someone else tells me to do or makes me do. So to be free of slavery is to be not under someone’s control, but at the same time, if you look at independence, it means separation, a separation from somebody. So if we’re not to be under God’s control, if we choose, “Well, I’m not going to do that,” we have to also accept the fact that, if you ask for independence, you’re also saying, “I don’t need your support. I don’t want you to control me. I don’t need you to help me. I want to do this on my own.” This may seem oversimplified, but if you look at the story of Adam and Eve, and you look at all these issues that we’ve been looking at throughout this entire salvation history story, it always seems that human beings are having a hard time certainly being told what to do. Somehow they’re realizing, and they do certainly as we mature and grow, that the goal of life is not to surrender to somebody else’s will or another law or rule but to somehow awaken inside of us a new rule, a new law that’s written in our heart. So the path is to follow the destiny each of us have, and it’s something that we don’t know fully, and we need the support of God to reveal it to us. But more than that, we need some kind of mysterious strength and power to know how to deal with this union, this communion we have with this divine figure. It is so difficult to fathom.

As I said last week, I was talking about this, and I was saying it’s so interesting that we want so much to do what God calls us to do, but then when you realize what God calls us to do, it’s pretty frightening, because the easier thing to do is what the Old Testament asked of people before they were really capable of doing much more. They were told, “Here’s the rules. Here’s the laws. You do them, and God is pleased, and you’ll be rewarded.” That’s clear, but then you look at the New Testament, and what’s it saying? Well, you need to learn about presence, and you need to learn about intimacy, independence. Take those images of those words and those thoughts. Think of it. Independence, we don’t want independence from God. We may not want God to be telling us all the time what to do through an institution, but we want support. We want to feel his presence, and his presence is simply — presence, the word, means to be connected to, to be one with, to be here. When someone talks to you and they’re drifting and you know they’re acting like they’re listening but they’re not, well, their presence has left you. You often say, “Where’d you go? You’re not here anymore.” Presence, God’s incredible presence in us, in our life, that’s who he is. I love the answer that he gives to Moses about, “Who are you, God?” He said, “I am who I am. I’m not going to explain to you who I am. You can’t fathom who I am. You just believe I am who I am. Get to know me. Hang out with me. Let me do what I do best with you.”

So if we want to have his support, but we don’t really want his control, then we’re going to have to figure a way that, through his support, we are empowered to be able to do what’s right, and that’s the promise. And how does that work? Well, the greatest of mysteries — God comes, knocks on our soul, our heart and says, “Let me in. I’m going to come, and I’m going to dwell with you. And all I’m asking from you is intimacy.” And what is intimacy? Making known what is hidden, making known who you are to another person with absolute honesty and holding nothing back. These are the things about me that I’m maybe not proud of, that I’m not happy with, but these are my struggles. This is what I want to share with you, who I really am. And God said, “That’s wonderful, because the more you share with me who you are, I’ll share with you who I am.” It’s the most classic description of an intimate relationship that we have in marriage, in friendship, in family. No secrets, no secrets. So we have this challenge then not to figure out how to live according to the church’s rules and laws but letting somebody divine enter into us. Now, which is easier? Which would you prefer if you had a choice, that both of them were equally effective? I’d pick the first. I just asked you would you like to go into someone’s house or home or presence that you know and tell them everything about yourself, even though you’ve hidden so much of it. Do you want to do that? I don’t, but if I tell you, “These are the things I’d love for you to do for me, and then we’ll be friends, we’ll be connected,” ah, that’s easy.

So at the heart of this whole Lenten series is how do we get to know what this is that we are engaged in when God showed us something at the end of his life when he died and rose again. What is this telling us? What’s the mystery, the secret? What are we supposed to be getting? Well, one thing — let’s look at the gospel passage, because it’s interesting. If you know the cycle A, the five Sundays are really beautifully summarizing our journey with God. It starts off with getting to know Jesus, who he is, through the temptations. Then we see what he’s here for, to enlighten us, and he becomes bright white last week, and now we get the image — in the original series of cycle A, we had three more things that were really clear. One was a woman at the well, who he says, “I have living water for you,” a man who was born blind, that he heals his blindness, and a man who was dead, and he raises him from death to life. “I give you something that opens your eyes, that makes you now live.”

So this is that same theme but in a little different metaphor, a fig tree. Now, I think the fig tree is interesting in this story about what it is that Jesus has come to accomplish. He said there was an incident on his way to Jerusalem when he knew he was in deep trouble and would most likely be crucified. He ran across a fig tree, and the fig tree was barren. And it was clear that Jesus went to the tree to get some fruit. He wanted to be fed, and when there were no figs there, he got so angry and cursed the tree, and it withered. It seemed like he kind of lost his balance there and just raged, which makes sense to his humanity. The disciples looked at each other and said, “This is weird.” And they said, “It’s not even time for figs.” So here’s Jesus with something on his mind as he’s going back to Jerusalem. What would be on his mind if he thought he might end his career right then and there? “I’m not finished. I haven’t produced the fruitfulness on this earth that I want to. It’s still barren.” Then you look at the fig tree, and here’s Jesus talking about this tree that is there, that for three solid years has not produced any fruitfulness. Three years, what would that sound like? What more clear explanation of his three years of struggling to awaken human beings to a truth that he knew was in them and yet they couldn’t get it. So the recommendation is don’t cut the tree down. Don’t curse it but fertilize it. Fertilize it. Give it something that it doesn’t have, something that’s not in the soil, something that’s not in the earth, something that’s core. They don’t understand. “That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to give people that incredible gift to fertilize them so they can do this work.” And that’s called redemption. Redemption, it’s the water that’s in us that never ceases to flow. It’s the nourishment that we need as our human nature evolves and grows into who God wants us to be. It’s all the things we need, and it was won for us by this act of Jesus on the cross. And so what is the essence of that act? Well, it sounds like it had to do with some kind of disappointment in his humanity over the fact that he wasn’t finished. Nothing really seemed to be accomplished. His disciples, most of them, didn’t believe in him. The church leaders couldn’t fathom anything he was saying and only saw him as a threat. And so if you were prepared for 30 years of your life to do this work, and you were looking around and it wasn’t finished, you would say, “I’m being asked by the Father to surrender to evil and let these people silence me and demean me and humiliate me?” And he said no twice to that plan, and then he finally gave in. What was he giving in to? Well, God is in him, right? God is so in him that he is God, but this is so interesting. Being God in this context does not take his humanity away. In fact it enhanced it. So as a human being, can any of us say that, when we have a life work and we’re struggling to do it and it looks like your life’s going to end and you’re not going to be able to accomplish it — what’s the feeling? It’s a horrible feeling. I failed. I failed to do the work I’m called to do. Think of the shame that that creates inside of us, and yet Jesus was able to do it. How did he do it? Well, he must have done it, because he knew there was something in the act of surrender to the reality that our humanity will never be enough, never on its own is enough to do what we’re here to do.

I think our humanity can save us from hell, because our humanity basically, kind of on its own, can figure out what’s right and what’s good and bad and follow rules. That just doesn’t take more than a basic human instinct and nature, but we’re asked to go way beyond that into divinity inside of us. And that’s the challenge. How do you surrender the reality that your humanity will not be enough but the divinity in you will be enough? And what it’s going to do is transform you when you admit, “My humanity’s not enough.” That’s what Jesus did. He said, “I am not enough without my Father.” And when that act of surrender to the divine — it was the antithesis of the first Adam who said, “No, I can do this on my own.” And Jesus said, “No, you can’t. Please, please believe. I will do it in you, through you and with you.”

Father, the mystery of your presence within us is beyond our full comprehension. It’s beyond our understanding. The gift that you are to us seems too much, too intimate, yet it is your plan. It is what you’ve asked us to surrender to, so bless this mysterious union of divinity and humanity in each of us so that we can feel it and not so much understand it but feel its incredible transformative power, and then filled with this great gift, we can accomplish the things that we only dream about but somehow never losing fact that they are not what we do but what you do through us. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18 | Philippians 3:17 – 4:1 | Luke 9:28b-36

Oh God who have commanded us to listen to your Beloved Son, be pleased, we pray, to nourish us inwardly by your word that, with spiritual sight made pure, we may rejoice to behold your glory. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

These Sundays of Lent contain the message of God to man in a very, very powerful way, and it makes sense that, since this season was the time that the catechumens would be entering the church, it was their last full instruction as to what they were being baptized into, a great mystery, a mystery that was inviting them to allow something to happen to them that, I think, has been the most difficult part of this covenant, these promises that God made to us. The image in the gospel seems so clear to me, that one of the things that Jesus is intended to do, teach to all of us, is seen clearly for the first time in this mystical experience of these three disciples seeing the body of Jesus transfixed, transformed into the brightest light they’ve ever seen, and to see in this vision two of the most important people from the Old Testament, Moses, who gave the law, Elijah, who represents all the prophets, and they’re conversing. And what happened to the disciples when they saw this, they were completely confused, and they went into a place that would make sense to me whenever God is manifesting himself inside someone. There is a kind of, “Whoa, this goes way beyond my realm of what is possible.” And so you sort of disassociate. So they go into this cloud.

It’s reminiscent of the thing that happened when Abraham was called by God and manifested himself to him, and when he was explaining the relationship that he was going to have with Abraham and everyone after that, when that whole thing was unfolding, he went into a dark, dark place. I think it’s interesting. Abraham was in a place of darkness and fear, and the disciples were in a place of just confusion and cloud. And when they came out of that, they were changed, but I don't know how consciously you are when you have some kind of major shift in your life in terms of understanding something that you never saw before. To see it for the first time is an amazing experience, but it doesn’t necessarily instantly erase all the things that you’ve been doing, your patterns of behavior based on something that was different than that. We can imagine what it was like for Abraham to experience the presence of God. We know that God had appeared. At least in salvation history, we know he appeared first to Adam and then to Noah.

The thing that happened, when God had that time with Adam and Eve, is so important to understand clearly, because what it is, it’s not about God being upset with human beings for being human and sinning, lying and believing a lie. What was really happening in that relationship is it was established that God knew that this was a part of human nature, and he allowed them to leave, not with anger and resentment, but with, “Okay, if you choose to work out your salvation, or you work out your way of understanding who you are on your own, I’ll give you that opportunity, and I’ll just tell you first a little bit about it, how hard it’s going to be, but you go.” Not cursed. Only the serpent who lied was cursed, and they weren’t literally sent with a great prayer and blessing. But they maybe wouldn’t have understood that, but they were sent to accomplish what they thought they were here to do. And that is to figure out life on their own, to figure it all out. That is such a core part of human nature. “I want to be the one who figures it out. I want to be the one who accomplishes it.” It is in our DNA. It is in our human nature. To go against that is almost literally to go against our nature, our lower nature, but as you and I both know, this whole story of salvation history — and the same thing happens in our own individual lives, because our lives are reflections of the same full story we find in salvation history, but it’s simply that this task that we’re asked to do, this thing that we are making a promise to God to do, we know it has to have an ingredient that we naturally would rather not have. It seems strange to say this, but we would rather not have a partner in some ways. “I would like to accomplish this on my own.” So the first covenant that God made with Adam was to send him forth, in a sense, and say, “I’ll give you all the information you need. Now go and learn.”

Then there was a covenant with Noah, because God got so upset with everybody. It seemed like he couldn’t find a single soul in the world that had a heart that wasn’t just packed with evil. An angel finds the family of Noah and says, “Oh, please, please save Noah.” And he destroyed all the other life, the life of everyone else and started over with Noah, and then he made a promise to Noah. “I’ll never do that again. I’ll never do that again.” Don’t you love the way God seems to grow in his awareness of how to work with human beings? He didn’t have to learn that. It was the way he revealed himself, a God who is learning about a relationship that he longs for more than anything, and we resist it, even though there’s something deep inside of us that longs for it more than we ever realize.

Then we have the covenant with Abraham. What Abraham is promised is two things. God said, “I’ll come into your life if you’ll trust me, and I’ll give you a land. And that land is going to be wonderful.” Then later he adds to the covenant. He said, “Well, not only am I going to give you land, but I’m going to give you the thing you long for the most.” Back then people didn’t really believe in such a thing as life after death, so they had this instinct. They wanted to continue to live, so it was through their posterity, through their children that they saw their life going on. So Abraham didn’t have any children with his wife, Sarah, and that’s how you get the inheritance, through the father. So God said, “I will give you a child, and you will have posterity.”

Let’s just stop there with the way God worked with people and just fast forward to the gospel. Now, here’s a new covenant being established. How can I best describe to you the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant? It’s this. Look at the ceremony that’s in the first reading. Animals are cut in half and laid opposite each other, and then God symbolically walks between them. And Abraham, in a way, was to walk between them. He didn’t actually maybe do that, but the idea was that you would make a promise to fulfill the thing that you were going to do. You would say, “I will not — ever keep my side of the covenant, because if I don’t, I will die. I will have the fate of the animal, or some part of me will die, my integrity, my ability to keep a promise.” What’s so fascinating about that is, even after God made that covenant and realized that the Israelite people, who were so stiff-necked, couldn’t keep their end of it, he said, “Oh, this is not ever going to work, because if they don’t keep their part of it, I don’t owe them anything.” And so he changed it, and he said, “No, I’m going to make a change in this covenant. I’m going to say, no, I will never leave it. I don’t care how far you go from me, I will always be there. That’s my promise.” So you see this wonderful, mysterious way in which God, being revealed in the Old Testament, becomes so attractive, because you see him making adjustments to his demands based on human nature. And since God will always have the image of a demanding God, there’s something beautiful about him starting off with something — how can we say it — over our head, over our capacity, and when he finds out we can’t do it, does he just write off the human race and kill them all? No. He said, “I will change it. I will work with you.”

So you end up, at the time of Christ, with this God who has made a promise to his people that he will never ever leave them, and since he keeps seeing them as not being able to keep the covenant, and he adjusts it, now he comes to the part where he’s not going to adjust it anymore. He’s going to change them, and that’s the incarnation. And what is it that the disciples are watching? They’re watching the very thing that is the key to keeping the covenant on our part, and that is a God/man, a God/man, a human being who — it would have been so interesting to know the way the disciples slowly grew in their faith, but they must have seen Jesus as a human being completely. They couldn’t imagine him being God, and then he was promising them a career in the power structure of the world at that time. They were going to be major players in the world, and yeah, they were attracted to that. They had no idea what it was going to take to be who God wanted them to be, but the idea of having power was pretty intoxicating, as it’s always been with people. So they really thought they were going to be given a key position, and every time Jesus would explain something to them, they’d sort of shake their heads and say, “This doesn’t make any sense. This doesn’t make any sense, and who can be saved,” that kind of thing. You just see this God/man doing the work of preparing them for the reality that they see in Jesus happening to them, and they see that the things that Jesus is explaining about the way life really is, the truth of our existence, the truth of who we are, wouldn’t make any sense to them. Either in their culture it didn’t make sense, in their own way of seeing themselves it didn’t make sense. It pushed them, pushed them. It wasn’t until this figure explained by his very life that the whole thing God wants from us is not a commitment to do what he says but to become who he is and who we are, and when you become that, you have given up something that is so crucial, your need to be in charge, your need to know what you’re here to do, your need to feel you have the ability to do it. All of that is a great obstacle, and isn’t it interesting that God said, “That’s in you as humans. I placed it there on purpose, because I want to be the one who enters into you and makes this all happen. That’s what I want you to believe. Everything I ask you to do you can’t do without me. Trust me. I’m in you, not to judge you, not to tell you what to do but to enable you to be a source of salvation for the world.

Father, the mystery that you’ve given to us to ponder, to wonder about, to feel the depth of what it really is is this mystery of you coming and living with us, within us, and this partnership is hard for us. It’s really hard for us to understand it. It’s easier for us to be told what to do and then be judged by that than to enter into this mysterious cloud of unknowing and then find ourselves in union with you. And then we are somehow, in a way, not in charge, and we need to surrender our wills to yours. I used to think that meant leaving the world, but it means a deep, deep investing yourself in the relationships that you have in the world around you. And through your presence in us, we’re told to believe we can make amazing changes in the world, changes we long to see. So bless us with a faith in that, trust in that. Let it happen to us. Amen.

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Deuteronomy 26:4-10 | Romans 10:8-13 | Luke 4:1-13

Grant, almighty God, through this yearly observance of Holy Lent, that we may grow in understanding of the riches hidden in Christ, by worthy conduct pursue their effects. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We begin this Sunday with what is considered to be one of the most important times in the liturgy of the church. The liturgy is our way of connecting with God through a ritual, and we listen to his word, and we believe that he becomes present to us and enters into us. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing, ritual. It’s held the church together through all kinds of situations. We long for that which we cannot understand, and ritual somehow makes it real. It doesn’t create it, but it opens us to what is real, what is true, who we are, who God is, what we’re here for.

Now, if you’re like me, you might have fallen into a trap. That is, at least as a child, I was there, and it’s this. I thought about human beings, and I listened to the stories of scripture, especially the beginning of the story in Genesis about Adam and Eve. In some naïve way, I thought, “Well, these people are just like me, just like everyone. These are humans. We’re all the same. We were all made by God. We don’t change that much.” Well, nothing could be further from the truth. Human beings have changed dramatically — dramatically in the short time that we’ve been recording the relationship that God has with them. Maybe one thing that might help you is to think about time and think of the changes that have happened over the last 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, 200 years. It’s like, “My gosh, it’s a different world completely.” And we are having to adapt to this world, and we are changing.

The story of Adam and Eve happened to the human race close to 5,000 years ago. We were just coming out of the Iron Age and into the Bronze Age, making certain weapons more effective. I would have loved to have seen what community life was like then, and it wouldn’t be anything like what we live in. It was supposed to be 1,000 years after that experience of human beings that we end up with the story of God entering into the people of the Israelites. We hear about that in the first reading, a people in slavery brought to freedom by God, who intervenes in their life and guides them and talks to them, not directly but through a prophet, a patriarch. So just remember that that first event of human nature’s response to a God, who created a beautiful world, and then didn’t have the ability to say no to a temptation that came basically out of their human nature, but evil was there, and it played off people’s human nature, which evil always does — and all Adam did was he gave in to a lie that he believed. He didn’t maybe have any kind of real experience to know the lie was a lie, and he bought into it, and his wife bought into it. And then we have our first human being encountering God, and the worst part of that story, in terms of its misinterpretation, is it seems God made us, and then we showed ourselves to who we are, and it disgusted God, and he kicked us out, because we wouldn’t obey him. Somehow sin then, we are told, was invented, caused by this man called Adam, and I remember hearing that and thinking, “That’s not fair. He did that. Maybe I wouldn’t have done that.” But it wasn’t the story about one man’s sin. No, Adam was the symbol, the image of who we were then, a much lower level of consciousness. We liked things being given to us. We could see beauty. We knew we needed a partner, and God was there, and it was wonderful and idyllic, but then human nature came along and seemed to mess it all up.

But I want to say something to you now that I’ve never, ever said before, and I believe it with all my heart. I want you to stop thinking that sin, in the eyes of God, is something that is disgusting and horrible, and whenever we participate in anything that feeds our human nature over what God is asking us to be, don’t ever believe that that is somehow a turnoff or he turns away or he kicks us out. We have to go to an institution to get back in. No. Think about human nature as a thing that God is most attracted to, with all of its goodness and all of its impurity and disobedience. He loves human beings as we are made, not as we are eventually drawn into being through his grace. No, he loves us as we are, as we love a child when they’re messy and out of control, and we look at that human being, knowing what’s in store for them and who they’ll become. And God certainly knew the future of human beings would be something awesome. So stop thinking that our faults are an obstacle. Think of Jesus, of God as a doctor, and we have diseases, and we come to him. What doctor would slam the door and say, “I can’t stand disease”? No, he loves us in our brokenness, completely, thoroughly.

So I want you to look at this first reading or first set of readings in Lent, because Lent is a time when we’re presented with the core of the message of our God. I want you to feel something with me. First of all, we know that the purpose of God entering into our life is to do something for us that we couldn’t do on our own, and so the best way to describe that is he’s come to free us from that which enslaves us. Lies enslave us. Patterns of behavior in humanity, in our lower nature enslave us, and enslaving is somehow being caught in a selfish state that is static and focused only on self. And we think the more we satisfy this self, the happier we’ll be, and that’s not what we’re made for. We’re made for so much more, and he knows that. So we have this story of freedom that is sought for us by God, and what it requires from us is trust and fidelity. And if you just take this group of people, Old Testament people, and let’s say they’re part of the first Adam, they never could do it. They could never, ever be faithful. They tried and tried and tried, and the only thing God could do is lighten the requirement over and over and over again until at the end he said, “All right. You’re never going to follow my rules and laws, so I’ve got to do something mysterious that will put the laws and rules in your heart. And you won’t be needing to be told. You’ll know what to do.” Well, how’s he going to accomplish that? With a new Adam, the second Adam. That’s what Jesus is called in the scriptures, the new Adam, and what’s different? How is the new Adam different than the old Adam? I can’t imagine how to describe in words the change, but we’re going to learn something about what the effects of the change are when we see the devil doing his work, as he always does, trying to convince people that the most important person in the world is themselves and that they’ve got to follow that lower human nature and take care of themselves, because that’s survival. Get something for you. It’s even amazing to me that, when God was working with people as they were, he set up a religion that, in a way, kind of promised that. “Do the rules. Do the laws, and you will get what you want. I will bless you. If you don’t do what you’re told, you’ll be diseased, and you’ll lose your family. You’ll get leprosy.” It was a kind of prosperity story. Do what you’re told, and you’ll get what you want. And that’s about as far as he could take the old Adam. So now we have a new one. His name is Jesus, and what do we know about him? Well, we know one thing. He’s not just an ordinary human being, but he’s also a God. But it’s not that he wanted to be treated like a God. He wanted to be treated like a human being, but what we know is, when he was baptized, God entered into him. And as soon as God entered into him, along comes the devil to test him, but for us, it is a beautiful story about what potential we now have because of what Jesus represents, and that is a redeemed human being. What’s a redeemed human being? A person filled with divinity. It never existed there before. All the old Adams were never able or capable of becoming what God wanted them to be.

One of the ways to understand what redemption is, it’s an influx, an overflowing amount of light and truth and grace that comes into people so that they begin to know what they’re really meant for. They know their destiny, and their destiny is to become like the God that created them. That’s what God so loves and is excited watching, a creation that has free will becoming exactly what God longs for it to be, and it’s not done on their own. That’s the big lesson of the Old Testament. “They can’t do it, so I’ll enter into them. I’ll be one with them. I’m in this figure Jesus.” The devil knew that he had this new power, so he tested him on it. See how selfless he is. So he’s just been 40 days without food. He’s hungry, so any human nature that is hungry, that hungry would do anything to have something to eat, and so he says to Jesus, “Now, look. You have power. I know you have more power than any human being’s ever had. So go ahead and make some bread and have a nice, wonderful hot bread with butter and jam and honey. And put your feet up and say, ‘Well done. I did a good job not eating for 40 days.’” And the shock to the devil, maybe the fear in the devil, is that Jesus didn’t sound like the first Adam. He said, “You know I’m here not to take care of myself and just feed my physical needs. I’m really here because I want one thing. My new life in me, this God in me is drawing me to something, and it’s so beautiful, because all he wants me to see, and he wants to show it to me, is the truth. And you know what he’s saying to me? Yeah, bread’s important. It nourishes people but,” Jesus said, “You know what I’m thinking I’m going to do? I’m going to be bread. I’m going to be the bread for people. I’m going to feed them, give them life. I’m the bread of life.” And the devil tries another angle. “Well, human beings love the wonderful world they were promised in the Old Testament, everything going great. Made your crops, made your farm — everything was successful when they did the law. I know you want that. So I’ll give you all that. It’s my world, that world. I’ll give it all to you if you just trust me over that other voice inside of you.” Jesus said, “Oh, no. I don’t worship you. I know you. I see you. I’ve figured you out. I only worship the God who can bring me life, real life, peace, wholeness.” The last temptation, “Okay, you’re strong, and you’re going to give yourself away. And you’re going to somehow not buy into the things that I’ve always been able to talk people into wanting more than anything else. So what do you think? God’s going to get you through this without you being destroyed? You can’t get up there and say all this. The church won’t like it. Anybody that’s going to go against what everybody’s known forever is going to be in trouble, so he’ll probably — how do you know he’s going to take care of you?” Most interesting response, “He will. He will. No matter how bad it goes, he’ll be there for me.” And what an incredible statement to make when you see how he died, a failure in the eyes of the world, didn’t accomplish what he wanted. As a human being, he had to feel that it didn’t go that well, and he accepted that, even though it looked like it would destroy him. And when he accepted it, he exploded into this awesome creature that came back and did all the work that he longed to do. There’s a mystery in that that you and I have to figure out and learn during this Lenten season.

God, your power within us is beyond what we can imagine, and one of the gifts you give us is a heart open to receiving a truth that the mind has a really hard time comprehending. Open our hearts during this season. Fill us with the faith that is our inheritance and understanding of the gifts you are to us so we’ll stop this craziness of feeling that every time we fail you turn your back, which is not who you are but what we’ve been told you are by those who long for us to do better. But separating us from you is the most dangerous thing that anyone can do, and free us from the thought that our faults do that. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Sirach 27:4-7 | 1 Corinthians 15:54-58 | Luke 6:39-45

Grant us, oh Lord, we pray, that the course of our world may be directed by your peaceful rule, that your church may rejoice untroubled in her devotion. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

It’s rare to find somebody to talk to who thinks the world is just in this wonderful place, and everything is exactly as it should be, and we should all be just thankful for everything going on. There’s a little truth in that, but still it means that we have to look at the world when it’s out of balance and recognize it and learn from it. We’re beings that evolve. We change, and the whole nature of human beings evolving and changing has to do with seeing things for what they are, realizing that they could be dangerous, destructive. And so we have to figure out a way to change who we are in order to adapt to this new danger. It’s the way human beings have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years. It would usually be something as simple as the weather changed dramatically, and they’d have to figure out a way to live in a world where they needed fire, where before they didn’t, something like that. It’s just an amazing process, and it’s important to know that we are not finished with our evolution. I used to think, “We’re so sophisticated, so smart. We can do so much. We’ve just reached the pinnacle of what it means to be a human.” But the pinnacle of being a human is not in its mind and it’s able to create things and do things, but the pinnacle of a human being is their spiritual growth — their spiritual growth, their wisdom, their understanding of why we’re here, who we are, who God is. Those are the ultimate questions. Yes, it’s great we can invent something that solves a problem. That’s part of our evolutionary process, but we need to be changed in order to meet the problems of the world, and that’s where we count on our faith in God, because God is the one who is not necessarily the one who will come and fix everything. No, he likes us to learn how to take care of ourselves in this world. So he empowers you and me to face the crisis, to face the situation.

Look at the first reading from Sirach. It’s about wisdom. He uses three images. A sieve is like a strainer, where you shake it, and the grain of wheat that is nourishing falls to the ground; the husk remains in the strainer. Also we know that, when a man does pottery, he places the pottery in a kiln, and if it’s not really done well, you go to get it out, and it’s broken. So you can test someone’s ability to make good pottery as it endures the furnace, and then when someone speaks, it’s not the words that work. It’s their understanding of the words and their intention with why their speaking, so integrity of who we are. When we say what we say, we mean it. When we teach something that we believe in, it’s not because we’re told to teach it. It’s because we do truly believe it. We’ve been tested as to whether or not we really believe it, and it’s made stronger in our hearts. And then we’ve been actually able to get rid of the stuff that isn’t really nourishing, the husks, and we go right for the wheat and nourishment. It’s an image of how we evolve into nurturing creatures, not just talking creatures, not just doing creatures but creatures that have virtue, and virtue is a power given to a human from a higher power, divine, where they’re able to see and to accomplish things that they could never see or accomplish on their own. And that’s an inner transformation. That’s not being told what to do. You’re changed so you will do the thing, and when you have that change in you and you speak, your very speech carries the virtue, and the virtue is given to a new heart. It’s why some people can talk to you, and it’s just like words, words, words. Other people talk to you, and you are changed, changed, changed. It’s all about the intention of the heart of the one speaking.

So we seem to be living in a world where talk is cheap. All you have to say is, “I never did anything like that. I deny those accusations.” And no matter how hard we try to prove to the world that this kind of behavior is negative and destructive, the person who causes it looks at you and says, “I didn’t do anything wrong.” So if you don’t want to see the truth that is being exposed by the lies that are being told, you’ll never change, and people do that today. “I believe what the man said. I don’t believe that he would ever do those horrible things. Those are all fake accusations.” Are they? How do you know they’re fake? How do you know what’s true? How do you know what’s true from what’s false? Well, it’s an amazing, amazing thing, amazing process, and I’m calling it evolution, but we can also call it grace, unmerited love, God giving us something.

I don't know where you are in this continuum of evolution, but the one way to look at it is you’ll see in salvation history two epics, two times, so to speak. One is a time when God entered into the world and wanted people to know one single truth. “I am the only God. There’s no other God.” That’s the work of the Old Testament, monotheism. In the meantime, while you’re learning that God is the only God, you’re seeing him work like the other gods work. It’s the way he decided to reveal himself. He didn’t come in and reveal himself as he did in Jesus at the very beginning, because nobody would have comprehended it. They weren’t evolved far enough to even comprehend the notion of mercy, understanding, compassion. What? That made no sense, because one of the major evolutionary points the human race has come through is the one where we move from a self-centered existence, where it’s all about survival, it’s all about me, and you cross this incredible threshold, and then it’s all about others. It’s all about what’s true. It’s about virtue, helping people. I’d like you to think that that moment, that liminal moment between those two worlds is what we’re celebrating when the fullness of Christ’s message comes to us through Jesus. It’s an amazing message of hope and trust and goodness and life, and do you know that that message, when it was heard by those who were living in the Old Testament, a place of the law, not mercy, they were so frightened by it, because it so threatened their entire system of controlling people with the law that they had to kill him. They had to destroy him, but he implanted this image of a new way of being in the world in the hearts of his disciples. And they became apostles, which are the ones sent out, and they started teaching it to people. There was a small group of people evolved enough to receive that message, and they took it in, and it changed their lives, and they began to take care of people. They actually took care of people that were sick. They actually seemed to care for sinners, because everyone at that time, in people’s imaginations, that were sick or crazy or diseased of some kind, that was all God. God punishes people who don’t keep the law.

It’s interesting. Paul is talking about the law, and he says death is a thing we worry about if you live in that first part of evolution, me losing me, me not being served, me not being taken care of. That is the greatest fear. So more than anything else, you want to protect yourself, and Jesus is trying to say something quite different. And here’s Paul, one of his apostles that he taught, and Paul is saying, “Look, that system of the law is so dangerous. It’s so frightening. Watch out for it, because what it is, is the real power of that old system, the real power is in the law, and the law is what controls you.” And Jesus came into the world not to destroy it but to change our understanding of the law. It’s not a written rule by someone in authority making you do something that you don’t really want to do. That’s the way the law was presented in the Old Testament. Everybody wants to do the wrong thing, but here’s God saying, “You must do the right thing, and if you don’t do the right thing, I will kill you. I will destroy you.” So the real sting that’s in this thing called death is an understanding of death where it ends up being the place where you’re judged as to whether or not you’re worthy or not, and the sting is this sort of poisonous fear that I won’t make it, that if I don’t perform better, if I don’t give my will over to another authority greater than myself, if I don’t do that, I’m going to die. And where does the law get all that kind of power? Where does it come from? Basically it comes from the fact that the law, if you don’t keep it, will destroy you. That’s the power of it, death, the fear of death.

Jesus comes and says, “That’s important for people who have low levels of consciousness, but I want to say something completely new, because I’m looking at the people that have lived in this world of law, the Pharisees, the scribes.” He said, “I look at them. I see my people burdened with all these rules and laws. I see these men so blinded to what they’re doing.” Because they’re blind to what is happening, they end up imprisoning their role as spiritual leaders. It’s all imprisoned in this self-centered system of control. So Jesus said, “We’ve got to change that. We’ve got to completely change it,” because of one thing, blind people. The law has blinded the Pharisees and the scribes who are religious leaders, because the law doesn’t change your heart. The law just makes your will function a certain way, because the brain is afraid to die. That’s all he saw, and he said, “What happens is then you stay in your corruption. You won’t look at what’s going on. You won’t say there’s something unjust about a system that won’t help people. You don’t say there’s something wrong with a system that divides people into classes and makes some more worthy than others. That’s just the way it is.” The beam in the eye of a person who’s living solely under the law is one that keeps them from seeing what they’re actually doing, because they’re not breaking the law. Everything is fine. It also has this insidious way of making the person who’s blinded so irrationally critical of anyone that breaks the law. Isn’t that interesting? If you live by a law of, let’s say, you have to do things correctly, when somebody isn’t, you’re not concerned about them and want them to change because the law will help them be a better person. No, you’re so blinded by the addiction to controlling people that you condemn them unmercifully, and that’s what the church had become, a church without a heart, a religion that was so caught in a way of controlling under-evolved people, and it had to be that way. It had to be. We still have laws for that kind of thing. We can’t live without law, but what’s in its place? Mercy, forgiveness, compassion, understanding. Remove the beam in your eye, control, law, punishment, because your sin of not seeing is a zillion times more deadly than the people you have put the same blindness in their eyes. You haven’t blocked their vision. They’re not completely blind, but you can’t help them. You can’t free them, and what is it they’re supposed to do? Become the people that God intended them to be to allow discernment and testing, all of that. Open their eyes so they can see what the world is really about and how it changes. Why couldn’t they do that? This is important for me to say. Because they didn’t know how. They really didn’t.

It’s when Jesus is on the cross, I think. He said, “Look, they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re rejecting the very thing they long for more than anything else. They don’t know.” And so he took the curse of the condemning law on his head and let it do its work, and then he burst forth in the most amazing, new life. He endured it. He’s telling people, “Now is the chance I have to teach you what you need to do, what you need to have in order to endure it, to endure the insanity of the law, the destruction of it, the sting of it and enter into a new world.” And the world is the world of Jesus coming into the world and not telling people what to do but offering something that you can’t describe, but I know it happened, because look at the fruitfulness of the world today compared to back then. It’s called redemption. “I’ll free you from your blindness. I’ll open your eyes so you can see, and the person in you that’s been imprisoned in this horrible place of control, power. I’ll break you out of that, and I will do this for you, because I know you’re ready for it now. You’re ready. You can receive this, and you know what? All that burden of doing what you don’t want to do, the burden of worrying about whether you’re going to be punished or kicked out or fired or divorced, I’m going to take all that burden off of you and give you a heart that is alive and full of the thing called compassion and understanding that overrides the heart, that loves the law, loves knowing what needs to be done and can control it without any support of anyone else.” But mercy, compassion, understanding, the only way that’s there in us is when God dwells in our hearts, and that’s the miracle of redemption.

Father, we ask you to help us to understand more fully the ministry of your Son who revealed who you are, what your intention is and how you invite us to partner with you to do this work and has revealed to us the way in which this kind of work is so satisfying, so life-giving that, once we see it, once we experience it, we cannot not do it. Virtue is your gift of grace, and that virtue is the ability to not just speak the truth but to convince people of the truth, not to inform them but to transform them. So we give you praise and thanks for this great gift, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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1 Samuel 26:2, 7-9, 12-13, 22-23 | 1 Corinthians 15:45-49 | Luke 6:27-38

Grant, we pray, almighty God, that always pondering spiritual things, we may carry out in both word and deed that which is pleasing to you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

There’s something really profound about these readings. At least they’ve touched me very deeply, and I pray I can open your heart to what they’re really trying to say, because it seems, in many ways, what these readings are saying to me goes against what I learned as a child growing up in the Catholic community and the religious life that my parents — I inherited from my parents. And I love the church. I’ve given my life to serve it, but she’s not always correct. She’s not always perfect, and we certainly know that today more than other times in history. And that doesn’t weaken my belief or my love for the church in the least, because the one I fall in love with, the one I am called to invite you to fall in love with and have a deep personal relationship is not the church but God. The church is a means to find that, and the biggest responsibility the church has is to speak the truth. And one of the problems about truth, when it comes to religion, is it’s not really about facts, about information or knowledge. It’s about mystery.

So how does an institution dedicated to putting people in touch with what is true stay focused on that which is mysterious? Because it tends, as do all human beings, when it comes to dealing with mystery, to explain it, and if our mind can understand it and we say, “Okay, now I guess I understand,” what we really need to develop — and this is why we live on this earth, is we need to develop and grow in our ability to deal with mystery. And the part of us that needs to grow in order for that mystery to be held and believed in and submitted to is not our brains but our hearts. We don’t always realize that there’s two centers in our very body that we turn to for direction. One is the brain, logic, reasoning, absolutely essential. The other is the heart, which has to do with emotion, love and mystery. As the mind hungers for more and more facts, so does the heart long for more and more depth into these things we call mystery.

Now, the first reading we have here is about a man who has an enemy, and he’s going to destroy him, because that what you do. Back then, in the old times, you were in a conflict, and the only way to solve it was to overcome a power or destroy the enemy. And so we see this enemy being presented to the one who is trying to conquer them, and it’s almost too sweet. Walk into the very camp where they — the enemy is there, and everybody’s asleep, and they don’t notice these people. And sitting right next to the enemy is a sword, and so Saul’s helper said, “I can take one, big, swift thrust of this sword, and the enemy’s gone.” And Saul says, “No, don’t kill him. Don’t. Take his sword and his cup, and we’ll leave. They’ll know that we were here, and he was so vulnerable and so easy to kill, but we didn’t. And see what that does to him.” And so they take everything, and they wait for those particularly who would be in charge of taking care of that king. They would be absolutely ashamed — a radical change in the way to deal with an enemy, and then we have in the gospel this incredible story of Jesus talking about a way of life that must have been just absolutely ludicrous to people. He was talking about a way of life that was so against who they were in their nature. Somebody steals something, and you should call them up and say, “You missed a few things. Come back and get them.” Somebody that owes you money, you look at them and say, “Oh, listen, I don’t need that money back. You just keep it.” Yet there’s some part of our nature, even though that would seem so outlandishly crazy, if it happened to us, we would say, “Oh, wow, that was great. Interesting.” We have a great sense of justice and demand it of others, but at the same time, if we were left off the hook, we would love it.

So what’s Jesus saying? He’s trying to open their eyes to something that has been going on since the creation of the world, and that’s the evolution of the creation that God has made. And when God created the world, there was a force, a grace. It was given to the world so we continue to move in a direction toward perfection, toward wholeness. Amazing. It’s why the story in Genesis of creation is so important to interpret correctly, and most of us don’t realize there are two stories. In fact, the story we use mostly in liturgy of the word and when we teach is part of — it’s taken from one story of creation, the other from the second story of creation. The first story of creation is pretty simple. It means that God created the world in six 24-hour periods. On the sixth day, he created humans, and then he rested. And he created the world by just his word. He just said it. “Let there be unions. Let there be a man and a woman.” Poof, there they were. Amazing. That’s the story. The second story, God creates the world in one day. He creates the world. Then it doesn’t have plants or animals or insects or anything like that, but the next thing he does, he creates a man, just a man, not a woman, just a man. And he doesn’t do it by just word, but he molds it out of the earth and clay and makes water and then turns it into a human being when he breathes his Spirit into it. So he’s like a sculptor, and then he breathes life into it. And then he creates the world that this man is going to be taking care of, so we get trees and water and plants and insects and animals. And when he created the animals, he brought them to Adam and said, “I created all this for you. This is your world. It’s going to be so comforting. You’re going to have all this, and you’ll be in charge of it.” Then somehow he realized that, “Wait a minute. I think he needs a partner.” So he creates a partner. He doesn’t create it out of a word, but he makes it out of a part of the man, out of the rib and then said, “Here. What do you think of this?” And he said, “Ah, at last.” And I think this is such an interesting, kind of selfish thing. It makes so much sense about our human nature. “Yeah, it’s perfect, because it’s just like me. It’s bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. At last I have me to be with. It’s great.” Okay, that’s the story.

The thing that strikes me so powerfully is the second reading. Paul is talking about creation, and he’s talking about there’s two Adams. There’s Adam, the first man, and there’s Adam, the man who saves the world, Christ. One is of the earth, and one is of Spirit. One is human, and one is divine. And we know that the whole salvation history story is about these two Adams. One is at the beginning; one is at the end. The thing about the story in the beginning that is so dangerous is that, when I was told as a child, I had the feeling that God, since he created human beings out of just a word, poof, they were not creatures like any other creatures. They weren’t connected to animals, but yet science tells us, and the church certainly approves this teaching, that God did create the world. Yes, something created it, and we believe — scripture says God created it, but God created it — did not necessarily create it in seven days or one day. And what seems more even appealing to me is that, when we believe that God created the world from the very beginning to evolve on its own toward where it is — by on its own, I mean God is moving it constantly to evolve to become more like the creator that made it. So everything is moving toward perfection, but I got the idea that Adam and Eve were perfect when they were born. They didn’t have any animal instincts in them. They were these little, happy, naked creatures, perfect, beautiful, and so the idea that they sinned seemed so horrendous, because they didn’t have any bad instincts. They were created perfect. God gave them a beautiful garden, and then from somewhere they get this idea, since God gave them a law, which by the way is the only way sin can exist — you have to have a law first. So sin then is revealed as a part of human beings, and the reaction I get, from the way I was told the story went, was God was so upset, so furious at these perfect creatures he made, and they’d reverted to something unnatural for them, and they just rejected God, and he was furious, he kicked them out. He said, “Go beyond me. I don’t want to have anything to do with you. Leave now.”

Well, that’s not the story. They made a mistake. They chose something that was very core to their human nature. They were not created innocent, perfect. They were created from animals that had an instinct inside of them. It was terribly self-centered. That’s where we came from, and God pours life into us, and we begin a process of moving out of that animal-like creature into a spiritual creature. That’s what we’re here on this earth to do. It’s a wonderful process, but what I always thought was, whenever I sinned, I always lost the favor of God instead of God being there to help me through this process of evolving into the person that he ultimately wanted me to be. And when I sinned, I felt it was my fault, and now I’m beginning to realize, look, it’s not our fault that we sinned. That’s how we were made. We have a sinful core to us. By sin I mean it’s just basically self-centered. The most basic instinct of an animal is self-preservation, and then it needs to mate, so it needs a partner. And so there’s relationships that it needs, and then it needs a group to work with, a community. But in our need for safety and our need for relationships and our need to live in a culture that is safe, those are all things that can be done out of the most selfish motives, and it’s that that God is calling us out of. And it’s there by nature, so when I sin, I’m sort of falling back into who I really am without grace, without evolution of the plan that God has for me. I look back at my life, and I can say, over and over again, “My God. How did I ever — why — what was I thinking when I did that?” Well, I was thinking about the way I thought as a human. I wasn’t doing this on purpose to offend God, and God didn’t take it as offensive. He never takes our sins as a personal offense, but I thought he did.

The most interesting thing about that story from scripture is God didn’t kick these people out. He said, “Yes, you can go.” What did he do before they left? He sewed clothes together for them, and that’s one sentence the church doesn’t use in its liturgy of the word, which was the only way we ever heard scripture back then. Imagine. No, he wasn’t angry. He was excited. He wanted us to go and grow and become who we are and work with this lower nature. So one of the things we need to do — someone gave me this advice when I was very young. Learn about human nature, and learn about God’s nature. If you know them both and you know that they’re made for each other, ultimately you will be successful on this planet. Human beings are naturally selfish. We’re infused with a grace called love, and once we have that love and we move out of self into others, then we grow in our ability, first to have compassion, empathy. Then we care for not only what people are going through, but we want to do something to take their pain away. We’ll give ourselves to a work, and we’ll develop the work. Then we’ll give the gift away. That’s the evolution that we’re going for, and we can reach that high level and still, all of a sudden, one minute, we flip back, and we’re down into the lowest level of self-destruction. That’s not our fault. It’s our nature. We fall back. We remember just how much we long for God’s grace and his forgiveness, because it leads us back to the place we were ultimately made to be.

Your goodness is beyond our understanding unless we really understand who we are and who you are. It is your nature to forgive, to give generously to those who harm you and disappoint you. That’s who you are, and we are in such need of a God like that, and we need to believe in you, because it’s the best hope we have for our transformation from the lower forms of our humanity evolving into higher consciousness of seeing that we really are like you ultimately. As you love us, forgive us, we will do the same for others, not because we’re told to, not because we have to, not because of the reward we’ll get, because that’s who we are. And we ask this prayer in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Jeremiah 17:5-8 | 1 Corinthians 15:12, 16-20 | Luke 6:17, 20-26

Oh God, who teach us that you abide in hearts that are just and true, grant that we may be so fashioned by your grace to become a dwelling pleasing to you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

A reading from the Old Testament, from the book of the prophet Jeremiah, 17thchapter, fifth through the eighth verse: “Thus says the Lord, cursed is the one who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the Lord. He’s like a barren bush in the desert that enjoys no change of season but stands in a lava waste of salt and empty earth. Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose hope is in the Lord. He is like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the streams. It fears not the heat when it comes. Its leaves stay green. In the year of drought, it shows no distress but still bears fruit.” The Word of the Lord.

One of the most interesting things about this work that I share with you is that I’m telling the story, over and over again, through the eyes of three major witnesses, Matthew, Mark and Luke, and we follow, chronologically, in the readings as the story was unfolding. So we’ve come to the point now where we know that Jesus is the one who’s come. We know that his calling, his desire, his longing is to open the eyes of people that are blind to get them out of a place of imprisonment where they can’t truly experience their life, and he wants to free them from an image of the world or life that’s so burdensome. So he’s called disciples, and now he’s got a group of people together, and he wants to say something about his role, his work, his wisdom. So let’s see if we can understand it as fully as we can.

The first question I want to pose to you is what do you imagine this world is for. What’s it about? We are told in the second reading, by St. Paul, that it is clear that this world was never intended to be the thing that we are destined for. It is an anteroom. It is something that takes place in time. It is something that is short, and so how we imagine what this is about is absolutely crucial for our participation in it, for our engaging in what it’s for. And so we need to examine that very issue. What are we on this planet for? First thing we know, if we look at Paul, he says, “For goodness sakes, don’t think this is it. Don’t think this is what God has created you for. This is short, but it has a very, very crucial role in your existence.”

Now, from my background as a Catholic, I grew up thinking about the things that the church asked me to ponder, and one was that I was somehow infected by Adam and Eve, by this horrible thing called sin. And my task was not to do it, not to ever fall into sin, and if I could not sin, then I would please God, and then at the end of life here, a test of whether or not I would turn away from sin, if I passed, I would get eternal life. It would be a reward. It was so clear to me that that’s exactly what I was taught. Some of the shadow teaching in that that was really dangerous was that every time I sinned, I damaged my relationship with God by inflicting pain on Jesus. Where that came from I’m not sure, but it sure was effective in motivating me to stop sinning. But here’s the thing: what if perfection, what if not sinning is the furthest thing from God’s plan? Yet, if we look at the Old Testament, it seems to be that is the issue. You are given, by God, his favor, his promise to be with you, with you as a people, if you did everything that he told you to do. Well, that was the way it began, and I would love to think that we are born into this world, and we don’t come in as Adam and Eve, which we actually do. I’d like us to come in as the disciples who were filled with the Holy Spirit. That’d be a great place to start. No, we all have to relive salvation history. We come in innocent, and something grows inside of us. That story from Genesis is so essential to understand our nature.

We come into the world, and what do we want? We don’t want everything to be just perfect for us, a beautiful garden, no disease, no sin, no problems. No, we’re made for something more. We want a task. We want something to do, and so in this beginning of consciousness, awareness of who we are, a lie appears. It comes in the form of somehow lower nature, animal nature, and it says, “What I really want to do is you tell me what I need to do. I will do it, and I will win your favor. I will achieve what I set out to do, and will do it on my own. I don’t need help.” Somehow we come into the world with that, and what God is saying is, “Well, that is a normal way humans think,” because we’re evolving from lower forms. But we have the potential to evolve to something more, higher consciousness. What do I mean by consciousness? It’s an awareness of the truth of what is without having any proof outside yourself, without having any way to prove it. You just know it’s right. It’s a knowing consciousness, and what you can see the human race growing in is it moves closer and closer to the fullness of revelation that comes in the life of Jesus. We begin to sense something, especially in the teaching of Jesus. The most important thing he said right away, off the top was, “Look, every time you sin, you are not separating yourself from me in a sense that I’m turning my back on you. No, it’s the opposite. I’m drawn to you. I’m like a doctor, and the only reaction I have to your faults is forgiveness. So don’t focus on faults.” No. Well then, we don’t have to do anything. We just sit around and go to heaven. No. We do have a task. What is it?

Well, Jeremiah talks about one part of it. We have to realize that we cannot do the thing we’re called to do here on our own. A man who trusts in himself, trusts in his own strength, trusts in his own mind to figure things out is really a sad, sad individual. They’re like a tree that has no water, no nourishment, no fruitfulness. Okay, so number one, we’re not on our own. Number two, we have to realize that this life here is not all there is. Okay, got that. That’s from Paul, but what is Jesus saying? He’s saying something that is dangerous, because I know of many people that have read this — I think I’ve heard homilies on it, and it goes something like this. I’ve seen it more in action when somebody is going through a tough time. Somebody in the crowd, if you’re all believers in the same religion, would say, “Oh, that person is going to have such a wonderful place in heaven. Their life is a disaster. They’ve lost everything. How blessed they are.” What it seems to be saying is that those who have a horrible life, those who are broken and empty and terrible things happen, that they’re the blessed ones, and the cursed ones are the things that we want. We want to be full. We want to be happy. We want to be loved. We want to experience joy. Well, those people are cursed. What? What? It doesn’t make any sense. It only does if you understand this one truth that is hidden in this story. The reason we’re here is not to be happy, to be perfect, to have everything flow in the way we want it to, to be free of sin, to be perfect. No, we’re here not for perfection but for something else much more exciting, much more challenging, and that is called awareness, consciousness. That’s what we’re here for, to grow in our understanding of what’s real, what’s true, what this life is for, who God is and who we are. And how are you going to find it? The danger is we would go through this life thinking, “All right, if I have basically an easy life — I have enough money. I have enough food. I have some friends. I have shelter. What else do I need? Nothing. There’s nothing else to do but sit back and, I don't know, pop a beer and watch a game. It’s all done.” That’s a curse, but God has intentionally set things up in our life where we will go through times of enormous hunger, knowing whatever it is we have, we want more, something more. Whenever we think that people are against us and it frightens us and we don’t know who we are, we’re not sure if we’re being who we should be, because it’s not being accepted, all those questions and problems are the gift of what? Going deeper, trying to figure out what’s really happening. What is happening in this world?

Some are called to do incredible work in this area, Jesus being one. The thing I find so fascinating about his death is not so much that sometimes the church will tell us, and I don’t know how to understand it, but the reason Jesus died on the cross was because God was so angry and upset by our imperfection, which he created, by the way, in us. He was so upset, when we would give into it, and angry, that he needed a sacrifice, and the only sacrifice he could think that would be worthy would be to take the quintessential perfect human being and sacrifice them. Make their life miserable and destroy them, and he’d be satisfied. Oh, thank God. Something wonderful has been sacrificed for this. It doesn’t make sense. So how does Jesus’ death make sense? Well, he was gifted. He had everything. God was in him. He knew God was in him, and he had a sense of that. He had wisdom beyond his ability as a human being. He grew slowly over 30 years into the wisdom of this. When it came time to realize what he had, he began his work, and the thing that was so spectacular about his work was it wasn’t just what he said, but it was his very presence, something — this divinity that was living inside of him, as he promises it’s inside of us, has the capacity to work through us without us having to be perfect or having to be the perfect one. But you say, “Well, no, Jesus was perfect.” Well, was he? Did he sin? No, I guess not, because he never lost faith or trust, desire to do the right thing, but he was human. He had failings. He had faults. When asked to do something that was very painful, he said, “No, no, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to die on the cross. I don’t want my ministry to end in a disaster where I look so like a failure, like a phony.” Why would Jesus be asked by God to give in to something that would be more in the category of that second half of those that are blessed, when life goes awful, when it’s terrible, when it’s a disaster, when you’re destroyed? Why would he say that is a blessing? It somehow has to do with the consciousness, which gives us the power to accept things that we can’t understand and know they’re true, and somehow, the way in which these things unfold, they reveal something to us that’s essential for all of us.

The pain of Jesus’ death was not the cross or the whipping or the scourging. The pain was he had to face the fact that his destiny, instead of ending up at the end of a long life being honored and loved and supported and seeing the world around him change, all the success he wanted, instead of that, he had to accept, as his part of this side of the world that God has created for us, he had to accept failure, not just a small failure but a disaster, that for those who are following him, he had to know, as a human being, the majority of them would write him off as another one of those nuts that was always claiming to be a Messiah. They’ll forget about the miracles and say they really didn’t happen, just like the leaders of the church said, “You can’t heal the blind man.” So they always consistently said it didn’t happen, and yet there was the person saying, “I can see,” the parents saying, “I can see.” They said it didn’t happen. The power of denial, refusal of this incredible, awesome promise of God living inside of human beings, accomplishing work so far beyond what they can do — that’s our destiny, but what would we do if that destiny made us the hero that we sometimes want to be, the great one, the perfect one, the one everybody loves? It’d be a disaster in a sense. We’d be so full of ourselves.

So maybe there’s a way in which God continues to put us in situations where we’re being tested, not in a sense to say, “If you can pass this test, I’ll love you.” No, tested in the sense that we test what we know, and if it isn’t fully yet what it should be, I’ll look for it. I will seek it. I’ll ask for it, seek it and find it. That’s the reason we’re here, to do that work of seeking and understanding and finding the truth. What a wonderful experience we have together doing this. We don’t do it alone, without God. We don’t do it alone, without the people around us. So we look at life, and we say, “Well, look, here’s a champion over here, somebody who really —” In that group of human beings who lived at that time, he was a shining light, and there was a bunch of people there in that group that were just awful, just terrible, mass murderers, people with no conscience. Well, if we’re all interconnected, what if it takes just a couple of champions to lift up all the rest? Maybe that’s the thing we need to be aware of? We’re saved not by our works, not by what we do, but by this gift of God’s promise. “I will take care of you. I will feed you. I will nurture you, and for what you lack, I will give to somebody else, and somebody else’s strength will give you wisdom and strength and lift you up.” So it’s not that everybody has to do the same thing. We’re all in a community of people. It’s like being on a team, and there’s two or three people that score all the points. But the rest of us are there working hard. Some of us sit on the bench our whole life. It doesn’t mean we’re not part of the team. It doesn’t mean that we’re not a champion, that we win. It’s amazing. What a tragedy it is that I was never taught, and you were perhaps not taught, the essence of why we’re here, not to strive for perfection but for truth.

Father, your grace is everything. It’s your insights. It’s your presence. It’s your power. It’s your love living within us, guiding us through a time of confusion, to a time of clarity, from doubt and lies to faith and truth. Bless our journey. Most especially, continue to guide us as you’ve promised. Make us open to this guidance and receptive, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Isaiah 6:1-2a, 3-8 | 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 | Luke 5:1-11

Keep your family safe, oh, Lord, with unfailing care, that relying solely on the hope of heavenly grace they may be defended always through your protection. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that today more than ever we are aware of people in places of authority that lie to us. It’s everywhere, and it so shakes us, because we often give people in positions of authority a kind of openness. They’re the ones who should be telling the truth, so what they say, we would say we are supposed to believe because of their position. It’s very unsettling and very frightening when we can’t turn to those people and find the truth. So where do we find it? Where’s our source of truth? Well, certainly in many cases what we’re looking for is just the right facts. That’s easy. We can find those out, find out that what was said is not factual, and therefore it’s a lie, but there’s something more insidious about lies, how they can rob us of things, even destroy us.

I keep going back to what Jesus said he was coming into the world to do: open the eyes of the blind, release those in prison, unburden those that are stressed. Interesting. What’s imprisoned that he wants to free? Well, we have in our tradition the belief that God has created us in his likeness. We are like our God, and therefore our nature is made to be like God. Therefore our nature is to be the kind of loving, caring, forgiving source of life that God is, but if we’d been lied to — we’ve been told that we are basically sinners and that we have this terrible burden of our faults, and our task is to focus on our faults and change them. And if we just focus on self enough to say, “Well, I can clean my act up enough to get approval from the one who demands all of this of me, and then maybe I can make it to a better place afterwards.” It’s a lie. That’s not what God is about. It’s not what our nature is made for, self-improvement. No, it’s made for self-discovery, and what God is longing to do for you and for me is to free us from the bondage of a misconception of who we are and what we’re here for, because that kind of misconception, that lie that we’ve been told by our culture, our family, our religion robs us of who we really are, the true self that we are. The loving, forgiving, nurturing figure that we are is imprisoned, the true self, and when it’s imprisoned, it stays there, because we’re blind. We don’t even realize what’s happening, and the life that we are told is supposed to be the life God wants us to live here, of trying to always improve ourselves, forcing ourselves to do things we don’t want to is so stressful. It’s stressful, because it doesn’t bring what it promises. It just seems there’s more work and more things to do and more things to improve, and there’s never enough time, and we never get to where we think we should be. If that’s an image you have of your life, you have been lied to.

Listen to Isaiah who’s being called to be a prophet. The core thing of a prophet is what? What does a prophet do? He tells the truth, and so when he’s being asked to think about God needs prophets, he said, “Well, I can’t be a prophet, because I’m a man of unclean lips, and I live with a bunch of people with unclean lips. We’re all lying to each other. We don’t know what’s real.” And God says, “Well, I’m not surprised. Let me just take this ember off this altar and touch your lips,” an image of purification, “And I’ll purify you of your lies.” And when that was being done for Isaiah, when that was a gift, not that he had to understand everything, no, he was given some kind of power to see the truth, to speak the truth, and he said, “Yes, yes, send me. I would love to be the truth.” That’s in all of our natures. We’re all prophets in some way, called to be.

So we listen to Paul, and Paul is saying, “You know, I was caught in a lie. I believed with all my heart that Christians were wrong. They were going against God, because we saw them. They were caring for each other and disregarding our law. Well, they were wrong. They were somehow wrong, and so I had to destroy them. So I went about trying to destroy the people who were telling the truth, caring for each other, loving each other, nurturing each other. The most striking thing about Christians was the way they treated each other. Imagine leaving a system that said, “Anybody who was sick or anybody who’s in trouble, they’re being punished by God. You have no obligation. In fact, you shouldn’t try to help them. Take care of yourself.” What an interesting lie. It’s not unlike the way we are. We tend to think that we are the most important thing we’re here to take care of, and we do have responsibility to care for ourselves, but that’s just the beginning. You care for yourself. You find your true self. You find yourself in a way of life that isn’t stressful. You open your eyes, and you see what’s real. Then you have to become someone, and it’s the antithesis of someone who walks away from everyone who is hurting, broken, poor. So Paul realizes something happened to him, and he claims, “I didn’t figure this out, but somehow the grace of God entered into me. God came to me, opened my eyes to see what was going on, freed me from the prison of this lie I was in so I could find my true self, and all of a sudden, my life was not as stressful as it was. It was filled with hope, because somehow I knew I was given a gift. It wasn’t me. It isn’t from me. It’s called grace, and it came to me, not earned. In fact, I really didn’t deserve it, because I was doing the opposite of what God wanted.” What maybe Paul didn’t realize is, no, exactly the people who are in the lie is who God wants to reach. So he freed him from his lie, and he was so filled with energy that he claims, “I work harder than anybody.” I love that. “I’m the best one.” But then he goes on to say, “Not because I am the source of what I’m doing. No, because God is the source of what I’m doing, and I’ve been graced. It’s been given to me. I see the truth.”

So now we’re still in the period of time when we’re looking at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. So now we see Jesus doing something really interesting. Imagine with me that he knows that he is the one who’s come into the world to open people’s eyes, free them from a prison and release them from stress. That’s his intention. We slowly learn that he’s doing this by slowly revealing what is real, what is true. The great lie that’s still in the world — it’s in all of us — is a description of the world that doesn’t match reality. If you’ve been told by your culture, your society, whatever, that you are alone in this world, your job is to do everything you can to improve yourself, then to use those improvements to win favor, to get a job, to get money so you can take care of you and do the things you want, but you work in order to have some fun later — work is drudgery — if you think that’s what life is about, then you’re living in a lie. Jesus came to open our eyes to a world that was frightening to a lot of people. It’s a world that is filled with the unknown. It’s filled with divinity. It’s filled with angels. It’s filled with dead people. It’s speaking to us. It’s filled with this energy, this force, this power that’s swirling around us. When Jesus did some of his miracles and people saw his power, let’s say, over evil, when he told this young man that he wanted to free him from the devil, and the devil said, “I can’t leave this man. Send me somewhere,” he sent them into these pigs. And both the man and the pigs, when they were possessed, were completely self-destructive. Self-destructive, an illusion that destroys the true self. What were they afraid of? Afraid of a world that was so foreign to them and so powerful that they’d rather go to what they knew than to face something that they didn’t. They didn’t want to live in a world of grace and energy and spiritual forces. I feel uncomfortable there, but that’s our place, to be in a world that’s filled with mystery, with grace, with divinity, with all these powers helping one another in ways that are beyond our imagining. It’s a perfect ecosystem where these spiritual beings are there to give us everything we need to be to grow into spiritual beings. That’s the truth.

So what is Jesus doing? He wants to introduce this. So he’s walking along one day, and he thought, “Here’s a way I can do this.” He wants to give a speech, and it’s always better, if you give a talk and there’s a bunch of crowds, to keep them from crowding in on you, you go out a little bit from the water. Actually the water becomes a kind of amplifier for your voice, and so you sit in a boat, and you speak to the people in the crowd. It’s a perfect auditorium, and there he is, in this boat teaching, “The very thing I want you to understand is the truth, reality.” It’s so fascinating to me that — why didn’t we get the speech? Why didn’t we get it word-for-word of everything that Jesus gave in that talk? No, he doesn’t want us to believe that you go to scriptures to hear the voice of God solely, but he wants you to believe that the scriptures say the voice of God is coming to you 24/7. He lives inside of you. If he can’t reach you, he’s using his angels to reach you. He’s using the dead to reach you. He’s using circumstances in your life to reach you always with one thing, the truth of what is. And so he sits there, and he does it. He does his talk, and then he notices that those who had the boat were out there, and they were complaining. “We try. We’re stressed. We can’t get what we want.” And so he says, “Look, I will give you something that will enable you to do something way beyond what you could normally do. I’ll show you not only where the fish are, but I will give you the largest, most incredible group of fish you’ve ever seen.” And so what do they do? “Get away from me. I’m a sinful man.” What’s he saying when he said, “I’ll make you fishers of men”? They were catching fish, which is nourishment for human beings, and he’s saying, “I want you to catch men and teach them they’re nourishment for other human beings. They’re food, and I’ll eventually tell you that you also are going to bring drink to them, a cup of salvation. You’re going to feed them. You’re going to forgive them. You’re going to feed them. You’re going to forgive them. That’s the truth. That’s your destiny. That’s what we’re called for.”

Father, the truth you’ve called us to enter into, to accept and to believe with all our heart gives us enormous freedom from the stress of struggling to become someone that would please you when, in fact, all you ask is that we open our hearts to your presence and let you flow through us. Bless us with an understanding of grace, your presence within us, and let us be food and forgiveness to everyone everywhere, knowing that that’s our destiny, that’s our life, and that’s our joy. We ask this through Christ, our Lord, amen.

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Malachi 3:1-4 | Hebrews 2:14-18 | Luke 2:22-32 [33-40]

Almighty ever-living God, we humbly implore your majesty that, just as your Only Begotten Son was presented on this day in the Temple in the substance of our flesh, so, by your grace, we may be presented to you with minds made pure. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

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Nehemiah 8:2-4a, 5-6, 8-10 | 1 Corinthians 12:12-30 | Luke 1:1-4; 4:14-21

Almighty, everliving God, direct our actions according to your good pleasure that in the name of your Beloved Son we may abound in good works. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

St. Luke gives us a very interesting, clear picture of why we give such reverence to the gospels, particularly the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, because I think the intention that you hear in Luke, in this gospel, where it’s saying, “I want to put together, in a sequence that makes sense, a chronological sequence of the teachings of Jesus and how he revealed it over time so that you can really get a sense of what’s authentic in his teaching, what’s really there.” So after the council in the ‘60s, we took those words, in a way, to heart, and instead of just reading mostly from Matthew, as it was for centuries before that, we now read the full cycle. The first cycle is all of Matthew. The second one is all of Mark, and then the third cycle, that we’re in now, is all of Luke. And each one is different. Each one is a slightly different perspective.

And you know that Luke was a doctor, so it kind of makes sense. The image that he uses for the church is that of the body parts, something he’d be familiar with, but what is this part of the story? We’d heard already that he performed a miracle that was out of the sequence of time that he expected, but what he was saying through that miracle of changing water into wine is that there’s something new. Something new has come. It’s as different as water is from wine, and the wine is a symbol of the blood of Jesus that would ultimately be poured out for us so that it’s all about forgiveness. So right away it seems, as the stories are being put together by Luke, he knew this great teaching. Jesus opened our minds and our hearts to a dimension of God that was, in a sense, hidden in the Old Testament. It wasn’t yet revealed. It wasn’t that it wasn’t there in God. It was just that it wasn’t time yet to reveal it. What he’s revealing is an amazing disposition on the part of God, and that is his patience, his understanding, his compassion for those of us who break the law. His only response, he said, “That I’ve always had but haven’t been able to express it fully is I forgive you. I will not let your sins separate me from you, nor should it separate you from me.” One of the most devastating things about sins is not only that it’s something that is negative and affects the sinner and the one that’s sinned against, but it’s also something that tends to lead to separation, isolation. “I’m not who I should be. I’m ashamed. I’m not part of the body.”

So let’s go back to the first reading and see how this all fits into what I believe the church now, trying to amplify what’s in the gospel by choosing the other two readings, is trying to point out. So we start with Ezra, and Ezra is trying to explain to the people the beauty and the importance of the law. These are the laws that would tell people how they were supposed to act, so it rules their actions, and so when he’s describing this, the setting is pretty amazing. Ezra, the priest, is up high above in a position of authority. The people are laying flat on the ground, which is a symbol of humility, even the symbol of having to die to yourself in order to really follow the spirit of the law, but there they are, lying on the floor, on the ground. And as they listen to all the things they’re supposed to do, instead of saying, “Yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll do that. That’s great as long as I know I can do it,” no, I think they were very much aware of their limitation to follow the law. And so they’re just weeping, and one of the things that could make them sad is not just that they’re not going to be able to accomplish this, but also they knew that, if they didn’t accomplish it, they’d be excluded, separated from the community. Nothing is clearer in the Old Testament than that’s what’s happened with the law. The law, instead of being a very effective tool and getting everybody to do what they’re told, which somehow is not really the way to work with people, telling them what they must do, because when you tell them what to do and then you give them a law, the law can only do two things. It can tell the person that they’re not guilty. They didn’t do anything wrong. The law protects the innocent, but it can only condemn the guilty. That’s all it can do. Along with condemning the guilty, if you understand the way they thought about sin in the Old Testament, the way we still think about it in a certain way inside of us, when we sin, we’re not worthy of being a part of the community. And the community judges us and excludes us. In fact, it’s interesting. One of the symbols of sin in the Old Testament, the effect of breaking the law, I should say the affect of breaking the law, it would be simply this, you would be a leper, and a leper is someone who is contagious and will always be separated from the community, because they thought they were bad. That is a contagious disease, but it’s also a disease that distorts what you look like. It’s a very strange disease. If you have it, it will change your face so much that you’re not even recognizable as who you are. It’s like it destroys your identity, who you really are, perfect image of the way the law treats the sinner. So that’s the Old Testament.

Now, here is Jesus. He comes in to change that, and he said, “I’m not going to get rid of the law,” but one of the things that’s so clear, that shocked everybody, is his seemingly disregard for the rules and the laws. But that was just an effect of the thing that he was really doing. He was saying something about the law that we had to understand, and what he’s saying is there’s two ways to deal with the law. One is the letter of the law, and the other is the spirit of the law. And so he comes, and he says right away, in his hometown — he’s there, and he describes himself. “I’ve walked into this town, and what I’m filled with is the Spirit. I’m the anointed one, the Christ.” And what he’s saying is the Christ is the one who’s come to open your eyes, to free you from that which imprisons you and to take a burden off of you. So here’s the spirit of the law, the truth behind the law, the true reason for the law being reimagined by Jesus, and it was probably the one thing that was most difficult for people to grasp, because their whole society had been build on the law being the requirement to be a part of society. Society and church were the same thing practically, and so one of the things that’s really interesting about that is, when you look at the way in which laws operate, when they’re dealing just with your actions — and as I said, they can only judge your actions if you’re guilty, and if you’re guilty, you’re condemned. But what’s so interesting about that condemnation is you’re considered to be automatically less than everyone else. It had gotten so incredibly crazy in the Old Testament that anyone then who had a disease or was in trouble or was poor or didn’t have any kind of seemingly blessed life, they were definitely cut out of the community, but it was so intense the cutting out that no one in the community was ever encouraged to talk to the people that were out of the community to convert them or change them. They were just to stay away from them, because they were contagious. They would ruin the integrity of the community.

Think of that. It’s so frightening to me when you think of how that still lingers in us. When someone fails, when someone doesn’t do what they’re called to do, they’re automatically considered as less than, and we’re talking about an action they’re doing, not necessarily their intention. Sometimes their intention is way off, but there are so many people with an intention to do good that do wrong, and yet we treat them as if they are their intention. That’s another thing about the law. It can’t do anything other than expose it and condemn it. So Jesus brings the Spirit, and what does it do? It heals. It opens our eyes to see something that frees us from the prison of self-hate, self-distrust and the community’s hatred and distrust of us and lifts an enormous burden off our backs. “I’ve come to free those who are imprisoned, to open their eyes, to lift a burden off them.” The burden is the law, but the burden of the law is not in the nature of the law itself, but it’s in the way they used it, not as a motive to do what was right. Well, they did use it for that, but then a big shadow of that was they also used it as a way of excluding people and cutting them out. You say, “Well, how unfair.” Well then, look inside yourself, because what I think is so fascinating is the way we treat others is the way we treat ourselves. And if that image lingers in us, that when we sin, when we do something wrong, there’s something wrong with us, if we make that same problem the law makes as saying, “You are your actions,” then you’re going to feel something that automatically tends to give you a sense of separation.

Then you look at the beautiful image of the doctor who’s talking about every part of the body is essential, but the thing he didn’t say, that maybe he didn’t even realize it then, because we know it now in medicine, the body has an amazing capacity to heal itself. So if something’s bad in your body and immediately you cut it out with medication that masks its effects or you operate and take it out, that may be necessary in some way, but it’s not the plan of God. The way that beautiful metaphor is used, the body has the ability to heal the sinner. You, your essence has the ability to heal that in you that you feel makes you so less capable of being a part of what God wants. What a gift, to be freed from rejection, from judgment, and I guarantee you, whenever you’re feeling it working in your life against something that you feel you can’t get past or some dark secret you have, that if anybody knew it, they would hate you, until you get rid of that, you can never welcome your brother and sister back into the community.

Father, you know us so well, and your patience is beyond our wildest dreams. Somehow institutions and people that speak for you are not always as generous as you are, and so help us to hear your voice always over all other voices, your truth. And your truth is sin is not the obstacle we have made it into. It is simply part of the process that we go through in order to truly grow and become all that you call us to be. So fill us with your Spirit, your mind, your heart, most especially as we deal with our own failings and our own faults so that we might deal with others in a way that truly brings life for all of us. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Isaiah 62:1-5 | 1 Corinthians 12:4-11 | John 2:1-11

Almighty, everliving God, who governs all things, both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people. Bestow your peace on our times. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

You turned to this station, or you go to the Internet, and you find this program, and you listen. I think it’s important to know what we’re doing, what I’m doing, what my intention is and what I believe your longing is, to go to a place like this, to listen to someone like you, struggles with things just like you, sins like you, does good things like you. What you’re listening to is a man trying to interpret a story that is very, very old.

The Old Testament goes back to 4,500 years ago, and when I go to scripture, we know that we believe that these works are inspired. They have something in them that we long for, and what sometimes people do is they go to the scriptures to find out what to do, how to act. But if we stay there, we haven’t really moved very far, because the first part of the story, the Old Testament, is about a choice that human beings made in the Garden of Eden when they said, “Even we knew we were not supposed to eat of the tree of the knowledge and [sic] good and evil.” Someone lied to them. This creature, cunning, smart, attractive lied to them and said, “No, no. You should eat of this tree, because if you eat of this tree, you will live forever, and you will be like God.” And what is this tree of the knowledge of good and evil? It’s the law. It’s human beings saying, “Tell me what to do. Tell me what not to do. I will do that out of my mind and out of my will, and I will please you, and I will have life with you.” And it makes so much sense to a consciousness that is underdeveloped. It means, “I am the source of what I do, and I can do what I’ve been asked to do. And I feel good about being the one who achieves it, and if I achieve it, I’ll be able to receive something from God, not a gift but something I earned.” And that just feels comfortable, just feels comfortable to us. Let me do what I need to do, and I’ll get what I need. That’s the Old Testament, and then the New Testament comes. It’s radically different. We’re told that the law is no longer the source that we go to to find out how to live. We’re told something almost impossible to believe. The real issue is not that you go to a law, but you go rather to something inside of you, this mysterious indwelling presence of a God who is there with you privately, individually, sitting, standing, walking with you and guiding you. Now, that takes faith, and it takes a constant sense of an awareness of who he is and what he’s doing and a receptivity to that. If you want a simple, simple thing that this indwelling presence is able to achieve that a law could never achieve, and that is putting human touch with reality, the way things are. It’s called the truth, but all through the Old and New Testament, we see this story unfolding slowly.

So this first story from Isaiah is one of those moments where you see God as some people wish he was throughout the Old Testament. You see him as this absolutely, totally infatuated, in love with his people — looks at them and just says, “You are absolutely beautiful. You’re my delight. I want to spend time with you. I want to marry you.” What’s the context of this piece from Isaiah? It comes at the very end of the Book of Isaiah, and you know that throughout Isaiah we see the people who follow Jesus both being the people that he longs for them to be. And then at times they are not, and he gets angry, and he gets jealous, and he loses his temper, even at times says, “I would just like to kill all of you.” Somehow people remember that more than anything else about the God of the Old Testament, but he was acting in a way that people could understand. That wasn’t the fullness of who he is, but at that time long ago, human beings didn’t have the capacity to be motivated by something as etheric as the truth. But the law, they could understand that, and they had to understand that, if they didn’t follow the law, there were repercussions, and so rather than having to go through all kinds of suffering, God made it clear to them that he was upset. So you do what he asks, he’s pleased. You don’t do what he asks, he’s furious. But under all that is this God who’s watching his children grow, and he’s seeing the most beautiful transformation slowly taking place. And so at the end of the Book of Isaiah, they’ve been exiled from Jerusalem, and now they’ve got the temple back. And what was the temple for the Israelite people? It was God’s presence in their midst. In the Ark of the Covenant were the Ten Commandments. They weren’t necessarily the rules and laws that people thought they were. They’re the best explanation of who we are and how our nature works, but to them, it was a simple law, and they tried to follow it. Never quite achieved it, but they kept trying. But not to have that presence with them was devastating, and so the presence comes back, and it’s almost like God’s presence is talking to them, not the rule giver, not the judge but a lover. “I look at you, and you are so beautiful to me. My heart wants to be one with your heart. I want to be with you. The best way I can describe that is I’d like to marry you. I marry your land, so I’m in the land with you, and I’m in you. My presence is in you, and what it is there is a vehicle to bring something to you.” Beautiful image of God’s essence being revealed at a time when it’s hard for human beings to believe that this God is that much of a lover, that much longing for something that would seem to them impossible, intimacy with God, with the divine.

So we look at the second reading with St. Paul, and he’s talking about this incredible thing that God longs to give to people through a relationship that he has with them, which is like marriage, a life-giving relationship. It’s interesting. I’ve done a zillion marriages. There’s a line about asking people to be true to each other. It always sounds to me like to be faithful, to not commit adultery, but I think it means something much more. I think it means that, in a relationship that God has planned for you and for me, the heart of a relationship of a healthy marriage, a sacramental marriage, is that each person receive something from God to them, and that gift that they have is for their partner. It takes many different forms. Sometimes it’s advice. Sometimes it’s a confrontation with something that’s not right. It takes all different kinds of forms, but if you look at it carefully, what you’re looking at is what is the ultimate gift that God wants every human being to have. What is hidden in every story of scripture, in every event that happens to you, in every gift that he gives to the world? Yeah, there’s the gift of healing. There’s a gift of prophecy. There’s all these different gifts. When you boil it down, St. Paul says all these gifts are given to you individually. So the gift comes to you, not just to everyone the same. It comes to you, some form of this thing that he longs to give us. The form is different, but the thing that he gives is always the same. “I want you to see the truth, reality.”

I think the hardest thing about intimacy is one of the things it demands more than anything else, not physical presence, not ability to make love, no, it’s about a commitment you have to the other person that you will, whenever possible, give them the truth, and you will receive the truth from them. It’s why marriages are so difficult. It demands that kind of radical honesty. It’s why, when there’s adultery and it’s not owned, it’s a lie that is so destructive, not because it’s a sexual act. Because it’s a lie. Not even that you just — well, it’s a lie, and it’s also an indication that the person is not as committed as they need to be. So they’re not as open to, and if you’re not committed to a person as a source of that truth for you, if you don’t understand that that’s the commitment you make — “I’m looking for you to be a source of truth. I will be a source of truth for you.” When that’s at the heart of a marriage, you will never leave. You’ll never leave that. It’s too valuable.

So we go to the gospel, beautiful story, and so it’s on the same theme, intimacy, a wedding. God’s image of how he wants to relate to you is to be in the deepest form of union that we know in this world. So it makes sense to me that the first miracle that Jesus would perform, even though it wasn’t planned, is something to do with the wedding, and it’s about producing something, not for the individuals in the marriage but for the community gathered, which includes them. So there are stone water jars, and they’re filled to the brim. These would have been used as ceremonial washings, that you would come to an event and be washed clean of all the impurities, both literally the dirt on your hands but also spiritually anything that would keep you from entering into the place that God wants you to be with people. You had to be purified over and over and over again, freed from all sin, and so these ceremonial stone jars are not by accident the thing that God uses to do this miracle. So he takes these water jars — some people think the concrete, stone water jars represent the law, the Ten Commandments — and inside, this water represents what Jesus came to give to us, not just a baptism of water but a baptism of fire, fire water, alcohol. So interesting that God uses wine as such a powerful image of what he is here to give you. The greatest truth that God is trying to say to you is, “You know what? Everything you’ve ever done that’s wrong never gets in the way of my loving you, because I’ve come to invite human beings to drink of something that’s more purifying than any water ever could be, and the wine is so clearly representative of the thing that we say whenever I consecrate it. This is the chalice of salvation. This is my blood poured out for you for the forgiveness of sins. They’re forgiven.”

I think it’s interesting we think of Jesus’ death getting rid of all of our past sins. Well, yes, it does that, but it’s more than that. It’s more an invitation for you to believe in a truth that changes relationships radically, and that is nothing that someone can do or nothing that you can do to them — if you understand this great gift that’s been given to us, this wine, this intoxicating wine of forgiveness, you realize that there’s a gift in that. It’s not something you can do. It’s a power given to you that, when this happens, instead of resentment or anger or fear or shame, whether you’ve done it or someone else has done it, in place of all that, there’s this mysterious acceptance, compassion, empathy. I want to tell you the most important truth that you can learn. When someone loves you and truly loves you in God, in the spirit of God, there is nothing you can do that will ever been seen as anything other than something I want to heal, not something that destroys our relationship but something that directs the gift individually given to me that is now given to you.

Father, we pray for the gift of understanding, the relationship that you want to have with us. It seems almost too easy and too wonderful, but it’s your plan. You want us to trust in you being the source of everything that we feel that the law demanded of us, and when it’s a gift, it comes through us so freely, so effectively. So bless us with this faith, a faith in your plan, a faith in you, a faith in ourselves as instruments of you, your love in this world, and we ask this in Jesus’ name.

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Isaiah 42:1-4, 6-7 | Acts 10:34-38 | Luke 3:15-16, 21-22

Almighty, everliving God who, when Christ had been baptized in the River Jordan and as the Holy Spirit descended upon him solemnly declared him your Beloved Son, grant that your children by adoption, reborn of water and the Holy Spirit may always be well-pleasing to you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This feast of the baptism officially ends the Christmas season. What we’ve been focusing on is this most fascinating, interesting thing. It seems from the beginning of time, men and women have longed for something more than they have or more than they are, and whenever they seem to examine the life that they had, they said, “Someone has to come and give us something that we’re missing, because somehow we’re not connected, like we should be, to this whole thing. We need a Messiah, somebody who will come with great wisdom.” And I would add this one line that they wouldn’t have said, “But when we are ready — when we are ready for the Messiah.” We might say, “Well, why didn’t the Messiah come to Abraham? Why did we have to have 1,500, 2,000 years of struggle with one particular way of looking at the world and looking at God, God being the one who created us and is demanding of us that we respond to him, that we love him, but the only way we could show we loved him was to do what he said. And so we were bound by a very complicated set of rules and laws, and we kept trying and trying to keep the relationship going by being more than we were able to be. Kept being punished, and God would even threaten to destroy us when we failed so miserably in doing what he asked. Why did we have to go through all of that before we had his Beloved Son who comes into the world to reveal who he is? Why didn’t he start with who he was?” Well, I think it’s pretty obvious, because we couldn’t have handled it.

It was 5,000 years ago when God called Abraham, almost five. If that’s true, then people were not at all like they are now, in terms of being evolved and growing in a capacity to understand things, especially the things of a world that we can’t know directly but need help in knowing, and that’s the world of the Spirit. We know pretty much about the world that we live in. At least it seems that throughout history human beings were capable of figuring things out and discovering new ways of seeing the world and new ways of using things in the world to take care of themselves. We call it evolution. It’s so funny to me that one of the primary causes of the evolution of human beings, in terms of growing into knowing how to use the things of the earth to take care of them, was the weather. They had to learn how to protect themselves from the elements, and as they did that, their bodies and they themselves adapted themselves into becoming someone who could live in a certain environment, and that’s never ceased. Our environment is constantly changing. It’s not just the weather, but you think of the world we live in now. Even the world that I was born in 70 years ago practically, it’s so different, and yet when I see younger people getting into things that I can’t quite figure out, seeming to do it without any effort — they seem to understand how these things work, this technological world we live in. They seem to have an intuition about it that I don’t have. Is that because I’m stupid, and they’re smart? No. They have adapted from [sic] it from a very, very young age, and that means everything. The world I was created in and the world that I learned my basic ways of dealing with life is so radically different than theirs, and so I should — we all should give ourselves some slack when it comes to why can’t I figure all this stuff out. But we have grown, and we have changed, and God has revealed more and more to us. And I love the idea that the whole history of the human race is very much a kind of metaphor for what we individually go through, starting with childhood — childhood, infancy, adolescence, younger adult, older adult, wiser adult when you get close to 70, 80.

So what is it that we find in this conclusion to the invitation we’ve all had in the liturgy to remember this new creature that came into the world called Jesus? We end in an epiphany. Last week was the Feast of the Epiphany, but now we have a true epiphany. When Jesus the man was baptized in Jordan by John, there was this showing of his divinity. First of all, a spirit, the Spirit of God, took bodily form in the form of a dove, and the Spirit of God descending into Jesus is a sign and a symbol that Jesus, like us, not to the same degree, but he’s there to show us that we’re like him. And he’s the first one to say something that seemed almost impossible to believe, that God’s Spirit dwells in me and enables me to do things I could never do on my own just as a human being. And so we see the Spirit descending into this man, and then we hear a voice, and the voice says, “This is the one. This is my Son that I’ve always promised I would send to you. Listen to him.” That’s what he said in the same kind of theophany at the transfiguration. “This is my Son. Listen to him.” In this case, he said, “This is my Son. He has my favor and my love, my presence inside of him, and you can have it too. You can have it too.”

So we end on this note of baptism. Baptism is a very interesting sacrament. It’s something in the Catholic Church that is required, as it is in almost all religions, but the one thing interesting about the Catholic Church in its teaching on baptism is always recognize baptism in every other faith. It never rebaptized someone, let’s say, when you came a convert. So here’s a ritual that we believe always, always, always works, no matter who does it, no matter what religion does it, and what is it, when you baptize, that’s so important? Well, the ritual is essential in many ways, but in another way, it isn’t the only way one can receive the gift of baptism. The church teaches that you don’t have to be baptized literally by another person in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit to be baptized. You can be baptized — we call it a baptism of blood. That’s when you give your life completely over to the truth, become a martyr, give your life for your faith, or also just the desire, to want desperately to be filled with God, that’s a baptism of desire. So as much importance as we put on baptism, we wouldn’t say that a person who isn’t baptized doesn’t have God inside of them, because that is given as a gift to every human being.

We are redeemed people, and I want to see if I can try to describe what redemption is. It’s always been difficult for me to figure it out. If it means that we’re freed of sin, then why do we still do sinful things? If we’re told that we’re freed from the punishment of sin, why do we always feel that, and why does the church often say to me that, if you don’t do what God wants, he turns away, he punishes? It damages our relationship with him. He won’t dwell with us anymore until we get our sins forgiven in confession. That’s what I was taught. So how are we supposed to understand it? Well, here’s one thing that I hope helps, and it’s been something that I’ve been pondering these last few days. I hope it makes sense, but I know I can’t explain it, but I can point to it. I can’t describe exactly how it works, but in that moment that Jesus was baptized, he revealed the work that he was here to accomplish. The work was to reveal a dimension of God that we never knew existed, and that is that he refuses to punish a sinner. He refuses to separate himself from a sinner. He refuses to let our actions do anything to damage his affection, his attention, his desire for our salvation. I never knew that before, and I don't know that I’ve lived my life in any way, shape or form that I really would say I base my reactions to my weaknesses on that kind of truth. I base them more on the truth that the culture lives in, and that is, if you do something wrong, you’re punished. If you take someone’s life, we believe that the government has, or at least the government believes, they have a right to take your life. It’s just, an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. You live in that all the time in the world, yet we’re told that our God, in fully revealing who he is is not that way at all. So how do we make this adjustment? How do we think about sin as not being something that damages our relationship? Because otherwise you’d say, “Well then, why worry about not sinning if it doesn’t take God’s love away, God’s presence away?” Well, it goes deeper into an understanding of sin and the effects of sin in our life.

To say that God does not in any way, shape or form limit his love for us when we choose to do something wrong — still in the doing of something wrong, there is damage done to people and to self. That’s not God’s punishment. That’s just the result of what you’re doing. You drink water, and you’re hydrated. You stop drinking water, and you die. If you don’t drink water, is the punishment from God that you’ll die? No, just that’s the result of it. So it doesn’t change the fact that there’s something really dangerous about our sins. They are not in any way, shape or form limiting God’s love for us, but they are causing unnecessary, unwanted pain and suffering. And so what we have to do is learn how to accept that part of the world that we live in that, when we choose things that are negative and destructive, we do experience the destructiveness, but here’s the thing that I think is so interesting. So often when you see someone in pain because of the choices they’ve made, they have a feeling that God abandoned them. He abandoned them, and somehow they’re left with this curse from God. I think it’s really interesting. We often tell people, when things are going really well, “Oh, you’re so blessed by God. What a wonderful — you must be so pleasing to him.” What does that imply when things are going bad? Well, he’s not pleased with you, and you’re cursed. Why do we connect that dimension to our actions and somehow say, “God, why are you doing this to me?” Why can’t we see as clearly as this theology of redemption is trying to show us that no, he’s always there, always pulling for us, always wanting us not to abuse self or others? He wants us to learn, and so he allows the negative results. Otherwise it would be sort of like a body that doesn’t feel pain. People have that, and it’s a horrible thing, because you never know when you’ve injured yourself, and you can’t do anything about it. There’s great motivation if we realize the things that we’re doing are creating pain, but it’s so unfair to say that’s God’s response. It’s not God’s response.

What I love about the Old Testament is the image of God that we’ve lost in the New Testament, if you only read the New Testament, and that is that God in the Old Testament is usually described as somebody who is rather demanding and legalistic and always crushing people that didn’t do what they wanted. It’s like God is the source of all punishment, all pain rather, and it’s all in the form of punishment. And so we somehow take that to look at God in the Old Testament as not good and Jesus as good, and that’s completely oversimplified. What I love about the God of the Old Testament, since we’ve been preaching on it for now 50 years in the first reading of every Sunday, is how human he is, how filled with ordinary emotions, human emotions he is. He’s sad. He’s angry. He’s jealous. He’s depressed. Somehow when I was growing up and learning about God, God didn’t have anything like that, because that would seem too human. It would sound like he was imperfect, but a God who loves, authentically loves, how can he not have an emotion about the person he loves when they don’t do what he’s simply asking them to do for their own benefit and for the benefit of everyone around them? He is sad. He feels sadness when we sin. It’s so different from a judgmental, angry, punishing God, and how does that change things? How does it make things different? I don't know exactly how I can say this, but it does mean that, if you don’t have that image of a God who’s always there in all the negative things you do, you can’t ever believe that he’s always present, always in you, always pulling for you. His indwelling presence, this image of the dove entering into Jesus, his Spirit, that’s what’s key. That’s what’s important.

Father, your redemption is the gift that frees us and restores us to a childlike belief and faith in your love and your presence, your desire to give us everything that we need. Bless us with this gift as we face so many of the shortcomings that we experience in our life, the times that we fail, the times that we lose self-respect. It’s never your will. Your will is simply that we continue to grow and to change and to become fully your child in whom, we pray, we are always someone that pleases you greatly, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Isaiah 60:1-6 | Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6 | Matthew 2:1-12

Oh, God, who on this day revealed your only Begotten Son to the nations by the guidance of a star, grant in your mercy that we, who know you already by faith, may be brought to behold the beauty of your sublime glory. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Religion, a very fascinating and interesting part of what it means to be human, to want, to need, to create a religion — the word religion means to be bound to or to be yoked with. In many ways, religion, it seems, is something we have to lean on, because we don’t have the capacity to know what to do or to do anything of ourselves. So we turn to an institution and ask the institution to take care of us, and many people see that as a great weakness in human beings, that they have to go to some institution to ask them what’s right and wrong, what to believe, what not to believe. But those kinds of understandings of religion miss the point. The Vatican Counsel that we just finished just 50 years ago had a very powerful thing to say about religion. It continued a journey that’s been going on for a long time of the church, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, moving away from a way of seeing itself as the one and only true church to realizing that all religions, if they are true to what a religion is supposed to be, are pointing to something that human beings are not seeing on their own, cannot know on their own, something that keeps them from becoming who they are, not by being told what to do but by being shown something, shown who they are, shown why they’re here, shown what even the whole notion of a God means.

The universal thing that is needed in human beings, why we’ve always had religion is we’re looking for something beyond ourselves to teach us, to show us something that is hidden. The best word I can think of for that is the truth. Every human being, every culture, every nation has always sought to understand things, to know things. We’ve always been in quest of the truth. It’s the mark of the evolution of human beings, and the more we discover it, the more it changes how we think, the more it changes how we see things. We’re able to accomplish things we could never accomplish before. We grow in knowledge when we see the truth. If you take knowledge as the basis of what a religion offers, then you begin to realize that there’s something beyond simple knowledge. That’s a thing called wisdom, and wisdom is that ability to take what you know and to make decisions based on it. And anybody that bases their decisions on what is true is considered to be a wise person. We know so much more now about the body and how it functions, and we know what’s good for it and what’s not good for it. When you see somebody disregarding that knowledge, you say, “That’s not very smart. That’s kind of foolish,” the opposite of wisdom. A person who knows things and acts upon them uses that knowledge to make good decisions, they have wisdom, but then there’s something even beyond wisdom. It’s called enlightenment. Enlightenment, obviously it focuses on the mystery of light.

So let’s look at this set of readings for this great Feast of the Epiphany, because the Epiphany means a showing, exposing, an opening up so you can see something. We talk about struggling with a problem we have no solution to, and all of a sudden the answer comes, and we call it an epiphany. I see something I didn’t see before. A light came on out of this darkness I was in. So when we look at this feast, it’s based on the realization that all religions are based on some kind of prophet, and the prophet’s claim for being an important, positive source of goodness for you, the reason you would turn to the prophet of a religion is because you believe he or she is able to share with us something that we can’t see on our own. So this Feast of the Epiphany is right before the baptism of Jesus, and it’s connected to the baptism of Jesus. It’s, in a way, the end of the whole Christmas season, the Advent season. What we’re looking at is the manifestations in the person Christ that are epiphanies to show the world that he is something special, something really different. One of the great epiphanies that we have in the early life of Jesus is his baptism. When he’s baptized by John, John claims to see, in an epiphany, the sky open, and the dove descend upon him. It’s clear that he’s saying this image, this enlightenment is that this is the Anointed One. This is the one filled with wisdom and more than just wisdom, enlightenment. He is the light that’s come into the world.

We notice in the Feast of the Epiphany that we’re focusing also on the birth of Jesus. Something about light and his birth was the three wise men, and you notice in this set of readings, not only are the wise men filled with knowledge of something and able to find it, you also see in the second reading, St. Paul going through an epiphany of his own when he’s realizing that the Christ who’s come into the world has a purpose, a goal for all of us, and it’s a hard one to determine when you decide you want to know what it is literally. But it is more about a work that we’re engaged in, something that goes beyond the actual events of our life, and the main thing, it seems, that Jesus has brought into the world is the notion of unity, oneness, and so Paul, who is filled with this wonder of this new insight that comes to the world through Jesus, he’s saying, “It’s clear to me now, as I see it,” and he knew scripture well. There’s many things in the Old Testament that refer to Jesus as the light to the Gentiles, but he knew somehow, with this Jesus who is calling us to a oneness, that the idea that there are believers, and they’re connected to God, and then they’re disconnected from Gentiles who are not worthy, and then the Gentiles are disconnected from God. Jesus comes along and said, “No, no. None of that is what is the will or the intention of God.” No, everything is connected. Everything flows into everything else. Anytime you separate yourself from someone, from some group of people, from some other religion, you’ve blocked yourself off from things that they have that we don’t have that we need to be open to. The Catholic Church feels that it is a very unique religion of all Christian religions, because it’s the oldest. It goes back to the very foundation. The first major shift would be in the eighth century when the Muslim religion was founded, but then there was also — we have the Protestant Reformation. So you see in these early years always this separation, disunity, separation, disunity, and what the call of the gospel is, what the call of Jesus is is to bring everything back into oneness. Oneness, that’s our destiny. It’s our destination, unity.

So let’s look at the story of the wise men, because it’s a really interesting one. These men were Zoroastrians. I did a little research, and Zoroastrian was a person who founded a religion 1,000 years before Judaism, before the call of Abraham. It’s an ancient, ancient religion, and one of its basic teachings is unity. There are still Zoroastrians today, and the thing about these Zoroastrians is they were open to all kinds of things. They looked at the stars. They were looking for signs from the stars. They interpreted dreams. They were always looking for anything that could be a slice of something that would add to their awareness of a oneness and a unity, and they would see something more. They would be enlightened. So they were seekers of enlightenment. So we know that knowledge is important. Wisdom is knowing how to use knowledge, and enlightenment is a kind of direction, a kind of knowing that is not really like wisdom and knowledge. It’s more like intuition, and when you think about it, the image that the Zoroastrians had was that we were following this star, this light in darkness, and there’s a tradition with stars. The most obvious tradition is that the star somehow represents the birth of every human being. It also represents their destiny, what they’re called to. That may make people think, “Well, stars, we can go to stars and find out who we are, and they can guide our every direction of life and every decision.” And I don’t think that’s what it means, but what is a star? We don’t really see the value of stars in our culture for a very simple reason, fire and electricity, but there was a time when there was no other light at night other than stars, the moon. If the moon wasn’t there, the stars never went away, but sometimes the moon wasn’t there. So the way you moved in darkness, the way you found your way home was to look at the stars. So something about stars that are a kind of light in the darkness that gives you a direction to go in, even though you can’t see, that’s the key I want you to feel with me.

Enlightenment is knowing there’s a destination, which is the same root word as destiny. There’s a destination I’m called to, and anybody that says, “Well, it’s all predetermined. Everything’s going to happen. I don’t have anything to do with it,” predetermination, all that, that’s too simple, or that it’s all preplanned for us and it’s determined so we don’t have to make any decisions at all, that’s the same kind of thing. No, that’s too simple, but what is complex and beautiful and empowering and freeing is to know that in this journey that you and I have, we have the ability to go in the direction that is ours that will bring us to something good. Let’s just call it unity, for lack of a better word, calling us always into oneness with everything, everyone, every experience, oneness. Receiving what something brings, whether it’s negative or positive, if we’re connected to it, it puts you in pain that is there to teach you. It puts you in joy that is there to enlighten you, open your eyes to what you really want, and so this whole idea of the journey that you and I have is a journey that has a truth that we need to follow, being connected to and open to everything around us. But what it is is always hidden from us. We’re in the dark. How am I going to die? When am I going to die? What has my life been for? Have I been doing something really significant? Those are questions we ask ourselves, and if you’re looking for a nice, clear answer, then you’re not interested in enlightenment. You want to go back to knowledge, and that’s really limited. And people use knowledge as the only source for making decisions. It’s usually a disaster, a separation from star, from light in the darkness. You’ve got to be able to feel that you’re called to follow a destiny, go in a direction that you don’t fully know, but if you’re open to the wisdom, the grace, the mysterious presence of God in your life, you’ll have a sense that you are going to reach the destiny that is yours. You’ll make it to that destination.

It’s fascinating to me that we long for something really deeply, and it’s in every human being. And you know that, when you’re not in that place that you’re destined for, there’s a side effect, and it’s the most beautiful thing we have, in a sense. The side effect of not being in the destination you’re called to be in, it’s not something that’s one point in the future. It’s being in the moment where you are. It’s not — if I know I’m going on a route that’s mapped out for me, and I know I’m on the route, I know I’ll get there. It’s a highway. I know. I have a map. It shows me it goes right to the city I want to go in. I’m on that thing. So in the moment that I’m in, I can feel confident that I’m on my way to the right place. On my way to the right place is enlightenment, and that ability to feel that and to know it is the gift that we know has come into the world through Christ, the Anointed One. But the thing that’s so important is the one ultimate union we’re all fixed for, made for is a union with the one who is guiding us, union with God. Union with God, when God is in me, and God is in you, and he is the one who is guiding us, he is like that star, a light in the darkness. I feel good about the direction my life is going even though I don’t have any sense of where it’s actually going to end up, but being on the way, being enlightened by the truth, being engaged in life, wow, that’s all we need. It’s everything. It’s what it means to be guided in the darkness by a bright, incredible light. Then you look at what is the greatest star in the heavens. What is it? I tend to forget that the sun is nothing but a star. So there you have the sun — s-u-n, s-o-n. You have a son coming into us. The brightest star is this incredible example of life that we have in this prophet Jesus who is God, and every religion is aiming toward him. It doesn’t maybe name him as that, but that’s what all religion is for. That’s why we can say that all religions have value that lead people to this powerful, wonderful place of enlightenment.

Father, Christmas season is about being gifted with things. We don’t always realize the greatest gift that we have is your presence within us. We don’t realize that the greatest promise you’ve made to us is we should never ever feel that we live in a place of absolute darkness. The first thing you created, the first day of your work of creating the world was to create light. So keep us enlightened by your grace, by your truth, by your love, and we ask all this in Jesus name. Amen.

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Sirach 3:2-6,12-14 | Colossians 3:12-21 | Luke 2:41-52

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Micah 5:1-4a | Hebrews 10:5-10 | Luke 1:39-45

Pour forth, we beseech you, oh, Lord, your grace into our hearts that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ your Son was made known by the message of an angel, may by his passion and cross be brought to the glory of his resurrection who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

There’s something about that song. You just listened to it, and it was in, obviously, German. So you didn’t really hear the words, but it’s a song that just the melody itself, the way it works on the person who’s listening, it creates an inner stillness. It creates peace. The first reading that we just listened to, from Micah, is one of those passages, so many of them in the Old Testament, that refer to the coming of a Messiah. From the very beginning, right after what we know as the sin of Adam and Eve, that incredibly interesting and difficult to interpret story, what we’re told is there will come one day someone that will crush the head of the serpent. The serpent is that lie that was given to Adam and Eve, and the lie was, “You are enough. You can do everything on your own. All you need to know is right and wrong, and you’ll be fine. That’s all that God asks. Do what’s right. Don’t do what’s wrong. That’s the whole relationship.” That’s the lie. What we’re told is that there would be a man from a woman. Interesting, most of the time you talk about a man in the Old Testament, you wouldn’t say a man of a woman. You’d say a man of a man, because the women weren’t considered to be as important as the men. So we were sons and daughters of a father. Well, this is the son of a mother, a woman who gives birth to someone, and that someone in this story is peace. And the someone in that first prophecy of a Messiah in the Old Testament, the Book of Genesis, is the son will crush the head of the serpent, but he’ll also be bitten. He’ll crush the head, but he’ll be poisoned. He’ll die. Amazing. From the very beginning in the Old Testament, you were being told that this isn’t the fullness of the message. Someone’s coming.

So in the second reading, you hear from the author of Hebrews that it’s clear that, when Jesus came into the world, and the Messiah is Jesus — so the Messiah who comes eventually to reveal the truth makes an astonishing statement about the Old Testament. It was all based in the law, and it was fundamentally based in the law that required that you didn’t sin, and sin was always a kind of curse. So if you sinned, you would be punished, and so in the Old Testament, what we see, the major relationship that we have with God is one struggling to make up for our sins, to find forgiveness and, through some mysterious way, find a way not to sin. So at least when I grew up in the church, and that’s what I felt was the most important thing. Stop sinning, and if you do sin, you have to make up for it. And the making up for it was yes, you went to forgiveness. You went for forgiveness. You went to be forgiveness, but at the same time, it seemed that there was something inside of us that felt there was a debt that was created by our sins. And that’s something human beings feel. I’m responsible for causing this pain, and I should make up for it. And yet what the Old Testament taught us is that that kind of system, based on you keeping a law that you’re not really able to do perfectly, being caught in failure always and then being caught in trying to pay for the failure means you’re always going to be primarily thinking about the future as, “Oh, God, I hope I’m enough not to sin in the future.” And you’re going to be thinking about the past. “Oh, my God, I’ve got to make up for all that.” And so sacrifices, offerings were made, and that was pleasing God. And here is the Messiah coming along and saying, “That whole system never pleased God.” It’s almost to say that your sins are not, in any way, shape or form, the issue with God. God does not turn against us because we are sinners. In fact, the more you understand the mystery of life, you realize that we are given by God, from the beginning, a weakness that leads us into sin, and what is sin? Sin is yes, doing the wrong thing, but it’s mostly not seeing what is true, seeing something that looks like the truth and aiming for that, and then it never produces what it promises.

So what we learn in the Old Testament is that just making up for your sins and trying not to sin is not what God wants. It’s not what he’s interested in. Shocking. What that must imply is that there’s something about sin that has its purpose, its meaning, and we’re supposed to be engaged in that. And the engagement in it is somehow to accept that’s part of our human nature, that we fail, and in that failure, there’s something promised, something good, something that will happen to us. I’ll call it experiencing that which is not what we want and knowing therefore that is not the direction we want to go in. We need sin to grow. We need it. It’s part of the plan. So something is coming. The thing that’s coming is peace, according to the first reading. That’s salvation, being at peace. We have to be at peace with who we are in our relationship with God, and yet it’s always bothered me that he says, “I have destroyed sin,” but then I still struggle with sin all my life I still feel guilty. I still feel at times I’m not good enough. I’m afraid I’ll sin in the future, and I’m not supposed to. But what if sin is not the thing that is the problem? That’s our human nature.

So what is our problem? If it’s not our weaknesses, if it’s not our faults, then where should we be looking? The Messiah is the one that comes into the world to show us what we should be looking at, and what is it? Well, first of all, you have to understand that it’s a change, something radically new, something different than we thought. We can say, “Well then, the Old Testament is wrong, and the New Testament is right.” No, no. We have the Old Testament as the example of what we go through on our journey to become whole, to become complete when we learn what is real, what is true, and what is true is that we are not ever expected by God never to make a mistake. That’s not his plan. His plan is that we grow and that we change and become someone. The someone we become is described in a very beautiful way in the gospel, because we have two figures that represent the old and the new. There’s two women, one, say, in her 90s. She found out six months earlier that she was going to have a baby, so she’s in her sixth month, and this baby inside of her, we know who it is. It’s the greatest of the prophets, John the Baptist, and the thing that was so great about him is he announced the new way. He announced the new kingdom, the surprise, the thing we never expected, and so she represents the righteousness that people struggle for, always doing what’s right and then still finding themselves cursed, because Elizabeth always felt she was cursed with not being able to [sic] child. So why was she cursed when she did all the right things? Well, it’s because your parents sinned somewhere back, but she was burdened by the shame of sin. It kept her from bringing new life into the world. It’s called shame. It’s an infection that saps energy and takes away hope. She represents the end of that and the beginning of something new, and then there’s someone 13 years old, a little girl. What do we know about her? Well, we know that she has amazing faith. The one thing the story tells us is Elizabeth looks at her and gives such praise for who she is, and she says, “We’re all blessed because you believe in what God has promised, the Messiah.”

Most of us have given up on the Messiah. What we worry about is our sins, trying to make up for them. No, there’s somebody here in our midst who is there to save us, and he’s peace. He’s forgiveness. He’s acceptance. He’s everything we think we have to earn by not sinning, and so the radical statement of the New Testament is sin is not our problem. Human weaknesses are who we are. What is our problem? Whether we believe or not. Believe in what? The truth. What’s the truth? Reality. What’s reality? God announces John the Baptist, makes everybody aware that this person Jesus is the announcement of the most incredible, impossible thing that anyone could ever think is going to happen. God, the God who punishes, who rewards, that God, he wants to live inside of you. He wants to come and be a part of you. He wants to be your partner, but he comes to you as a sinner. He comes to you in your dirtiness, in your darkness. That’s when he comes. Well, wait a minute. The old way said I had to be pure, had to be clean, had to be sinless in order for God to even pay attention to me, much less do something as come inside of me. That’s blaspheme. God doesn’t do that. We’re dirty. He’s clean. We’re imperfect. He’s perfect. It’s incompatible. The opposite is true. We’re made for each other. What we want more than anything else is to find a place of peace in the world where we feel all is well, that things are as they must be, but if you live in the world of sin, then you live in a world where either you worry about the sins that you might commit in the future and worry if you’re going to be strong enough, and you’re worried about the past, because you have to make up for those sins. So you either are in anxiety about the future or shame about the past, and so what’s missing? The present. What’s in the present? “I don't know. I don’t spend much time there,” is what most of us would say. “I’ve got a plan for the future, and I’ve got to make up for the past.” No, the kingdom that God wants you in is the kingdom in which he joins you by entering into you and you with him living in a present moment. And what is the moment like? Grace. What is grace? God’s presence. What is God’s presence? Unconditional love? What is unconditional, unmerited love? What does that mean? It means you, as you are right this moment, is everything that God has ever wanted you to be, and everything you want to be in the future is in the present moment with God working with you.

Listen again to the words of Elizabeth. “Mary, blessed are you who believed that what the Lord promised would take place.” It’s so hard for me to think God lives in me, in my messiness, in my dirtiness, in my failures. I was so trained by a church that kept saying, “No, no. Sin is the obstacle. Sin is the biggest problem you’ve got. If you stop sinning, you’ll be happy.” Well, the only way I know you can stop sinning is by turning off almost all your wants and needs, and then you’re in a kind of empty vacuum where there’s not much happening, and you think, “Ah, this is it, peace. No wants, no needs. Nirvana.” No. No, your wants and needs are the energy that is in you to push you into a situation where you’re going to make mistakes, and you’re going to grow, and you’re going to learn. And where do you get that energy? Where do you get that confidence to go into something where you know most likely you’re going to fail at it? It’s this indwelling wisdom, this indwelling love, this indwelling forgiveness that says, “Look, right now in this moment you are all you need to be. Don’t worry about what you weren’t, and don’t worry about what you think you should need to be in the future. You are right now everything you are needing to be.”

I’ve had two, three moments in my life that stand out where I’ve just had that feeling. I was doing some nondescript thing. All of a sudden, this overwhelming feeling came to me. I wasn’t thinking about my past. I wasn’t worried about the future. I was in the present, and it felt so good, so rich, so full. Could that be the kingdom? Could that be the mystery of this Jesus, this Messiah who came into the world and did the strangest thing, died in a form where he was looked at as sin? It’s like he was wrong, and so they had to kill him. They had to destroy him, and in the very act of destroying this man, they didn’t know what they were doing, but they were teaching us something. You’ve got to believe that sin is not the enemy, and sin, when you can accept it as part of who you are, you’ll be saved. And that’s exactly what Jesus did on the cross. He accepted the fact that people saw him as sin, and he wasn’t angry. He wasn’t mad. It was unfair. He said, “It’s all right. You can think of me as sin. You can try to destroy me.” But when you try to destroy a sinner, all you’re trying to destroy really is a part of them that needs to die. What needs to be born is this new creation, this new Messiah, this new person. That’s Christmas. That’s the gift, to discover the beauty, the essence of who you are with God inside of you, guiding the present moment, using you, healing through you, loving through you and making you really, really happy.

Father, the way to salvation is really, really difficult for us. There’s something in our nature, something in the way we see the world that we think we’re the problem. We think, if we could just be better, if we could just be perfect, then we’d please you, and we’d find happiness. And nothing is further from the truth. Perfection, not making mistakes is never to be our goal. Our goal is to grow, to change, to evolve, most especially to see, see you as you are, to see you as a lover who is drawn to us because of our weaknesses, who wants nothing more than to connect deeply with our will and our desires and not focus on what’s wrong but focus on the potential we have of bringing life and love into the world, true forgiveness and mercy. Thank you for this great gift, but like Mary, give us the faith to believe in it. And we ask this in Jesus’ name.

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Zephaniah 3:14-18a | Philippians 4:4-7 | Luke 3:10-18

Oh, God, who see how your people faithfully await the feast of the Lord’s Nativity, enable us, we pray, to attain the joys of so great a salvation to celebrate them always with solemn worship and glad rejoicing. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We’re now on our third Sunday of this great season of Advent, a season announcing something that’s coming. We know that what’s coming is a kingdom, the kingdom of God, and we know a couple of things about it. It’s inside of us. It’s not necessarily something we should look for outside. It’s a feeling. It’s a disposition deep within us, and it’s here now. It’s not about something in the future where things are going to get better. No, it’s exactly enough right now. It’s exactly what it needs to be now to produce something, and what it’s producing, according to the set of readings we’ve just listened to is an amazing quality, amazing disposition. It can be summed up in one word — peace. Peace. It may sound like it means no struggle, no tension, everything is just fine and calm, but it doesn’t mean that in terms of the external world we live in. It has something to do with the internal world, the world that is truly us, the world that is forming us, guiding us, supporting us and even harming us at times. But in that inner world, what we’re looking for is a place of calm, a place of well-being that creates not just peace, but the peace brings a kind of joy, a kind of happiness that’s not the gigantic, elated thing where we’re jumping up and down because we just won the lottery or something like that, but it’s about a kind of calm, inner happiness. All is well. All will be well, Julian of Norwich.

So how do we get this place, or what is it, or how do we engage in it? It’s clear to me that I often don’t live there, and it’s probably true for you too. We get caught up in worry and anxiety, but this Sunday always, the third Sunday, is dedicated to this gift that we’re promised if we enter into the inner kingdom and we live it as it was intended to be lived. So let’s look at what creates this peace. Where does it come from? What does it take for us to stay in it? Well, the one thing — let’s look at the first Sunday. The first Sunday of Advent was we have to go through changes. Anybody that wants to enter into this inner kingdom has to let go of the outer kingdom, so to speak, the way the world would tell us we should live to be happy, no problems, having everything we want, having more than somebody else, being the best, whatever. If your world is based in those things and you have to die to that, the world feels like it’s completely falling apart. So we were told be careful about what looks like the end, because it may simply be the transformation, the radical transformation you need to go through in order to get to this place called the kingdom. You have to die to everything that’s not the kingdom. Then the next Sunday was about the journey, the path. We have to make this journey of movement towards truth, towards wholeness, towards authenticity, and it’s difficult, and it has deep, deep valleys and high, high peaks and lots of confusing directions and constant obstacles. But something, I’ll call it hope, trust, those virtues keep us moving so that the darkness is not so dark, and the high peak is not as exciting as we thought it would be. Being confused at times is not really as unsettling as we think it is, and daily obstacles, well, we can learn how to deal with those. So now what are we looking at? Where do we find peace?

Well, the first thing that I sense in this quest is that we see something in the first reading that is unusual in a way, because I tend to think about how can we show God that we’re thankful for him. How can we be grateful? “Thank you, God, for giving me my life. Thank you, God, for this. Thank you for that.” The word Eucharist means thanks. We gather week after week to give thanks to God for our life. What’s interesting about this first reading, it’s really not about we giving thanks to God, and he’s so happy. It’s he [sic] feeling enormous satisfaction and joy and peace as he looks at who we are, at what he created. He delights in us. He looks at us and absolutely, totally falls in love with what he created, and he’s delighted in it. And he knows it’s imperfect. He knows he made it that way, and so what I sense in this first reading is one of the core, I would say, foundations of our sense of peace is that, as messed up as we are and as filled with failure and doubt as we are, there’s something about us that God just looks at and says, “Wow, look at what I created. It is absolutely beautiful.” And when you see something beautiful, you have three reactions, because we’re made like God, and God has these reactions. I take pleasure in what is beautiful. I want to protect what is beautiful. I want to participate in it. I want to be a part of it. That’s what God sees in us. He wants to be a part of our life. He wants to participate with us in this process. He wants to enter into us, live with us, dwell with us, go on the journey with us with all of its mess and all of its sin. He says, “I want to be right there, please. I really like being with you.” God, how many years of doubt and struggle I’ve had trying to please God by being perfect, and I think, if I’m not, I always thought I’d lose his favor. He smiles at our mistakes, and he’s sad, because they cause us pain and others. But it never ever weakens his love, his affection, his attention.

Then Paul talks about how we should be so delighted in this work that God has given to us. If we understand our work and we do the work that God has given us, we live the gospel, we’re going to find great satisfaction. So it’s about finding peace in what you’re doing — what you’re doing. That’s a really interesting image. What is it that we do that brings us peace? What is it that we don’t do or do that causes anxiety and worry? Well, I was struck in the gospel by the words that John the Baptist gives to these people that come up, because he’s been telling them, “This is happening. This new thing is coming. This promise that we’ve always had that this God of ours is going to enter into a new relationship with us, it’s going to be much more intimate than it was in the Old Testament, and we’re going to be given a gift called redemption.” He didn’t use that word, but he meant we would be made new, and we’d be given more insight.

The way I like to think about this is that we’re growing with this gigantic thrust into deeper awareness of what is real, growing in a gigantic leap of consciousness. I think it’s fascinating to think about the growth of consciousness of human beings. When God first called Abraham, that was 4,000 years ago, and he dealt with him as God had to deal with people. And he dealt with him in a way that is radically different than the way he fully revealed himself to be in terms of the way he works with us. In the beginning, he was demanding and often irritated by faults and wanted to destroy that which wasn’t good, and then you find he’s not interested in anything that’s like destruction. What he wants is transformation. He wants to renew. He wants to save, save things and bring them into fullness. We’re obviously living now, 4,000 years after that event, in a world where we’re much more receptive to this kind of direction, not being condemned, not being judged, not being threatened with punishment but being invited into something wonderful, into some new life. This new life has a kind of litmus test. I don't know if that’s the right word, but if you want to know whether you’re living in the kingdom, you’ll know it by the amount of peace that you have.

Now, we’re not talking about everything being fine. We’re not talking about your financial situation, the relationships in families. We’re not talking about those all being perfect and peaceful. No, we’re talking about a way of seeing the world that you’re living in that goes beyond the tensions that are there, beyond the fears that might be there that are literal. I worry about this person. They may be making a terrible mistake, and I’m hoping they don’t. That kind of anxiety is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something much, much deeper, like somehow knowing in the midst of all of it there’s a core, quiet, still place I go inside of me where I know my God is there, and I’m with him, and he’s delighted at the way things are going, not because they’re going well, because they are. He delights in what he created. He created a world with suffering, with pain, and I’m not saying he delights in pain and suffering, but he delights in what they can create. And they have this mysterious property of being able to create something for us that’s positive.

So I look at John the Baptist announcing all this. He’s saying, “Look, this is coming. This is going to be wonderful.” And so there are two groups of people that come up to him and say, “Well, what should we do? You’re talking about a kingdom of peace, a kingdom of joy, a kingdom of life. What do we do? What’s our part? How do we get it?” And his answers are amazingly simple and not what I would have expected. When I think about what it is the church has generally required for holiness, it’s like a life of austerity, a life of separation from the world, the monks that go away to be holy. They give up family, and they give up sex, and they give up connections with pleasure, and they live in a quiet, still place. There’s a real, honest vocation in that, but that’s not the model for our holiness. It’s not. This is not something you have to go away from the world to achieve. It’s something that you achieve by living in the world in the way God intends you to live in it, and so listen to what advice he gives to the tax collectors. Now, these were people that were outcasts. They were Jews that were working for the enemy, Rome. So right away they’re kind of on the outs, so they may be more open to asking a question like, “How do I get out of this mess I’m in?” And so they say, “What shall we do?” And he said, “Well, don’t charge more than you’re supposed to.” That’s it? That’s going to bring peace? That’s going to bring the kingdom? What does that mean? Well, think of it symbolically. The toll collector, someone that helps people get from place to place, to pay what it costs to move on to a new level, a new, deeper understanding, and we’re all called to help each other do that. What he’s saying is, “Help each other do that, but don’t use it to get something from them. Don’t manipulate them. Don’t be selfish in this. Just help them to get to the new place. That’s just enough — enough.” Do what you’re called to do authentically, and you’ll find peace.

Then soldiers come up. It’s interesting. The centurions were often closer to Jesus, because they understood. Soldiers understood how authority worked, and authority was everything about the way they saw power, and they saw that power in Jesus, so they were more open to him. So the centurions say, “What shall we do?” And again, the advice is so interesting. Don’t use your power as extortion. Don’t take bribes. Don’t use it for selfish reasons, and furthermore, when you’re dealing with people and you’re in a place of authority, whatever you do, don’t lie. Don’t accuse somebody of something if they’re not — be honest. And then the last one is so funny to me. Stop complaining about your wages. Just do what you’re to do authentically.

Authenticity, what an interesting image.To be authentic is the key to finding peace.I’m simply doing what I’m called to do, and my intention is in sync with my nature.My nature is I should do what I’m called to do to help other people.The first one was about people who had two coats and food.That was the one that, if you have something, give it to people.You’re here to help people.You’re here to help them move along.You’re here to guide them and to protect them from things outside of themselves, but you do it with integrity.And so my suggestion to wonder about at this time is what is authenticity in my life.Do I really feel that I am the person that I’m called to be, and how do I know that, that my intention, what I’m here for, is really in sync with my nature?Intention and my nature, when those two are together, and not the nature I may think I have but the nature I truly have — so when you ask God, “God, show me who I am.Help me understand my role,” well, do your job.Everybody has a little job, a little different job.Just do it with authenticity.Do it with the right intention, and all of a sudden, there’s this kind of well-being that comes over you.I can feel it at times when I’m doing that.I do this work.I get up, and I preach.I do this.If I’m trying to win your favor, it gets in the way.If I’m trying to preach better than somebody else, it gets in the way.If I’m just doing it because I’m called to do it, then there’s peace.

Father, your affection, your care, your interest in our lives is something hard for us to grasp. We work too hard for human relationships. We struggle to please them, yet you tell us we should not do that with you. We should allow you to simply be the source of what makes this relationship so deep, so profound, your attention, your affection. Bless us with an awareness of it as we continue to do the work you’ve given us with authentic hearts so that we can be truly effective and, in our effectiveness, find that great, great gift of peace. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.

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Baruch 5:1-9 | Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11 | Luke 3:1-6

Almighty and merciful God, may no earthly undertaking hinder those who set out in haste to meet your Son, but may our learning of heavenly wisdom gain us admittance to his company who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The four Sundays of Advent are really one, consistent message. Each Sunday focuses on a part of that message. The message is directed to something that we are about to begin, a new church year, a new liturgical cycle. Each cycle focuses on one of the synoptic gospels. Last cycle we just finished was the gospel of Mark. This will be the gospel of Luke. The first is the gospel of Matthew. Someone once said, if we didn’t have all four of the gospels, we couldn’t possibly have the fullness of the message of Jesus. So even though they seem similar, covering the same events, it underscores the fact that, as one reads an event, as one perceives it, digs into it, imagines it, as one would have imagined the ministry of Jesus and then wanted to record it, certain things would be recorded, depending on your perception. We have four different people’s perspective.

So let’s look at these readings and see what they point out, because last week, when we listened to them, we realized that there was something coming, something difficult, some difficulty was coming and that there would be a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, a kind of catastrophic situation where things were falling from the sky, and the earth was trembling, and there was great upheaval. I pointed out that one of the things I believe God was putting before us was the notion that, if we’re going to follow the way of God as revealed by Jesus, we are going to go through radical changes, and when those changes come, they’re going to basically free us, cut us off from the illusions and the half-truths that we’ve been living. And when you’ve been living in one way of seeing and you’re asked to let go of it, it isn’t just, “Oh, how wonderful, a new way of seeing. It’s so much easier, so much better.” No. You have to let go of the old, and if the old has really been a part of the decisions you’ve been making, particularly your unconscious decisions, then it’s almost like a death, like your world is collapsing.

The other thing we learned last Sunday is it’s time to pay attention. Don’t go numb. Don’t go unconscious. Pay attention. Pay attention. What I think we’re supposed to be paying attention always is our intention. Our intention is everything. What am I doing? Why am I here? What’s my deepest desire? It’s clear, especially as we listen to the second readings of both these two Sundays — we see that what Paul is saying is, “I’m so delighted that you’re engaged in this work. I’m so happy to see God manifesting himself through you, and I see you loving each other, taking care of each other,” which, surprisingly to me in a way, was so radically different than the way the world lived back then. Then this beautiful image of as you perceive what you’re seeing, as you perceive the message of Jesus, that perception is going to focus your intention in the right direction: empathy, care, forgiveness, and most especially, living out your life as it is written. Living your life as it is written, this brings up a very complicated issue of is our life already written for us. Not in the sense of all decided, because we have a major role in deciding how our life goes, but are there objective principles? Are there objective things that our life in particular has been in formation for years to get ready to give a particular insight, a particular part of the story so that everyone has this challenge of not only seeking to be who God calls us to be but to be uniquely what that is? And that takes a tremendous amount of self-reflection. What is it that I’m here to say? What is my gift? What is my purpose?

It’s interesting to me that at the beginning of God’s relationship with his people, he formed a community, the Israelites, calling them to be his people, which underscores to me that the way in which we are asked to live out our life here, our destiny on this planet, is in community with others. When I think about my community or your community, I could say, “Well, we belong to this religion. I do, Roman Catholicism. That’s my community.” I could say I’m an American, or I’m a Texan. Those are my communities, but I don’t think it’s that simple or geographical or based on whatever religion you belong to. I think it’s the family of man that is searching for the truth and longing to see what is real and to live out their part in that process, being a seeker. We come into the world in a particular family, and we are a part of that family. I think it’s fascinating how, when you come into a family, you would think maybe because children have the same experiences that their brothers and sisters have that they’d all be so similar. It’s just the opposite, it seems. Brothers and sisters can be radically different. Where does that difference come from? Well, there’s certainly a primary influence on all of us in our family of origin, but there’s also an influence that we come into the world with, which is about our past, about all the generations that preceded us and about the groups of people we were part of in an intimate way, that we were really working together. My point being we have a nuclear family that we work together with. As we grow older, in adulthood, we find we are choosing a family of friends, acquaintances, people that we are working with, and that’s another group that we’re connected to. Within that group, there’s usually a smaller group that’s our intimate friends. So we have a family that we’re connected to, a community of workers and connections with people that we interact with, and then this group of people that we really call friends. That’s who we work with. That’s the group that is ours, and whether we choose to be aware of this or not, it happens this way, because the way we are connected, the way human beings connect is that they connect in a way that is not just literally time with each other. But when you connect with someone, there is a true, literal flow of resonance and grace and energy between the two of you. I love it when you have a friend that you haven’t talked to in a long time and you pick up the phone to call them — this happened to me not too long ago — and they had picked up the phone at the same exact moment to call me, and neither phone rang. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

We work with a group, and what is the work of the group? Well, pay attention. Be alert. Be awake. Be conscious, and then notice some things that are crucial to the whole sense of being full and alive and engaged, principles called the truth. Our responsibility is to lead each other into the truth as Jesus came into the world to lead each and every one of us, as a community, into the truth, what is, reality. And so this work is the work of all of us. We call it sometimes the work of the church. We call it the work of friendship, the work of marriage, the work of parenthood, but it’s guiding each other, reminding each other of things. And that first set of readings that we had last week was saying there’s a promise being made to you by God, and this promise will be fulfilled. I love that image, because it means that this work of growing into the truth is not simply something that we have to come up with all the energy and all the strength that is needed to achieve it. No, there’s a greater strength than we are who knows so much more than we know, who’s light years ahead of us in wisdom, and it’s his relationship with us that, if we pay attention to his intention, it is we will succeed. We will make it. We’re going to make it. This is not a dice throw. No, it’s a slam dunk, unless we simply stand up and absolutely resist it, which is possible, but not for the person who’s seeking it, not for the person who wants it.

So we see in this particular second set of readings for the second Sunday, it is something a little different. It seems to be, certainly, about the plan, about the direction we need to go, but it also says that there is this path we’re supposed to be on, this journey. And we should be on it together. We should do it. It’s symbolized by — obviously the first thing that God did with the community that was interconnected was to lead them together on a path, on a journey from what they didn’t know to what they knew, from what was less to what was more, from what was imprisoning them to what was free. That’s our direction, and the thing that we can call all this work is going toward the truth. Now, one of the phrases that stands out from this liturgy is this path that we have. We have to do something about it. John the Baptist, who was the most important figure to engage us in this path, announcing it, not the source or the success of the path but the announcer, said that you have to make this path, the path of Jesus — you have to be open to it. You have to let it come to you. When it comes to you, you have to be strong and fearless enough to go where it’s calling you. It’s a journey, and I think it’s so fascinating, when it says so clearly, grace, the will of God, the intention of God inside of you, who wants this thing to happen, is going to do something for you. Every valley, every dark gorge, every dark place is going to be made level, and every mountain peak is going to be made level, and every road that is twisting and going in all kinds of direction is going to be made straight. And the path is not going to have so many obstacles in it. Interesting images. What is it? Some might say, “Well, that’s about heaven, because we won’t have any more struggles.” No, I think it’s about the path that you and I are supposed to be on, and God fills us with something that changes the erratic nature of it, the difficulty in it.

Let’s look at the symbols, the deep, dark gorge, the darkness. Let’s call it depression, call it not feeling anything, being sort of maybe in a bad place. Well, that darkness going down there is going to no longer be the negative that it is. You’re going to be going above it in a sense. You’re going to be on this level road where you go down, but you don’t have the resulting depression. And a high mountain top, I know that’s what everybody wants. That’s what I want, the mountain top, success, being above everybody else, being in charge. I love those high mountain peak things, but they’re dangerous, because we want to stay there too long. No, that’ll be leveled, and then you know the feeling, and I know the feeling that we think we’re going to this path. We’re excited about it. All of a sudden, we’re completely confused. Our decisions aren’t working, and we make decisions. We find ourselves going in the opposite direction or halfway in that direction, and we’re confused. We don’t know which way to go. He’s going to give wisdom so that whatever direction we’re going in, it is the right direction. It is the way in which we have to go in order to get to the goal. You have to follow the path, and I love the one of the road. When you’re on it, you’ve finally found your purpose, your direction, you’re going, but there is obstacle after obstacle after obstacle, setback after setback.

Think of any project you’ve ever done. This machine doesn’t work. That didn’t work. This got in the way. That happened, all negative, and then it can be discouraging, like, “God, there’s so many things working against this.” Well, God’s grace is going to carry you through that, and what is that grace? How can I name it? Hope. Hope. Hope is not belief that something might happen. It’s knowing that it will, and the other is trust. Trust. Trust that anything, no matter how dark, no matter how wonderful and exhilarating, no matter how confusing, no matter how irritating, it’s going to work. We’re going to get there, and the kingdom will be ours.

Father, we get confused. We lose hope. We get caught up in the wrong things. It’s just our nature. We know that you know that. We know that it’s nothing that surprises you. What does surprise us, however, is your consistency and your patience and your longing and your intention that we make it on this journey, and it’s our confidence. Your help is our confidence, our trust in it. We hope in it. So bless us, as we begin this new year, with the conviction that we will come to a new insight of the truth as we spend these weeks together growing in our ability to not only live a life of peace but one of great value and grace to those that we love. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.

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Jeremiah 33:14-16| 1 Thessalonians 3:12—4:2| Luke 21:25-28, 34-36

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming so that gathered at his right hand they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Today we begin a new liturgical year. The season is Advent. The word means coming. One of the things I find fascinating, the more I wonder and ponder about this thing called life, what it means to be human, who is God, what is he doing, questions like is he real, what’s he want. It’s really wonderful to take time, to have time to ponder these questions, because it seems to me that most of us live through our lives aware of a lot but not necessarily what is at the heart of everything. We need to get to the heart of everything, and what’s there is the truth — the truth.

I like the thought that I am a part of something that’s been going on for millions of years. It sort of makes me feel like I’m an integral part of something big, and it’s true of all of us. We’re all interconnected. We’re all part of a plan of God that’s bringing human beings to a place of fulfillment. And what is that fulfillment? What is God promising for us? I think the most interesting thing that we know about us, in terms of the beginning of the Judeo/Christian tradition in the Old Testament, we’re told that we are made by God, and we are made in his image and in his likeness. That means that potentially we are like God, and when we think of God, we think often of perfection. And we think, “Well, I can’t be perfect. I’m human.” And it doesn’t mean that kind of perfection, but God is perfectly God. God makes no excuses for who he is. He’s not affected by how we think about him. He doesn’t change his plan because we don’t like the plan. No, he’s confident in what he’s doing, and what we need to be, in order to be fully like him, we need to be absolutely, equally confident in what it means to be human as he is in what it means to be a God. We’re not gods, but we’re like him, which means in the kind of coolest way, I think, is that he’s our Father. He’s our parent. We come from him. We often talk about, as we get older, we become our parents.

All of that makes sense to me as we look at this beautiful image of what we’re here for, the evolutionary process of becoming more and more conscious of what is true, who we are, why we’re here, and every year we go through the story again. Every year we recap the stories, and we don’t focus on the same ones every year. We change every third year. We have a new set of readings, and one of the things about those readings is every time we go over them, it seems to me — this happens to me; I hope it happens to you — that each time we do, we look at these same stories, often told from a slightly different perspective than the year before, but every time we ponder them, there’s some hidden truth in them that clicks in. And once it clicks in, like it becomes real, it becomes not just something we know but something — not something we’ve heard but something we deeply know. We’re moving toward that fullness of the evolution of becoming who God intends us to be, and so it’s an exciting journey. And I’m delighted to be a part of your journey if you listen, because all I’m doing is sharing with you what is happening to me, and what is happening to me I see happening to the world. It’s very interesting to pay attention to where the world is today, and you can see a deep, deep longing for something. You might simply call it the truth, but what has truth promised? What does God promise us that comes with the truth? It’s a thing called love, and what is love? It’s this thing we’re made for. It’s a part of us that is often asleep, sometimes so damaged that it’s not even present, but it’s the capacity we have for empathy, for compassion, for somehow putting people first, not things, not things we want, not things we think will make us important or feel good about ourselves. No, it’s a kind of instinct that the reason we’re here is to care for one another, and it starts with caring for yourself.

What better thing could we do for ourselves than be as radically open as we could be to whatever is real and true, who we are, what we’re here for? Because the promise that God makes in his coming is that he’s starting a new kingdom. It’s a kingdom that is not out there but inside of us. It’s not about the past or the future. It’s about right now. He’s talking about living in a place of consciousness where we’re so conscious of who we are, who God is, what we’re here for. If you look carefully at the evolution of human beings, you’re going to find that the drive began basically with the drive for self-survival, but that drive has evolved from self-survival to something closer to self-actualization, being authentic, being who we really are. That’s the drive, and what keeps us from it is the thing that we know is present in the world. It’s difficult to avoid, and it’s call sin. But another word for sin, which I like much better is a lie, because if you look at the story of the Old Testament, what it is that we see that brought sin into the world is a lie. So you could say sin is missing the goal, missing the mark of where we’re supposed to be because you believe in a lie that, if you follow that lie, you’ll never — the trajectory of that lie will take you far from the target — far from the target.

So imagine that we are in this process of continually moving more and more toward this fulfillment of this plan of God, which has something to do with finding truth, which is love, and when we’re living in that place of love, when we do know in some mysterious way that the basic call that we’re here to do is to care for self and others, then something miraculously shifts, because what happens then, if we’re not believing in lies that tell us, “No, what you really want is power. What you really want is prestige. What you really want is comfort in a kind of ‘I refuse to be uncomfortable. I refuse to go through anything painful kind of way.’” That’s not it. No, it’s called peace. The truth leads to a life of love, and when you’re in that life of love, there’s some amazing, comforting sense of well-being that has nothing — nothing to do with what’s going around you, nothing.

So how do I put all that together with the readings? I got all that from looking at these readings, and I want to look at them more carefully with you, but the first reading is about a promise. God made a promise to his people. The promise is, “I will take you to a land of milk and honey, and I will free you from everything that enslaves you.” So what is that? Well, there was a literal situation that the Israelites were in, where they literally were slaves to a culture, the Egyptian culture, and so when God promised to take them away from that, he had to take them on a long journey. And what they experienced on the journey was anything but comfort. It was difficult, and they kept losing a sense of what was promised, because they weren’t comfortable, and so they kept resisting. And they were a stiff-necked people, and they often turned back to their old ways and even said, “I’d rather go back to slavery than what we’re going through.” It’s called change. It’s called growth. It’s called evolving. It’s not easy.

So when we listen to the second reading, it’s pretty clear that Paul is very much in touch with this process that we’re involved in, and he’s telling people that there’s something that God has given to you, something Jesus exhorted you to do, and it’s to conduct yourselves to please God. And to please God is really tricky, because it seems like to please God might be to follow some external, rigid, moral law or moral system or a bunch of moral practices and somehow work out of your mind and your will where you make yourself into somebody that you think will please God. Well, you can’t make yourself into somebody and please God. You can only allow yourself to become who you are, and that pleases God. He doesn’t want you to be someone you’re not. He doesn’t want you to follow someone else’s image of what it means to be in the world. If you look at spirituality over the centuries, you’ll see how often the exercises of spirituality were not founded in the truth, and they were destructive, especially during the Middle Ages. It was considered that pain is what God wanted us to be in to prove that we loved him, and people inflicted all kinds of pain on themselves. Francis, for one, St. Francis, was very aware at the end of his life, and he said, “I treated my body so badly, so badly.” And at 45, he was blind and had all kinds of health problems, and he was still a young man. But all of that was well-intentioned on the part of the people, and I know God took care of them. But it’s like you would think, “Well, God, why didn’t you give us all the information we needed? Why didn’t we come into the world wise enough to do everything you’re telling us to do? Why do we have to take so much time in figuring it out?” Well, you know why? It’s because it only can be figured out by people like you and me — you and me. Each one of us has come into the world at a particular time to take the human race a few tiny steps further. It’s been going on forever. We, individually and collectively, are changing the world, changing the way we are, changing the way we see things, and it’s not everyone that gets these insights. It’s just a few, but the few that get the insights bring everyone else along with them. So you’re engaged in a work, as I’m engaged in the work, of seeking the truth, seeking to live as God has called us to live, and each time we do that, each time we reach a higher level of consciousness, that lifts the world. It’s an amazing, exciting process. If you think you’re only here to deal with your seeking the peaceful, joyous place we want to get to, that’s just a kind of reward. It’s a side benefit. It’s not just that that we want. It’s the purposefulness of our life that is so satisfying. I have a purpose. I have meaning. I’m making a difference. And what happens in working to make differences? You have to change. You have to change. It’s hard.

So it’s so strange, when we listen to — this is the season of Advent. Jesus is coming. We should be excited about all the wonderful things, and then we have this gospel about all these terrible things that are happening in the world. It’s all falling apart. What’s so fascinating about that image, the way we often hear in the Book of Revelation especially, that the end of times are going to be this horrific time where everybody is just terrified by all this destruction all around them — the only way to understand that that makes sense to me is that, when you or I are caught in a lie and there is no clarity of why we are so miserable, because the lie seems to be the truth, it seems to be what we can use to fulfill — that God will use this lie to bring us to what we wanted, and he can’t. So whenever you leave a lie and move into the truth, you have to let something die, and when it dies, it is catastrophic, depending upon if that’s what you have in your mind as your value, as your goal. When somebody exposes a lie and you find out that the world that you created that you thought was secure and strong is completely collapsing all around you — did you ever notice, when people change, it’s often because they lie they’ve been living in overtakes so much of their reason and their logic, as far as what the truth really is, that they find themselves in this horrible place of destruction, self-destruction in many cases. So it makes sense, though, for us to have at the beginning of the season of Advent then an image of great destruction. Think about the time that something was taken from you that you had your heart set on. “This was the thing I need in order to achieve the goal I want, the happiness, joy,” the death of someone, the end of a relationship. If you have a sense of yourself as one thing and that thing is taken away from you and that’s your only sense of your value, your whole world collapses. And that’s what he’s saying. You’ve got to go through that. Stand tall. Hold your head up, because this is redemption, the death of the lie, the death of the situation you’re in, if you’re in the wrong projectile that cannot reach the goal. It’s an exciting year to go back and find the goal and find the means to get it, and that’s where we’re going.

Father, as we see your plan, as we understand who you are, as we see our nature as it truly is, it leads one to give you praise, to give you thanks. As I see images of you in heaven with angels always around you praising you, praising you, praising you, it makes sense that the only real response to who you are is an unbelievable sense of gratitude and joy. So thank you for your call to become who we are. Thank you for the means that you’ve given us to achieve it, and once we receive the fullness of your grace, help us to be effective as your Son was effective in bringing you to all those around us. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Daniel 7:13-14 | Revelation 1:5-8 | John 18:33b-37

Almighty, everliving God, whose will is to restore all things in your beloved Son, the King of the Universe, grant, we pray, that the whole creation, set free from slavery, may render your majestic service and ceaselessly proclaim your praise. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

It’s clear that this God that we believe in, the God that created us is a God who has an intense longing for you and for me to find fullness. He created us in a way, I think, to fulfill a longing of being loved and loving someone like him. Remember Adam and Eve. When God created Adam, he found that he wasn’t enough by himself. He needed a partner. He needed Eve. When God created the universe, it seems that he got to a point where he felt like, “I wanted to create, along with everything else, all the beauty, the majesty of the creation of the universe and the world and the animal world and insect world, all of that —” But he wanted someone in there to be like him, and then he did something to distinguish them from everyone else. He gave them free will. You can make choices. “I will not force you to do anything. You can do all that I ask you to do, or you can do absolutely the antithesis of what I ask you to do. It’s up to you.” He didn’t give that to any other aspect of his creation. So what does that say to you and me about who we are? We are absolutely a unique gift, given by God who created us and this gift carries an enormous responsibility.

You often think that it would be easier — at least I often think it would be easier if he didn’t give us free will, and we could just do what we’re here to do. And like the animal world, we would just exist, but what we wouldn’t have then is — without free will, we wouldn’t have the creativity that we are able to have. To be able to choose is more than making a right decision of whether something is right or wrong, but free will has everything to do with being able to come up with something that no one ever thought of before. And think of the creative energy that has been manifested in the world in mostly recent times. We see human beings being able to do the most amazing feats, whether it’s solving the problems of a pandemic in lightning speed, coming up with a vaccine that nobody ever thought could ever be designed and produced in such a short period, whether it’s the success we’ve had with technology or space travel or whatever you look at. There is just an amazing capacity in human beings to be more than we ever thought we could be. It’s just kind of a wonderful way of imagining human nature, all this potential in seed form inside all of us, and one of the things that we need with a free will, like we’ve been given, is we need direction.

We need somebody to guide us and direct us in the way that we should go, because we have so many questions. Where did I come from? What’s this world about? Why am I here? What really matters to me? And it would be, I think, cruel of a God that would say, “All right, I give you this capacity to ask all these questions, but I’m not going to give you the answers.” Well, he does want to give us the answers, but not like other answers have been given by other leaders, meaning sometimes we have leaders in our life — sometimes it’s a parent; sometimes it’s a religious leader; sometimes it’s a boss; sometimes it’s a whoever — that could care less about what we think or what we feel — the impact of what they’re saying to us. But they will tell us, “This is what you have to do.” And I would call that control. And there’s nothing in human nature that responds very positively to control, because it somehow feels wrong, because it denies one most important aspect that God created in each of us, and that’s the freedom to make our own decisions, to create our own world, all of that.

And so how does God then fulfill his responsibility to take care of us? Not by controlling us, not by telling us what to do. The only real commandments that God gave us are ten very simple rules, and when you look at them, they make total sense to our human nature. Human beings have always needed a power greater than themselves. So to say that we need to believe in a God, we need to spend time with him, we need to use his power in the way that he intended it to, that makes total sense, or that there are things that we need to do in relationship to each other. We should honor the promises we make. We should honor the people that give us life. We shouldn’t steal. We shouldn’t kill. We shouldn’t lie. We should not envy and want things that other people have to the point of being dissatisfied with ourselves. All of that makes total sense. So those rules to me never feel like they’re controlling us. It’s just they’re awakening us to who we are.

But let’s face it. Living in the world today, more than any other time, we have voices all around us that try to tell us what is real, what is true, and the thing that’s so unique about this Feast of Christ, the King is that we are celebrating the fact that we do have a King, someone who has power over us who could do anything he wants, in a sense, because he created the whole world. But what he does and who he is, is so radically different than we see so many rulers that are in the world today and have always been in the world, where they become tyrannical and completely disregard one’s individual human freedom. Then we have a God that believes and trusts in our human nature that he created, that deep inside of us we have a capacity to make the best possible decision about any situation that comes up. We have that in us in a seed form, but what he does, what he promises to do, as our King and our leader, is given to us in the gospel when he is standing before Pilate and there is this question: “So you’re a King?” Jesus said, “Yeah, I am a King. You say I’m a King. I am a King, but my kingdom is different from your kingdom. My kingdom is a kingdom of truth, not power over people but truth. What I came into the world to do was to awaken people to who God the Father truly is.” He is a God who has a gift for every one of us, and the gift is he will speak to them, share with them the essence of who he is. He is truth. He is reality. He is the source of everything that is.

It’s all — all of this is a reflection of who God is, and you and I are reflections of him. But the thing that is so unique about us, that I love so much, is that he has asked us to be co-creators, co-partners with him in the world as it unfolds in the work that he has as a teacher, as one who shares the truth with everyone. He said, “I want you to be the recipient of my truth, but I also want you to be the one who brings truth to other people.” So we have this flow of — I call it the flow of life. It’s the flow of the truth. If we live in a kingdom of truth, and truth is the thing that is the most core ingredient in everything we do, that’s going to bring us to the place that we, as our very nature has created us to be, that we’re going to find a life of fullness. The fullness of our life is not the way we often think it is. We think fullness might be being the strongest, the most powerful, the most in control, the most effective in controlling other people. All those images that we have sometimes about what it means to be powerful, I guess, needs to be tempered with this voice inside of us, this divine voice that comes in and says, “I want to talk to you. I want to share who I am and who you are with you, and I want to give you the wisdom that you need to make your own decisions.” Isn’t that interesting? In the kingdom of God, God does not want to make our decisions for us. That’s what a lot of leaders do. “You all think this way. You all believe this way.” No, no. He wants you and me to make a decision based on the truth that he shares with us, and what that truth that comes into us through whatever means God is going to use — sometimes it comes through another person; sometimes it comes through an angel. We have these beings all around us that are speaking to us, giving us advice, giving us direction, opening our eyes to see things.

We also have a community of saints, all these dead people, so-called dead people, that are around us, and one of the things I’ve learned is how wonderful it is to trust in the voice of those that you’ve known who have died. We’ve always been taught to pray to the great saints that we know are in heaven, and there was always this fear of turning to somebody who wasn’t in heaven and asking them to guide us because they’re involved in another world that is, let’s say, in purgatory, or they’re in hell or whatever. Think about it. We were always told to just pray to the great saints that were canonized, but it doesn’t make any sense to me that we wouldn’t pray to my mother, my father, my brothers, my sister that died. Anyone in my life that has died, I would want them to be the one giving me insight, and they want to, and they do. Everyone’s had experiences with the dead that are so real, whether it’s in a dream or in a vision or whatever. They want to talk to us, and all these images that I’m using of talking to someone is the image of the truth — the truth, the truth coming.

And here’s the thing that I love about our human nature. Our truth, how do you know it’s true? That’s the most interesting thing, and you know the truth, because you are made in a way that is absolutely hardwired to respond positively to truth and to respond negatively to that which is not true. Do we really need to be told it’s wrong to lie or to steal or to kill? No, that makes total sense. That’s what our nature is. We’re just used to that in a really primitive kind of way or a really over-simplified way to say that, when God is — when you’re struggling with an issue, “I’ve got to make a decision. What’s the truth in this situation? How do I adapt to the situation that I’m now in so that I can find peace, or how do I give to another person the peace I wish they had? What do I do? What do I say?” When we have all those kinds of questions, we don’t know what to do. Ideas come in, and they come in from all different places. Different voices are out there all around us. In fact, there’s probably a voice out there on the Internet or somewhere that — it sounds official — that will tell you every conceivable way in which you should handle a situation, and let’s say the majority of those are going to be disasters.

How is it that you can hear a voice and know that it’s God’s voice, know that it’s God’s voice coming to you through an angel, through a deceased person, through another person, through a situation, through a song you hear, whatever? There’s a million ways in which God will be speaking to your soul when you’re struggling with something that you have to make a decision and you don’t know what to do. And here’s how you know that it’s true: it’s because there’s something already in you that is the truth, and when those two connect, when that voice that comes to you from whatever form that God wants to send it to you, connects with that thing that is placed deep inside of you. That’s when you make the decision. That’s when you know what to do.

Jeremiah said it so, so powerfully. When people kept looking for rules and laws to follow and, “How do we know what to do, and who do we turn to, to give us the direction we need,” he said, “Well, look, God’s doing something for you. He’s going to take his rules, his laws. He’s going to write them on your heart, and if they’re written on your heart, then when you hear them echoed back and it connects with that thing that’s already written inside of you. You know when you have a voice that tells you something, “This is the right thing to do,” and all of a sudden — it’s not because of who they are or their authority. It’s all of a sudden you’ll say, “Oh, my God, you’re right. That’s it. I feel it. I know it.” What is that? Well, we can call it conscience. A conscience is that gift we have deep inside of us that we already know the truth, and so when somehow the voices come that are conflicting from outside of us, we go to that inner voice. The inner voice says, “No, this is the way this has got to be done.” Okay, that’s the same thing I’m talking about. We can use the word conscience. We can use the inner voice. We can use the seed of the truth in us. It’s all the same thing. It’s this great, incredible gift that you and I have.

And how do we make ourselves more sensitive to it? What do we do? Well, first of all, we believe that I have deep inside of me a knowledge of what’s real and what’s true in seed form. It needs to be awakened, nurtured, developed. We believe that there’s a God who wants more than anything else for us to listen to his voice. So we have a God, a Father who is speaking to us constantly. If you want a model of what it’s like to be in a relationship with this God, look at Jesus. Whenever things got tough, what did he do? He went away and talked to his Father. Whenever we have a hard decision to make, what do we do? Go to the Internet and look it up. No. No, we go to inside, to the Father’s presence inside of us and just take time, and I think the most beautiful thing that God would ask from you and from me, to be able to listen as openly as possible, is first and foremost we have a willingness to say, “I don’t care what it is that is going to be the answer. I want it to be right. I want it to be the most effective thing.” If you can get yourself in that disposition where you don’t have a prejudice, “Please don’t let it be this, or don’t let it be that,” — no. “I’m open to whatever it is that I am supposed to do in this situation.” And then wait and listen and wait and ask again, and go to authorities that might help you with understanding the issues involved. The church has always been that sort of wonderful source of wisdom when it comes to moral issues, particularly in difficult issues, and you need to get the information that’s necessary to make the right decision. And that can be done objectively through going to read something or to study something.

All of that is important, but nothing is as important as believing that you have voices that come to you from God directly, his voice indirectly through other spiritual forces, and they’re there to do the work of awakening you to this kingdom of truth. And there’s nothing like it. When you have a conviction that is so clearly yours and you feel it resonating through your body, you’ll know that you’re in the kingdom of God. And does he keep you there all the time? No. And is there reason for doubt and for struggling to find the truth? Yes, because every time we’re in a struggle and we go back to find it, we discover another aspect of it. It’s like this beautiful diamond that keeps moving and twisting around, and another facet hits your eye and another facet, another aspect. What a gift. What an incredibly wonderful gift to have that promise of our Messiah, our King share his wisdom with you and with me whenever we ask.

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Daniel 12:1-3 | Hebrews 10:11-14, 18 | Mark 13:24-32

Grant us, we pray, O Lord, our God, the constant gladness of being devoted to you, for it is full and lasting happiness to serve with constancy the author of all that is good. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

It’s so interesting to me how that piece of music, that was written for this show, has a way of enabling me to put together the thoughts that I have after listening to the different readings and hopefully have something life-giving to share with you. There are two major themes in this set of readings that strike me. One is the image of a promise in the first reading and something about understanding in the gospel, understanding the promise. From the time that God created human beings, he established a relationship with them. It’s clear, from the story of Adam and Eve, that God did not create human beings aWe’ve come to the end of ordinary time, and next Sunday, we will celebrate the Feast of Christ the King. So in a sense, this is the last chance I have to summarize, if I think I can do that, summarize the thoughts of this amazing story of what God wants us to understand and what he wants us to see. And a funny thing, or not funny so much, but the interesting thing to me is the way the end of each year comes. It’s always a cataclysmic event that’s like everything is going to be exposed and broken open, and the sky is falling, and the earth is opening up and devouring those who didn’t really produce very much to please God and all of these end of the world kind of images. And that’s very, very dangerous, because this is not about the end of the world. It’s about the end of a way of seeing God.

The New Testament is so radical, so much a departure from the Old Testament that, when one opens one’s heart to it, when one’s opened one’s imagination, what is going to happen is there’s this falling apart of a whole system that we’ve created around us, and that system is fundamentally a binary system of right and wrong, good and evil, saved and unsaved, dividing the world into two parts. And it’s interesting that the Old Testament is designed and was always designed — well, all of God’s revelations are perfectly timed for where human nature is, and you have to go back 4,000 years ago to get a sense of what the people were like when Abraham was asked by God to call a people together. It was the Bronze Age, and that Bronze Age was the time when the alphabet, or I should say written language was finally put together so people could write stories and not just have them as oral traditions. I think the wheel was even discovered during that time, or at least came into use very much. So human beings 4,000 years ago, when this God began to reveal to himself who he is. They were pretty simple people, much like children, compared to the consciousness that we have today. So it makes total sense that the thing that he would do is create a world in which there would be a kind of simple message that fit their brains, their understanding at the time, and when we’re younger, we understand things in a very simple, binary way. When you’re two-years-old, you understand that your parents are going to tell you yes or no about what you do, good or bad. “Good little boy. You ate your food.” “Bad little boy.” Well, you’re not supposed to say bad little boy to children, but anyway, you might say, “You’re starting on chewing on something that’s going to make you sick. Bad, bad, bad. Don’t do that.” So it’s very much a part of the world in which we are evolving and growing in a relationship with a God who was hidden for so many centuries. There were always gods around, and they were always mean kind of characters that demanded a lot of attention, and I would say not very compassionate.

So what I think we have to understand very vividly is that, when Jesus comes into the world and describes a world that is based in not binary, black and white, right and wrong but in some kind of incredibly mysterious world that is filled with not so much justice — and that’s one way to talk about binary world. It’s right, or it’s wrong. You go to jail, or you’re acquitted or whatever. No, it’s this new world of mercy. Mercy, what is that, mercy? Well, the interesting thing about mercy to me is that it has this quality about it that is so nurturing and so life-giving, and so when I’m thinking about what it is that is so shattering to the world, when Jesus is finally fully revealing who he is, we have that image in the first reading about this work that has to be done for human beings to be freed from sins and that sins are the great downfall of human beings.

Let me go back to the opening prayer is what I really wanted to say, because that opening prayer is so beautiful when it says, “I am so, so delighted, and it’s so fulfilling for me to work for someone who is so good, so good.” And as a priest, you perhaps as a parent, as a person who struggles with ideas in their head that are sometimes unacceptable, we fall into the trap of the binary world that is in the way that God is imagined by us where he is judgmental and angry and condemning when we aren’t really fulfilling what we’re supposed to do. And when you think about that, that is the way the Old Testament is written. In the book of Deuteronomy, which we looked at last week, there’s that image of God being the God who said, “I want you to love me with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your soul, and then I want you to go into a new land.” In the next chapter he says, “And this new land is owned by another tribe, and you’re going to get rid of them, and you’re going to get all the things, which they built,” which doesn’t really sound fair. “And you kick all those people out.” And then God goes on to say, “And if you don’t, if they don’t leave, then kill them. Destroy them, because if you leave them and they stay in that particular place, then they are going to infiltrate into your way of seeing me, and they’re going to rob you of who I’m really trying to tell you I am. And so if you do that, I’ll kill you.” And to us that sounds so awful, but to the people at the time, that was what gods did. And so the God of Israel, the God that is, had to reveal himself like the other gods in order to get our attention so that he can slowly, slowly, over 2,000 years, get them ready, from the time of Abraham to the time of Jesus, to get them ready to understand who he really is.

And he’s the God of mercy. He’s the God that says, “If somebody strikes you on one side of your cheek, then turn and offer him the other. If they come in and rob you and take things away, then run after them and say, ‘You didn’t get this also.’” It’s such a radical change. That’s why the images in this final times of the church years always is about the sky is falling, and everything is falling apart. And what it is, is that binary system is being destroyed, and you take away a binary world from people who are living in it — these are the things you have to do; these are the things you should never do — and you cloud that with, “Well, sometimes that’s wrong.” Well, but what about the intention? What about the person engaged in this struggle? What about human conscience? These are things that a binary world goes nuts over. In fact, you can look at an extremely conservative religious person, and they have this almost — you get the feeling sometimes, when you talk to them, they’re almost happy when they can say, “Those people are all going to be condemned. They’re all going to burn in hell, and we’re not. We’re going to be saved, and we’re the loved ones. God loves us, because we do everything right.”

And you know how God feels about righteousness, how Jesus talked about it in the New Testament. He basically said, “That’s not what I’m looking for. I’m not looking for somebody that has developed and grown into some kind of perfect person and doing everything.” Think of the rich man. When he came to Jesus and said, “Look, I’ve done everything. I have followed every single rule and every single law.” And he must have been so confident and so full of himself, and what I love about Jesus’ response to that was he just said, “God love you. I love you. I know that you think you’re really doing the best thing possible, but you’re so far from the kingdom, because basically the issue is not in making yourself into someone who is perfect but is being freed of all those external ideals that don’t really have anything to do with the heart that is receptive and open to a presence of God that wants to live inside of you and, through you, offer life, goodness to those who are in the darkest places.” We are here in this world to do this work of ministering to those who are not achieving greatness and fullness. Isn’t it funny how you look at the whole focus of the ministry of Jesus went to the people who were in most need of what? Understanding, compassion, mercy, and you look back at the time that Jesus walked the earth.

And you look at the way the Old Testament had formed them, and it was so incredibly off-center for what Jesus wants people to see. If you were a believing Jew and you were following all the rules and laws and you saw somebody who was on the side of the road, in trouble, and you knew they were not following the rules and laws, you were obligated not to go near them. If you were a believing Jew and someone who God really was favoring, you would walk past that person, because they weren’t worth anything. And it was because God was punishing them. Everyone who had negative experiences in life were being punished by God. Well, if you take that system of a punishing God, a God who loves you, who follows every regulation and every rule, and you find comfort in that, and then comes Jesus and starts revealing this message — ad all the negative, horrible things that are described at the end times, they weren’t about — they’re not about the end of the world. They’re about the end of the binary world of the Old Testament, at the end of that kind of over-simplified division of all things, and what God is saying, when you let go of that, you have nothing. If that’s the thing that holds your life together, then it’s like the sky is falling, and the light that you thought was so bright and so clear for you is all of a sudden dark. That is the death that Jesus talks about in the New Testament. Unless you die to that old system, you can’t find the life that is your inheritance. Wow, that’s really, really different.

And why is it that people are so drawn to that binary world? What is it about it that is so seductive? And I think it’s simply that it feeds the mind, and the mind works in a binary way. And so the mind understands either/or, but you know what? The message of Jesus, this message that I long to share with you week after week is not something that I want you to be listening with your mind. And there’s nothing wrong with the mind. It’s an absolutely essential tool. If we don’t have it, we’d be mush and all that kind of stuff, but no. But think about it. It’s the heart that I’m talking to. It’s the heart that understands this world of mercy, compassion, empathy. The mind has really a hard time with it, and so what I’m asking you to do and reflect with me at the end of this year, when we’ve been listening to Mark go through his whole memory of this Jesus figure, what he’s really trying to do, what he would want, if you could talk to Mark right now and say, “We’re still listening to your message.” I think it’s fascinating to think about Mark and the evangelists and who they are, thinking of, “They’re listening to my story again. Here’s another congregation listening to the story. I hope they get it. I hope they get what I meant.” But what he would want them to know is that I am talking to your heart, not your mind.

And it’s so interesting when you find someone who is rigidly living in a binary world. If you bring a problem to them or you ask them to give you some advice, it just always seems so sharp-edged and hurts because in it is always an unconscious condemnation that, “Why haven’t you done it right?” And the expectation that you and I are supposed to be doing everything right, that we’re supposed to be sinless. We’re not supposed to have sexual drives. We’re not supposed to have a desire to break a promise. We’re not supposed to want to lie. We’re not supposed to want to dishonor people that we should honor. We’re not supposed to have that? No, that’s human nature. That’s who we are, and when you start with human beings, with this kind of demanding a certain kind of rigid adherence to an external law — and that’s all that we’re allowed to be in a relationship with somebody who also is following that law, meaning that, if you’re not doing it, you’re kicked out, just like in the Old Testament. That’s the way it was considered. If you were not one of the in members, you were an outsider, and outsiders were valueless, without any value. That’s so amazing that we could actually get into a way of thinking that, when somebody isn’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing, they are of no value. When it’s New Testament, when you understand the message of Jesus, you understand that his major role, the thing he came into the world to do is to finish and complete the message of the Old Testament. And the references to him in the Old Testament are so many that you cannot begin to imagine that the story of the Old Testament is not connected to the story of Jesus. It’s all there. It’s all predicted. It’s all there so that, if you’re following the story carefully, you’re seeing this slow evolution of change and growth, and it brings one into the moment where that catastrophic shift is not going to be so impossible.

I know people today that when you talk about mercy and the individual conscience, the right of every human being that Vatican II so supported to make their own moral choices when it’s not something black and white, a binary issue — it’s not something you can say, “Well, if I do this, it’s all going to work out. If I don’t do that, it’s all going to fall apart, or if I do the other thing, it’s all going to fall apart.” That’s not the way the world is. It’s always — and I don’t want to just oversimplify by saying it’s the lesser of two evils, but that’s part of it, goes into it. But when we have that strict, strict binary world, then there’s something, I would say, that’s — what’s the word I want — abusive. Abusive to the dignity and the beauty of an individual who comes into this world and is affected by everything that has happened to them, and they end up being strong in certain areas and weak in others. It’s not necessary they chose those directions of their life, but when they’re in that situation of growing in consciousness of who they really are, they flourish in an environment of mercy — mercy, not a binary world of judgment, of right or wrong and condemnation.

So it’s amazing to me that we have so many struggles today, even on every issue where people are divided and separated, and it’s one thing to be divided and separated over an issue, over what we believe, but why is it, along with that in the brain, that we come up with this idea of condemnation?And I think you’d say, “Well, you get it from the Old Testament. ”It’s all over the Old Testament. So we get it in sort of a way that reminds us that is the part of what human nature’s like when it’s not fully developed and not evolved far enough. And if we think that the world should be all fully developed and that this life that we’re called to live as believers in a God who longs to use us to help other people. If we think that’s all supposed to have been done by now, we shouldn’t still be working on all these problems, no. No, it’s always going to be that tension between a binary world and the world of mercy. It’s always going to be there, because we are generation after generation that come into this world. And what a joy that opening prayer says to all of us when it says it’s so wonderful and so valuable and life-giving to work for a God that is good. So when somebody is working for a God that is judgmental and demeaning and demanding and threatening, you know that you’re not in the right place. So God bless this world that you and I have grown to understand, the world of mercy, the world of understanding and compassion, and our challenge is to live it in the midst of judgment and condemnation, not play their game but live as God has called us to live. Amen.nd then set them off on their own but rather started by having an intimate relationship with them. They lived together in a garden. Adam and Eve were naked as they walked around, completely comfortable with who they were, yet he had something he was asking from them. And the thing I think is interesting about the things that God asks from us, because in some ways it sounds like he’s always asking us to do something we don’t really want to do, and if we do what we don’t want to do for him, it shows we love him much more than we love ourselves, but it’s much more complex than that. No, because the one thing from the very beginning, if you know the heart of God, is it’s fully revealed from the very beginning to the time when the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles. You’re going to find that this God, this wonderful God, has one intention, and that is we become who we’re intended to be, not slaves to a law or rules but engaged in a relationship with him where we understand who he is and what his role is in our life and what he’s asking us to participate in with him in this world.

So it’s important to go back to the beginning then, in a sense, and see that, when God began his relationship with us, the first thing he asked us to do is to be careful with our judgments, the judgment of right and wrong. There’s something so clear about this early story of God’s relationship with human beings that human beings were at a certain period in their own evolution, and the thing they really understood, much like a child understands, they understood right and wrong. Do this; that’s right. Don’t do that; that’s wrong. It’s called a binary world where everything is divided. Even if you look at the creation story, God divided the world up into two parts. There was darkness, and then there was light. There was earth, and then there was sky. There was water and earth. It’s an easy, simple way to understand this mysterious thing we call life on this planet with God engaged in a relationship with us.

And so in that early, early test that Adam and Eve were put through, one of the things they were exposing to themselves, as God always puts us in situations where he doesn’t have to teach us about ourselves. We discover, sometimes with pleasure, because we see we’re stronger than we thought, or we see we’re weaker than we thought, whatever. But basically, he’s always revealing to us, through the events of our lives, who we are and who he is, and what Adam and Eve realize is that they had this over-simplified notion of what was right and wrong. What they gave in to was something that seems so natural to human beings. They gave in to what was best for them, even though it wasn’t what God wanted, meaning it wasn’t the journey that God was asking them to go on with him. They chose to be like God from the very beginning. That was the temptation. The devil simply said, though he isn’t the devil — I think it was human nature — said, “All right, I’ve got two choices: obey God and do what he says, or don’t do what he says. And the promise of not doing what he says is that we will be autonomous, strong. We will be like him.” And that attraction to being as good as you can possibly be and to be pleasing even to God, to present yourself as perfect, you know what that feels like. We all have that. We’re given the option of following a rule that you didn’t quite understand why you weren’t supposed to follow it or becoming great. Yeah, I think we’d all choose, “I’d like to be great. I would even like God to see me as the greatest I can be so he’ll love me,” because that’s what we all ultimately want, to be loved by God, by others. So interesting.

So you take that beginning of the relationship, and it sets a tone, that God said, “All right, this is not the way you’re going to please me, by becoming perfect. You’re going to please me by a very different process.” And that’s what the promise is, and the one thing I would say he likes more than anything else, if you want to say, “What is it that would please God more than anything else that I would do for him,” pay attention to him and let him in your life and let him work with you, in you, for you. He wants intimacy, and when Adam and Eve chose to perform for God instead of allow God to enter into them and help them to grow and change, they wanted to become already what God and only God can help us become, then they had to leave the garden. They had to go and figure this out, and so when Adam and Eve left the garden, it wasn’t because they were so much punished by God, but they chose to live on their own. And so God, in his infinite mercy and wisdom and love, said, “Okay, humans. We’ve set the stage for this entire salvation history story, and you’re going to go off, and you’re going to be autonomous. And you’re going to work for me, you think, by doing everything you’re supposed to do and doing it as well as you can and getting a reward.”

And in a way, you see, as the evolution of the story of salvation continues, we see then God eventually calling the people together and saying, “Look, I want a relationship, not with just one of you but with you as a community.” So Abraham called the people together and said, “I want you to be my people.” It’s so interesting, that whole notion of God’s favorite people. It seems to fly in the face of the fullness of who he is, that he loves everything and everyone he’s created, sinners, saints. In the beginning, he revealed himself as one who wanted a certain group of people to be attached to him in some close, intimate way, and there were many, many gods at that time. So the God of Israel, the God who is, had a hard time convincing these people of who he was, and he is the only God. And so the whole story begins with that intention of God to create an intimate relationship with human beings, and so he decided he would do it by being on their side when it came to dealing with the one thing, at the time, 4,000 years ago, that everybody lived in total fear of, and that was enemies. Enemies, if you had an enemy, that was — everybody, I guess, had them. People were attacking each other. When one community would grow and develop and another community would see them and see they had more than they had, they’d come and pillage their place and take everything and drive them out. It was a rough world, a tough world, and so if God could be the source of their strength to overcome enemies, that would be a very attractive thing for any human being to believe in that particular God. And so that’s how God began to reveal himself. “I’m the God that will conquer your enemies, and I want you to love me for it. I want you to be my people. I want you to forget about all the other gods that you’ve known and all the other gods that people will try to seduce you into believing in. I want a relationship that’s exclusive with you. You’ll be my exclusive group, and I’ll be your exclusive God.” Interesting. And that kind of created a very interesting community, because when you listen to the promises that God makes in this first reading, he’s saying, “I want you to fall in love with me because of what I do for you, and I do conquer your enemies.” So love is the key to this. “Love me, love me, love me,” but the love that God is talking about there is just a mere shadow of what it ultimately will become in the New Testament, because that love is more allegiance. And listen to the way God describes his relationship with human beings, nothing like is revealed in Jesus, but you go to the next chapter in Deuteronomy. What you’re going to hear is God talking about the Israelites’ enemies, and he’s saying, “Now, when you go into their places, their cities that they’ve already built, and they have streets and buildings and cisterns. Go in there, and drive them all out. And if you don’t, you can’t get them to leave, then destroy them. Murder them, and then be sure they’re all gone when you take over their city. And when you’ve taken it over, if you leave them there and they start infiltrating and robbing you of your commitment to me and drawing you to other gods, then I’ll kill you.” It’s not a very warm, loving God. It’s a God of justice. So when he says, “I want you to love me with all your heart and all your mind,” I think it’s when he’s saying, “I want you to trust me, and don’t ever doubt me.” And that’s different.

So there’s an evolution in this whole process of understanding who God is, and so many times we live in the Old Testament where the God that is, is the God that demands us to follow rules and laws. And if we don’t, we’re falling short, and the only way he can love us is not so much that we just have allegiance to him, but allegiance to a misunderstanding that we’re supposed to be perfect, we’re supposed to be without sin. That’s the killer. That’s the one that gets in the way, and so what you see in the whole evolution of this beautiful salvation history story is you see this God over the centuries through the prophets and patriarchs and prophets and scribes and priests and sacrifices and temple. All he’s trying to do is lead us to a person, a man who absolutely was fully human, who’s also a God who is fully God. That right away says there’s something about this that we’ll never fully fathom with our binary brains, but this man/God comes in and reveals a way of working with human nature where it’s not about demanding justice or following rules and laws that can be violently negative to other people. No, it’s about learning something about this mysterious power that is best described as the power that happens to a human being when they allow divinity to enter into them. There is something more than allegiance to a God because he’s going to punish me if I don’t follow him. No, there’s this deep desire to be like this God/man Jesus. That’s our challenge, to fall in love with him. God in the Old Testament is easy to be afraid of, and it’s easy to be motivated to do what he says, because he’s very quick to say, “If you don’t do what I ask you to do, I’ll kill you.” And then you have this invitation to see God in the flesh, in the New Testament, and he’s the one who says, “If you have an enemy, love him. Don’t do any harm to him, and if he does harm to you, he slaps you on the face, well then, turn the face in the other direction and let him slap you again. If he steals from you, offer him more.” Think about how radical this incarnate, loving God is compared to the Old Testament, and the reason I want to stress that is because we so easily fall back into the Old Testament, not simply because we remember those stories of God’s punishing people who don’t do what they’re supposed to do. Not because of that so much, but because it’s our human nature. We’re prone to that. That’s the part that is more natural to us, and you look at the evolution of human beings throughout the history of the evolution of human beings from the beginning. You’ll see an amazing transformation of an ability to be beyond the need to be, let’s say, in control and in power.

There’s a movement in human nature that moves away from autonomy and perfection into a kind of neediness, in a healthy way, for God to be in us, enabling us to be the source of life and strength to other people. And that happens in each human life. That’s what’s so fascinating to me. We come into the world, and we need a God image, a parent image that says no, no to that and yes to this and no to that. Yes and no, that’s what a two-, three-year-old has to live with, and that’s because that’s who they are, and then they evolve slowly and begin to understand the thing that’s more important than being told what to do and what not to do is to be loved. And they understand and begin to feel what it means to be loved, even though they do bad things, and after they’re punished by their parents, they’re held and kissed and loved. And then they learn, by being loved, that they can love other people, and there’s some joy in that. And that joy awakens something in them that is their talent, their gift. And as you mature and get older, you have this gift inside of you, and you want to develop it, and you want to use it, and you want to give it away to people, because the joy of seeing someone grow and change and enjoy something that you’ve created is greater than anything you could do to get attention to yourself. That’s our story, and that’s the story of God revealing himself to us over these centuries.

So loving God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and loving your neighbor as yourself, adding that last part, even though it’s mentioned somewhere in the Old Testament also that way, but think about it. It’s not just loving God and doing whatever he says no matter how painful it is for other people. No, if you love God, then there’s no way to be in love with God without feeling his love in return, and when you feel that love in return, it transforms you. And your love is not simply for God but also for every other human being, and most especially there’s love for you, love for yourself. It goes in the same direction. The more you love God, really love him and feel him in your life as he really is and feel the energy and the life that comes to you through his love, you’re going to find a way of loving yourself beyond anything you ever imagined. And loving yourself is the key to being able to love other people, and so the mystery of redemption, we always think it’s the way that we finally get into heaven. Well, redemption is not that you can live a terrible life and finally still be saved. No, it’s being saved from the kind of selfish separation that sin creates between us and with God. Redemption is being able to love and understand the fullness of what it means to be loved by God and to love God and love your neighbor. It’s a wonderful, wonderful thing to be engaged in that process, and that’s what I pray we do together in this program. Sunday after Sunday, ponder these stories. Try to enter into them more fully and engage in this incredible, exciting process of transformation, evolution until we can feel the oneness that is beyond our imagining. It doesn’t take away pain, but it takes away that awesome, awesome fear that we’re not enough or that God isn’t the one who he says he is. He’s a lover, and we have nothing to fear. Amen.

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1 Kings 17:10-16 | Hebrews 9:24-28 | Mark 12:38-44 or 12:41-44

Almighty and merciful God, graciously keep from us all adversity so that unhindered in mind and body alike we may pursue in freedom of heart the things that are yours. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen.

So often I go back to the Old Testament, to the book of Genesis and the story of creation and look carefully into that relationship that God had with Adam and Eve, and it’s fascinating what you learn from that. You see something so fascinating, human beings, nature in conflict with the generosity and the love of a God who created us and wanted to do everything he could to care for us and give us all that we longed for. And one of the things that I learn from that story is, in one of the stories of creation, when God created a man, after he created the man, he realized something. It’s not good for a man to be alone. I just want to start with that theme. It’s not good for us to be alone, and it’s interesting. When I think about the image of communion, union with other people, I can’t imagine my life without relationships. I can’t imagine what it’s like to not have someone to listen to me when I’m trying to figure something out that they can see and show me what I’m missing. I can’t imagine what it’s like not to have the feeling of giving somebody something that they didn’t have before. It makes you just feel so good, and so it’s so clear that there is this flow of life that goes between us. And it’s so fascinating that we’re living through something so unique these days with the pandemic, and we’ve been separated from so many normal ways in which we communicate with others. It’s had interesting impacts on all of us. One of the things, I think for sure, we might feel a little crazier than we normally feel, part of the lack of balance, but the other thing is that there’s just something — something so natural about leaning on someone. And yet there’s a part of you and a part of me that often feels that we should be autonomous, able to handle things on our own, to be strong, to be self-sufficient.

Listen to that first part of the story in the gospel when Jesus is talking about the things that people really don’t find attractive, even though the people that are engaged in them think are terribly attractive, and that is, when somebody has a sense that they have a position of power, some control over life, they have money or talent or whatever it is, good looks, and they act as if they have this sense of being without need. They are the source of everything they need, and they want people to acknowledge it and give homage to it and pay attention to it and thank them for it. And yet it’s so clear that that’s not really part of our human nature, the core of our human nature. The core of our human nature is designed to be in relationship with other sources of strength and power and to use that strength and power within us to be able to do something for other people. That’s what it means to be born into the likeness of God, and Genesis tells us that’s true, that human beings are the only creatures that God created that are like him. And that doesn’t mean we just look more like him than other people. No, our nature, the fullness of our nature — animals have a wonderful nature. They can have a nature that’s committed and faithful and, in a way, life-giving to other animals, but there’s nothing quite as complete or full as human nature, because it has the potential to evolve and grow into something so like a god that the model we have for this is the Savior, Jesus, who achieved the ultimate goal of what it means to be a human being. And that was to have this relationship with God that is so intimate and so close that we call him God, we say he’s God. Jesus is a human 100 percent and a God 100 percent. I love repeating that over and over again. I think I said it last Sunday, and it’s simply because it reminds me so much that whatever is at the heart of this relationship with God goes beyond the mind, the binary world of it’s either this or that. No, it can be both. Quantum physics teaches us that. Things can be both matter and spirit at the same time. Well, how does that work? I don't know, but it works.

So what I’m trying to get to is a very simple truth, is that we are never comfortable being not enough, and yet our nature tells us we are not enough. And when that nature tells us that, there’s something truthful in it that we need to embrace and take in, and so we look in the scriptures for images that give us some sense of who we’re becoming, what we’re engaged in. And you see these two women, one in the gospel, one in the first reading, widows. Widows had no resources of their own. They were dependent upon the goodness and kindness of other people, and in the first reading, we know that story well. I believe that you do. It’s the story of this widow who was alone and needy, and Elijah comes and favors her and even promises her that she’ll have a son. And she has the son, and she relies upon Elijah. And then Elijah comes back to her and asks her for something, and she doesn’t have anything to give. She’s absolutely empty. “I have no food to give you. I was just going to take the little that I have, the little that I am, and I was going to basically surrender to the fact that I don’t have enough, and I would just die. I would just cease to exist.” We don’t cease to exist sometimes when we don’t think we’re enough. We just cease to produce anything life giving. We lose energy. We lose self-worth. We lose a sense of we have something to accomplish, to do, and we can do it. We can do it. We can do it. That’s the thing we want to say over and over again, and yet the truth is, unless you can embrace the fact that you’re not enough and that we, the we, can’t do it, not as individuals doing their own thing. But the failure of faith is when we say we, God and I, can’t do it. Then we’re in trouble, because we don’t have the faith we’re supposed to have.

And it’s so interesting that, if you look at the gospel, in the Old Testament and New Testament together, you look at salvation history. You see over and over again people who have an experience of being called to do something really extraordinary, really wonderful. The prophets had that. Jesus had that as a man. So many times a prophet had that in the sense of wanting very much to convince people of something that they couldn’t see, and they often used the power of God to convince people that what they were saying was true. And miracles were performed by these men, these prophets, but the stories of prophets are fascinating, because even the prophet Elijah, who was very, very much aware of God working through him, at times he lost trust in God. And the one that I love the most is Jonah, who when God said, “All right, I will empower you to go to this town, called Nineveh, and you will warn them that something terrible is going to happen. I’m going to give you this gift of conviction. Your voice is going to be filled with such authority and power. You’re going to walk through this city. You’re going to tell them, ‘You have got to change, or God will destroy you,’ and they’ll listen to you. And that’s because I’m in you, working through you, and you and I together are so effective.” And he did it, and he didn’t like the answer. He didn’t like the response. Imagine, he was filled with God’s strength to accomplish something, but he himself didn’t want to see it happen, because he had a different attitude than God did and wanted people to be destroyed when they didn’t do what God wanted them to do. And so he walks away, and he doesn’t want to serve God anymore.

Isn’t that fascinating, this difficulty we have with dealing with our weaknesses and our powers? And that’s what I really want to talk about for a minute. How do you balance the two? Look at Jesus, how he saved the world. How did he make up for all the sins of the world? Some people think that God was such a vengeful God that he needed some major sacrifice to be made. Somebody would have to suffer so intensely, because God suffered every time we sinned. So he created his Son, and his Son had to offer his life as a sacrifice to make up for all human beings’ sins. That just doesn’t make sense to me, and it’s not good theology. No, when God entered into the world in the person of Jesus, he wanted to teach us what he wants from each of us, and this God/man Jesus is the model of what it means to be fully human, God dwelling in us, working through us, enabling us to accomplish the goal we’re here for. And the way he did that in Jesus is he had Jesus to a point in his ministry where he knew that he was in trouble, that there was something not functioning very well. He could feel that his miracles had probably caused more of a stir than he really wanted in terms of angering those who were in authority, because they didn’t have any way to discredit him when he was raising people from the dead, giving sight to the blind. What are you going to do with somebody like that? Say they’re crazy? Well, how do you talk about craziness when they’re so darn effective? And so Jesus must have known that things were getting really scary for him, and he was going to maybe be not so successful in the way he hoped to be successful. Think about it. Jesus as the man wanted to be successful. He wanted to do the job that God gave him to do, to change those people at the time that were lost in their lies and misconceptions of who God is. He wanted to do that. Otherwise he’s not fully human; he’s just playing a part. No, he was fully human, and so when he was in that Garden of Gethsemane, what he had to feel is that, “I don’t want to do this. I don’t have enough in me to do this. I’m scared. I’m so afraid, and I don’t want to be seen as a fool. I don’t want to be seen in the eyes of the people that I love and I’m trying to convince — I don’t want them to lose hope. I’ve given them all kinds of hope that I’m going to be the one who saves the world, and I’m going to look to them as somebody who failed.” And yet he says yes. He says, “Okay, I’ll do that.” He didn’t say it right away. He said no once, and then he said no again, and finally he said yes.

I love that part of Jesus, because it means that there’s a part of all of us that wants so badly to be able to accomplish the thing that we’re set out to do, and we want to be successful. And success is so frightening and scary when you think about it. Success, what does it mean? Accomplishing what I’m here to do? That would be wonderful, but it means so much more than that to an ego. It means being the best, being the best at what we do, being the one who’s better than everyone else, whatever that is, that need that is part of our core human nature that unfortunately never leaves us. I’m 81 years old. I’ve been a priest for over 54 years. I still struggle with the same fears of not being enough, not being able to say something that makes any sense, and all that, you’d think, “Well, that would go away with a lot of practice and a lot of confidence.” Well, I don’t think it’s ever supposed to go away, because it’s when we’re in that moment of saying, “I am not the source of what is going to happen here, but you’re asking me to do it, and you’re saying it’ll be effective. But I’m not the one in charge of it.” What better description could I come up with in that that’s what it means to overcome sin? That’s why Jesus saved the world from sin by giving us an example of the way you do it. The core sin is the sin of Adam and Eve, the sin of autonomy, the sin of wanting to be perfect, just like God, and we never realize that that’s really what it is. We always think it’s our human mistakes. Yeah, our mistakes are not always good. Sometimes they’re terrible, and sometimes they cause people tremendous pain. But at the same time, you don’t grow unless you have mistakes, and that’s why God said, “I’ve got to establish a new relationship with you where I’m never holding anything you do against you. It never harms our relationship, no matter how far you’ve drifted from who I know you are, and I trust that you will be that person one day, or you’ll reach the level that you’re called to reach in this life that you’re in right now.”

Perfection is not on the table as something we achieve. What we achieve is not perfection in the sense of being able to autonomously handle every situation and give the right answer to every question we’ve ever been asked. No, it’s about surrendering to what is, surrendering to the way it’s written, the story that God created with our life. And I can feel it, in a way, right now, just kind of coming into me when I feel like, if I can relieve myself from the anxiety that I am the source of everything that I do. If I can lay back and let failure happen and realize that very likely, not because of me, but because God pulls away his authority and his strength that flows through me just so I remember it’s not me, it’s him living inside of me, not overshadowing my humanity, not destroying it but never, never making it him. Does that make sense? We’re not — if God loves us and says, “I will — you can do all the things I do,” he’s not giving you that human power to do that, though that’s what I would like to do in my lower levels of consciousness, my binary world of either/or, either I’ve got the truth, or it doesn’t exist. We don’t possess things in order for them to be real. All of that needs to be let go of, I think.

Maybe that’s a good description of what it means to be poor. A woman who gives everything she has away in the treasury is seen by Jesus as, “Well, there’s one that’s got it.” And when Jesus saw that, maybe he was even thinking about himself and thinking, “I hope one day I’ll be able to do that, give away everything I have, everything that makes me feel good about myself.” And that’s what he did, and that’s what he’s asking us to do. But it gets hidden, gets hidden and distorted by the most natural thing, that part that the gospel started with. People love to be in charge, love to be the one in the room that’s the smartest. One loves to be the one that gives the best answer. Isn’t it interesting that people who achieve great heights, whether it’s entertainment or sports or any kind of super award — you’re the best. You wrote the best novel of the world. It isn’t fulfilling. It creates anxiety. “Well then, what do I do next? What’s the next great novel?” “I’m no longer the one that holds the world record.” And there’s great depression in that because — not because you’re not the best anymore but that you’ve put so much energy and time into becoming the best instead of doing that so that you can feel, people can feel God’s grace working through you, God being the source of your greatness. No, you want it for yourself, and don’t feel bad, because that’s who we are as human beings, and that’s who God loves the most, the ones that can admit that. Amen.

Father, we are amazing creatures.We have this longing to be everything you want us to be. At the same time, we love to be the best in the room. We have pride, and we also have humility — one is always there when the other one’s there. We’re in tension all the time, and that’s what you’ve invited us to live in. Just give us patience. That’s all I ask, patience and understanding and wisdom. We are harder on each other. We are even harder on ourselves. So bless us with patience and understanding and compassion. That’s what you have for us. Let us have it for ourselves and one another. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Deuteronomy 6:2-6 | Hebrews 7:23-28 | Mark 12:28b-34

Almighty and merciful God, by whose gift your faithful offer you rigxht and praiseworthy service, grant, we pray, that we may hasten without stumbling to receive the things you have promised. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen.

It’s so interesting to me how that piece of music, that was written for this show, has a way of enabling me to put together the thoughts that I have after listening to the different readings and hopefully have something life-giving to share with you. There are two major themes in this set of readings that strike me. One is the image of a promise in the first reading and something about understanding in the gospel, understanding the promise. From the time that God created human beings, he established a relationship with them. It’s clear, from the story of Adam and Eve, that God did not create human beings and then set them off on their own but rather started by having an intimate relationship with them. They lived together in a garden. Adam and Eve were naked as they walked around, completely comfortable with who they were, yet he had something he was asking from them. And the thing I think is interesting about the things that God asks from us, because in some ways it sounds like he’s always asking us to do something we don’t really want to do, and if we do what we don’t want to do for him, it shows we love him much more than we love ourselves, but it’s much more complex than that. No, because the one thing from the very beginning, if you know the heart of God, is it’s fully revealed from the very beginning to the time when the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles. You’re going to find that this God, this wonderful God, has one intention, and that is we become who we’re intended to be, not slaves to a law or rules but engaged in a relationship with him where we understand who he is and what his role is in our life and what he’s asking us to participate in with him in this world.

So it’s important to go back to the beginning then, in a sense, and see that, when God began his relationship with us, the first thing he asked us to do is to be careful with our judgments, the judgment of right and wrong. There’s something so clear about this early story of God’s relationship with human beings that human beings were at a certain period in their own evolution, and the thing they really understood, much like a child understands, they understood right and wrong. Do this; that’s right. Don’t do that; that’s wrong. It’s called a binary world where everything is divided. Even if you look at the creation story, God divided the world up into two parts. There was darkness, and then there was light. There was earth, and then there was sky. There was water and earth. It’s an easy, simple way to understand this mysterious thing we call life on this planet with God engaged in a relationship with us.

And so in that early, early test that Adam and Eve were put through, one of the things they were exposing to themselves, as God always puts us in situations where he doesn’t have to teach us about ourselves. We discover, sometimes with pleasure, because we see we’re stronger than we thought, or we see we’re weaker than we thought, whatever. But basically, he’s always revealing to us, through the events of our lives, who we are and who he is, and what Adam and Eve realize is that they had this over-simplified notion of what was right and wrong. What they gave in to was something that seems so natural to human beings. They gave in to what was best for them, even though it wasn’t what God wanted, meaning it wasn’t the journey that God was asking them to go on with him. They chose to be like God from the very beginning. That was the temptation. The devil simply said, though he isn’t the devil — I think it was human nature — said, “All right, I’ve got two choices: obey God and do what he says, or don’t do what he says. And the promise of not doing what he says is that we will be autonomous, strong. We will be like him.” And that attraction to being as good as you can possibly be and to be pleasing even to God, to present yourself as perfect, you know what that feels like. We all have that. We’re given the option of following a rule that you didn’t quite understand why you weren’t supposed to follow it or becoming great. Yeah, I think we’d all choose, “I’d like to be great. I would even like God to see me as the greatest I can be so he’ll love me,” because that’s what we all ultimately want, to be loved by God, by others. So interesting.

So you take that beginning of the relationship, and it sets a tone, that God said, “All right, this is not the way you’re going to please me, by becoming perfect. You’re going to please me by a very different process.” And that’s what the promise is, and the one thing I would say he likes more than anything else, if you want to say, “What is it that would please God more than anything else that I would do for him,” pay attention to him and let him in your life and let him work with you, in you, for you. He wants intimacy, and when Adam and Eve chose to perform for God instead of allow God to enter into them and help them to grow and change, they wanted to become already what God and only God can help us become, then they had to leave the garden. They had to go and figure this out, and so when Adam and Eve left the garden, it wasn’t because they were so much punished by God, but they chose to live on their own. And so God, in his infinite mercy and wisdom and love, said, “Okay, humans. We’ve set the stage for this entire salvation history story, and you’re going to go off, and you’re going to be autonomous. And you’re going to work for me, you think, by doing everything you’re supposed to do and doing it as well as you can and getting a reward.”

And in a way, you see, as the evolution of the story of salvation continues, we see then God eventually calling the people together and saying, “Look, I want a relationship, not with just one of you but with you as a community.” So Abraham called the people together and said, “I want you to be my people.” It’s so interesting, that whole notion of God’s favorite people. It seems to fly in the face of the fullness of who he is, that he loves everything and everyone he’s created, sinners, saints. In the beginning, he revealed himself as one who wanted a certain group of people to be attached to him in some close, intimate way, and there were many, many gods at that time. So the God of Israel, the God who is, had a hard time convincing these people of who he was, and he is the only God. And so the whole story begins with that intention of God to create an intimate relationship with human beings, and so he decided he would do it by being on their side when it came to dealing with the one thing, at the time, 4,000 years ago, that everybody lived in total fear of, and that was enemies. Enemies, if you had an enemy, that was — everybody, I guess, had them. People were attacking each other. When one community would grow and develop and another community would see them and see they had more than they had, they’d come and pillage their place and take everything and drive them out. It was a rough world, a tough world, and so if God could be the source of their strength to overcome enemies, that would be a very attractive thing for any human being to believe in that particular God. And so that’s how God began to reveal himself. “I’m the God that will conquer your enemies, and I want you to love me for it. I want you to be my people. I want you to forget about all the other gods that you’ve known and all the other gods that people will try to seduce you into believing in. I want a relationship that’s exclusive with you. You’ll be my exclusive group, and I’ll be your exclusive God.” Interesting. And that kind of created a very interesting community, because when you listen to the promises that God makes in this first reading, he’s saying, “I want you to fall in love with me because of what I do for you, and I do conquer your enemies.” So love is the key to this. “Love me, love me, love me,” but the love that God is talking about there is just a mere shadow of what it ultimately will become in the New Testament, because that love is more allegiance. And listen to the way God describes his relationship with human beings, nothing like is revealed in Jesus, but you go to the next chapter in Deuteronomy. What you’re going to hear is God talking about the Israelites’ enemies, and he’s saying, “Now, when you go into their places, their cities that they’ve already built, and they have streets and buildings and cisterns. Go in there, and drive them all out. And if you don’t, you can’t get them to leave, then destroy them. Murder them, and then be sure they’re all gone when you take over their city. And when you’ve taken it over, if you leave them there and they start infiltrating and robbing you of your commitment to me and drawing you to other gods, then I’ll kill you.” It’s not a very warm, loving God. It’s a God of justice. So when he says, “I want you to love me with all your heart and all your mind,” I think it’s when he’s saying, “I want you to trust me, and don’t ever doubt me.” And that’s different.

So there’s an evolution in this whole process of understanding who God is, and so many times we live in the Old Testament where the God that is, is the God that demands us to follow rules and laws. And if we don’t, we’re falling short, and the only way he can love us is not so much that we just have allegiance to him, but allegiance to a misunderstanding that we’re supposed to be perfect, we’re supposed to be without sin. That’s the killer. That’s the one that gets in the way, and so what you see in the whole evolution of this beautiful salvation history story is you see this God over the centuries through the prophets and patriarchs and prophets and scribes and priests and sacrifices and temple. All he’s trying to do is lead us to a person, a man who absolutely was fully human, who’s also a God who is fully God. That right away says there’s something about this that we’ll never fully fathom with our binary brains, but this man/God comes in and reveals a way of working with human nature where it’s not about demanding justice or following rules and laws that can be violently negative to other people. No, it’s about learning something about this mysterious power that is best described as the power that happens to a human being when they allow divinity to enter into them. There is something more than allegiance to a God because he’s going to punish me if I don’t follow him. No, there’s this deep desire to be like this God/man Jesus. That’s our challenge, to fall in love with him. God in the Old Testament is easy to be afraid of, and it’s easy to be motivated to do what he says, because he’s very quick to say, “If you don’t do what I ask you to do, I’ll kill you.” And then you have this invitation to see God in the flesh, in the New Testament, and he’s the one who says, “If you have an enemy, love him. Don’t do any harm to him, and if he does harm to you, he slaps you on the face, well then, turn the face in the other direction and let him slap you again. If he steals from you, offer him more.” Think about how radical this incarnate, loving God is compared to the Old Testament, and the reason I want to stress that is because we so easily fall back into the Old Testament, not simply because we remember those stories of God’s punishing people who don’t do what they’re supposed to do. Not because of that so much, but because it’s our human nature. We’re prone to that. That’s the part that is more natural to us, and you look at the evolution of human beings throughout the history of the evolution of human beings from the beginning. You’ll see an amazing transformation of an ability to be beyond the need to be, let’s say, in control and in power.

There’s a movement in human nature that moves away from autonomy and perfection into a kind of neediness, in a healthy way, for God to be in us, enabling us to be the source of life and strength to other people. And that happens in each human life. That’s what’s so fascinating to me. We come into the world, and we need a God image, a parent image that says no, no to that and yes to this and no to that. Yes and no, that’s what a two-, three-year-old has to live with, and that’s because that’s who they are, and then they evolve slowly and begin to understand the thing that’s more important than being told what to do and what not to do is to be loved. And they understand and begin to feel what it means to be loved, even though they do bad things, and after they’re punished by their parents, they’re held and kissed and loved. And then they learn, by being loved, that they can love other people, and there’s some joy in that. And that joy awakens something in them that is their talent, their gift. And as you mature and get older, you have this gift inside of you, and you want to develop it, and you want to use it, and you want to give it away to people, because the joy of seeing someone grow and change and enjoy something that you’ve created is greater than anything you could do to get attention to yourself. That’s our story, and that’s the story of God revealing himself to us over these centuries.

So loving God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and loving your neighbor as yourself, adding that last part, even though it’s mentioned somewhere in the Old Testament also that way, but think about it. It’s not just loving God and doing whatever he says no matter how painful it is for other people. No, if you love God, then there’s no way to be in love with God without feeling his love in return, and when you feel that love in return, it transforms you. And your love is not simply for God but also for every other human being, and most especially there’s love for you, love for yourself. It goes in the same direction. The more you love God, really love him and feel him in your life as he really is and feel the energy and the life that comes to you through his love, you’re going to find a way of loving yourself beyond anything you ever imagined. And loving yourself is the key to being able to love other people, and so the mystery of redemption, we always think it’s the way that we finally get into heaven. Well, redemption is not that you can live a terrible life and finally still be saved. No, it’s being saved from the kind of selfish separation that sin creates between us and with God. Redemption is being able to love and understand the fullness of what it means to be loved by God and to love God and love your neighbor. It’s a wonderful, wonderful thing to be engaged in that process, and that’s what I pray we do together in this program. Sunday after Sunday, ponder these stories. Try to enter into them more fully and engage in this incredible, exciting process of transformation, evolution until we can feel the oneness that is beyond our imagining. It doesn’t take away pain, but it takes away that awesome, awesome fear that we’re not enough or that God isn’t the one who he says he is. He’s a lover, and we have nothing to fear. Amen.

Father, we are your children. We remain children our whole life. We keep growing slowly, and we think we reach a certain level, and then there’s another level, and then there’s another level. So give us the energy and the strength that we need to continue to evolve and grow and change. It’s not easy for us as human beings. You know that, but all you ask is that we long for the gift, and the gift is you inside of us. So bless us with the consciousness of this great gift that you pour into us. Let us believe in you, and reveal to us who God really is. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Jeremiah 31:7-9 | Hebrews 5:1-6 | Mark 10:46-52

Almighty, everliving God, increase our faith, our hope, our charity. Make us love what you command so that we may merit what you promise. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen.

There’s an image in the response to our Psalm that I think is so beautiful, that implies that, when people are experiencing God moving in their life, they often find it’s somehow like a seed that’s planted. And it just sits there for a while, and it’s not that powerful and not that important. It’s just like the beginning of that song where it’s sort of soft, and then slowly it grows and becomes more full and more effective and more powerful in terms of changing the way we see the world and ourselves. Anyway, I hope each time you hear it — it’s going to be done after each of the set of readings, and I just pray it’ll be part of our time together. It’s not to be so much a time for meditating on what I said, but just let the music say what it says, which is really amazing to me.

Last week, you might remember, we had an image in the gospel that was an image of the disciples coming up to Jesus and saying, “Hey, we’d like you to do something for us.” Well, it was actually not all the disciples but just James and his brother John. They just asked if God would give them a place of great authority and great power, and they just thought that was a really good idea. And Jesus just looked at them and said, “You don’t even have any idea what you’re asking.” So as Mark’s gospel continues then, we have another person that asks Jesus to do something in the gospel, in this set of readings, and it’s just exactly what God would like everyone to ask him. “God, I want to see. I want insight. I want to know what this whole thing is about. Show me.” And so what we see in that story, a beautiful way in which it’s described by Mark, is that he’s sitting there, and he’s a beggar. And that right away sets up something really wonderful, because people who are most likely to open their hearts to the mystical and the mysterious are people who feel that the practical world is not enough. And so he cries out, “Help me. Have pity on me.” He must have heard about Jesus. He knew that he was a miracle worker and probably said, “I just want to have my eyes back.” But then there’s something so much deeper in it.

If you think about these stories, they’re not just about the people who are in the story, but they’re about us, humanity, about all of us. And so it’s so interesting that, in the time that Jesus walked the earth, there was an image of God is the source of everything. So if you were doing exactly what God wanted, your life was rich and full, and you were very happy, and you had no disease, no problems. But if you were blind or leprous or bad, that was because you sinned. So anybody that was in need would not be responded to by the people who were believers, because they were considered being punished by God, so they were ignored.

So here’s a man who’s probably sat there forever, people just passing him by and looking at him, saying, “He’s worthless.” But he hears this voice, or maybe he just — you couldn’t say he saw Jesus, but he must have been able to hear his voice or know that people were yelling his name. But he had a sense that he was there, and so he calls him Son of David. So he knew the scriptures and stuff, and so he just called out and said, “Please, please have pity on me.” And what’s so beautiful about Jesus in this story is that — let’s just say, there were other people shouting. So why did he hear this one voice? One voice, “Have pity on me.” It’s like the woman that he bumped into in the crowd where he felt something going out of him and when he healed her. But anyway, he turns around, and he calls the blind man. And all of a sudden, he hears these words that are so beautiful, and we think, for anybody who’s on their own and wondering why I can’t figure things out, when he hears, not only is God answering my call, but he’s calling me. Jesus is calling you. God is calling you into a life with him. God is asking you to open your heart and believe and see what he’s really about. Take courage. And then I love this.

You know the word enthusiasm? Enthusiasm is such a cool word. I have an Oxford English Dictionary in my office, a great gift someone gave me, and I love looking at words. And the word enthusiasm means entheos. It means — actually the official translation is filled with God, filled with divinity, and so there’s something about divinity, truth living inside of you that just — it’s a lot of energy. And so you see this man throwing aside his cloak, springing up. I know it’s always interesting that blind people do have a sense of direction and where they’re going, whatever. He knew where Jesus was, so he just runs over there, and when he stands there before him, he said, “Master, I just want to see,” because Jesus said, “What do you want me to do, give you authority and power like my other disciples?” “No, I want to see.” And he said, “Go. You have it. Your faith has saved you. Your faith has saved you, not the state you’re in, not the sin that they claim you’ve committed or that your parents committed that put you in a place of punishment. No, it’s your faith that has saved you.” So in his blindness — this is what’s interesting. Faith, in a way, is kind of blind, when you think about it. You have a way of understanding or seeing something, and somebody says, “Well, show me. Show me that — prove to me that God exists, or show me that the God that is often absent from people —”

Like take the beginning. The first reading is about this relationship God has with people. It’s weird. You want to say, “God, did you really want to have this kind of relationship with us,” where he’s absent, and then he’s present? He’s absent, and he’s present. Your life is going well, and it seems to be blessed. And then all of a sudden, everything’s falling apart, and he’s gone. And there’s this image in the Old Testament particularly, which is the great journey to freedom, from slavery to freedom. You see this God always somehow saying, “Trust me. Stay with me while things are not the way you want them to be. See if you can trust me when I’m absent, because if you can’t trust me in my absence, then somehow you won’t have the relationship with me that I want, because I have to put you through times that are empty and dark. And if you can’t endure those, if you think I’m only present when things are light and bright, then you won’t grow.” There’s this mysterious thing about the pain and suffering, experiencing darkness in your life that is so crucial for you to live in the light, and so you have this difficulty, often, trusting in God. And so faith is a belief that isn’t based solely on the experience of something that’s happening that proves to you right now that the thing that you want is there. Faith is believing in it when it’s not there, believing in something that you can’t explain, that you can’t figure out. And in those moments of darkness and weakness, you just sort of say, “All right, I’ve got two choices. I can give up on this whole thing about God and divinity and all that, or I can stay with it and wait, because somehow, when I’m in that experience of having nothing or nothing around me has any light or I’m just staring into darkness,” and you still believe, that’s when it happens. That’s when things change. Amazing.

And Jesus, when he was walking this earth, he was teaching that to people. Accept the emptiness and the darkness as part of your life. It’s just God’s plan, and so you have in Hebrews this strange reading, in a way, where it’s talking about Jesus, saying that Jesus had to make up for his sins. Well, how do you do that? What are the sins that Jesus would have committed? It’s he had to do something to offer a sin offering for himself, and what it would mean is that Jesus, as a man, had to experience the same experiences we have in this world. And when I think about Jesus being sinless as a man, and Mary also, being in our Catholic tradition Mary was without sin, did that mean they didn’t make mistakes, that they didn’t fail at something? Did they do everything perfectly? No, that couldn’t be possibly right. No, what they didn’t ever do is doubt in their brokenness, in their inability, and when Jesus did some things that you could say objectively weren’t so wise — he yelled and ranted and raved at the leadership of the church. Try that out even today. Attack the leadership, and they’re going to, of course, listen and embrace you and say, “Oh, what a great new idea. We hadn’t thought about that.” No, they’re going to come back with vengeance. In a way, you say Jesus was shooting himself in the foot, in a way, when he didn’t have more patience with the leadership of the church. Well, that’s his humanity. That beautiful thing about Jesus is he’s like us. He loses it. He gets upset. He doesn’t want to do what his Father’s asking, and so he has to make up for that in a sense. And how do you make up for that? Well, I don’t think it’s something you have to do that’s good. I think you make up for it by simply enduring it and not imagining that you are, you are the failure. You’re not the failure. Human nature fails us, in a sense, if we’re going to expect to be all that God wants us to be immediately. Human nature is a process of growing, losing everything and then finding more and then losing it again and then finding even more. It’s this dark and light, dark and light, emptiness, fullness.

It’s why in the first reading you have this image of — there are moments in God’s relationship with his people when they have been gone, and they have gone in the wrong direction, and they’re blind, and they’re lame, and they’re wounded by their mistakes. And yet he calls them back. There’s this wonderful image of fullness out of emptiness. So important for us to believe that’s the way it works. It isn’t that we move from level one to level two to level three, level four, level five. No, it goes level one and two, and then you go to zero and below zero and then back up. It’s patience and understanding and compassion for our human nature that God wants us to see and believe in and believe that he, God, is always in charge. He’s always able to be the one that enables us to go through the darkness and not lose hope — not lose hope, not lose faith, not lose trust.

I don't know what Bartimaeus must have felt as he sat. From the time, I guess, he was born, he was blind, but his whole life was being a blind beggar. When you think of that, that’s not a bad image of some of us when we get to a certain place where we don’t see anything like the truth, and all the things that we choose to fill us with are emptiness, nothing but emptiness. That’s a pretty good image of that experience. So faith, faith, faith, when we’re in those moments, is what God will give us. That’s his gift. It’s not earned. It’s a gift, but like anything that God gives, it is something that you can’t count on having an experience that proves that it’s there in this moment. In fact, he almost on purpose — well, I say yes, on purpose, gives you a feeling that there’s nothing there for you, and yet you’re supposed to believe that that nothingness has a purpose, has meaning. And you can’t miss that. If you look at the Old Testament and New Testament, the way God works in human beings, it’s this constant cycle of death and rebirth and death and rebirth. So whenever you’re in darkness, in the darkness of blindness and can’t see what God is really doing, remember this story of Bartimaeus, because in the midst of the darkness, God is calling you into the light. You just have to see — you have to be in the darkness before the light can become as strong and as bright and as life-giving as it really is. Grey is the worse place to live, but fullness and emptiness is the cycle. And when you embrace it, believe in it and trust in it, there’s nothing that sort of like is hopeless, it’s all dark, it’s all black. You’re free of that forever when you have faith and trust in the one who’s guiding you.

Father, you are, in a way, a taskmaster. You’re not easy to be with. You’re not easy to work with, in the sense that you really do put us through test after test but always with a heart filled with love for us, knowing that these tests and this darkness bring such light and such growth and such truth. Help the part of us that’s like Bartimaeus to reach out and trust in you, call on you, and when we do, help us to recognize how much the truth is that you’re calling us always, through our faith, into new life. And we ask this in Jesus’ name.

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Isaiah 53:10-11 | Heb 4:14-16 | Mk 10:35-45 or Mk 10:42-45

Almighty ever-living God,
grant that we may always conform our will to yours
and serve your majesty in sincerity of heart.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever

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Wisdom 7:7-11 | Hebrews 4:12-13 | Mk 10:17-30 or 10:17-27

May your grace, O Lord, we pray, at all times go before us and follow after and make us always determined to carry out good works. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen.

I want to start with the images in the first reading about wisdom. What is it? It’s something to do with a way of seeing the world, seeing yourself in it and having an amazing ability to make decisions that are going to bring about the thing that you long to see happen. Wisdom is that mysterious understanding of the way the world is. It’s a kind of surrendering to reality. It’s — the best way I can describe it is a person who is filled with wisdom is the most real person in the room. And if there’s a decision that needs to be made about an end that you’re trying to achieve, the person with wisdom is the one you want to lean on the most, because they have this sense that there is a way to accomplish the goal that you have, but there’s lots of obstacles. And if you can get to the place where you understand something about the way the world works, then you have this amazing, this amazing quality, and what you’re being told in this first reading is that this kind of insight, this kind of knowledge, that I believe comes to you as a gift from God, is essential if you’re going to be able to find the place that God has created for you and me.

There’s one thing that I want to teach always and always. It’s this whole idea that this world that we are called to live in is a world that is supposed to be — how would I say it? Enjoyable doesn’t quite capture it, but it’s something we should be participating in, and our participation should bring us some kind of enjoyment — enjoyment, meaning there’s some kind of joy in the whole process of growing and evolving and changing and understanding the world that God has given us and the way in which we’re supposed to live in it, and who he is. All of that I would call wisdom. And the responsorial Psalm picks it up, and one of the things about the responsorial psalm that I like so much is the way it describes something. And it says very clearly that the thing that we are asked to understand is that, if we know we’re loved, if we know we’re loved — and love is a way of, I would say, of imagining the effectiveness of God in your life. When he loves you, it’s not just that he’s looking at you, like he did in the gospel to the rich man and just said he’s just filled with love for you. That’s a beautiful image of God seeing a goodness in all human beings, where we really do want to do the right thing. We may not know how to get to the goal that we want, but we do have that desire.

He loves that in all of us, but the thing that’s so interesting about that love is that, when it’s really directed in exactly the way it’s supposed to be received by us, it gives us a kind of confidence that, in the midst of the work that we have to do in order to grow and evolve — the pain that we have to go through, if you can feel, when you’re in that pain, that somehow this God who’s in charge, who knows how everything goes, who is wanting to make sure that you experience the experiences you need to be able to grow and to change, when you know that that’s basically the way in which God is looking at you, wanting nothing more than for you to evolve and grow, then whatever is painful, whatever is difficult, you can say, “Help me see, when I’m in pain, that this is something that should create in me some kind of gladness. Make us glad for the days when you afflicted us, for the years when we saw evil.” What an interesting line, and this is Old Testament. The Psalms are obviously Old Testament, but think of the struggle that was there for the Israelite people in that long, long journey and how many times they complained and complained and complained and resisted the whole process. And when you think about it, what is it that causes the most intense pain in our life really? Is it the experience of something that’s difficult? But if you add that experience to whatever is painful to resistance to that, you’ve doubled the stress. You’ve doubled the amount of energy that’s needed to overcome it. And so how do we enter into the world that the Psalm is inviting us into when we can say, “Lord, if we know you love us, then our song is always going to be a song of some kind of joy”?

Now, when I say live a joyous life, it doesn’t mean that you’re happy all the time. It means there’s something deep inside of you that knows that there’s purpose and there’s meaning and everything is moving in the right direction. And then when you endure pain by accepting it, by surrendering to it, it is an incredibly valuable moment in your own individual evolution as to who God wants you to be.

So what are we opening ourselves to through suffering? What is it that, when we surrender to something, we receive? Well, you might say it makes us stronger. So we’re more effective and more capable of doing what we’re supposed to do. Watch out for that, because that’s not exactly what’s going on. When you surrender to the way the world is, when you give in to the things that aren’t the way you want them to be, what you’re inviting into your life is the truth, the truth. Wisdom is another word for truth, and what does truth do? What is it there for? Well, the reading for the Hebrews gives us a beautiful image of that. What it is, it is something that comes into you, something that is invited to come in and to break through whatever is hidden. It penetrates even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It discerns what’s really going on in your heart. It’s called being busted. When something is coming, when something enters into you that exposes some part of you that you don’t really want to see and you don’t really want to acknowledge, when you see that event happening inside of you, you know that you’re being loved by a God who said, “Look, here’s the reason I caused this pain for you: because there’s something in you you’re hanging on to that’s going to keep you from the prudence and the wisdom that you need to live and make decisions in the world — prudence and wisdom, the ability to know the best solution for the problem that you’ve got on your plate. The prudence is that understanding of there’s a certain way in which you have been given a certain priority, and the priority is, “I want to do whatever is ultimately reality, the truth.”

I don't know why it’s so hard for us to do that. Maybe it’s because we grow up in a world that’s so filled with lies, and we see all these images around us of people achieving things that we think is good, and yet they’re doing things to other people, hurting them, destroying them or doing whatever. It’s confusing, but think about it. It is God gives us this gift, this living, effective gift that penetrates into this, the heart of everything, and gets us to see the truth. Okay, so we’re set for the gospel, the one that we’re invited into by the hallelujah verse. “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Who are the poor in spirit? What does it mean to be poor in spirit? Well, we could say that one of the things that poverty is, is the opposite of being rich, being filled with what I would say would be an amazing amount of power and control. So let’s look at Jesus in this gospel passage, but before I go into this, I want to give you a little bit of background about rich. Why is it the disciples are so confused when Jesus is criticizing a man who is rich? You have to understand, in the Old Testament, there was something going on that was radically shifted in the New Testament. And in the Old Testament, God was the one who gave favor to those who did what was good, and he gave evil to those who were bad. He punished those who failed to live according to the way he invites us to live. That’s not the New Testament. That’s not the God that we understand, that we’re engaged in in a relationship now. It’s very, very different. There’s a passage in the Old Testament where it says, if anyone slaps another man on the face, they should be executed. Take that line from the Old Testament and compare it to the New Testament, and we see Jesus who says, if somebody slaps you on your face, you should turn and offer him the other side of your face so he can slap it. What the — what does that mean? It means there’s a radical, radical difference in the New Testament from the Old Testament.

So let’s go back to this gospel passage and realize why the disciples are so confused over this man who seems to have done everything. He followed all the commandments, did everything he was invited to do, by his mind, by the commandments, and he didn’t — he missed it. He missed it. So let’s look at the dialogue between Jesus and this man. First of all, he comes up and says to Jesus, “You are so good.” Jesus is setting the tone. “No. No, only God is good.” So he describes himself. “I’m a good man. I do everything that I’m told I should do. I’m in control of my life. I possess my life. I have chosen to follow the commandments. I do it perfectly, so I am basically, I know pleased — I know you are pleased with me. So I’m coming to you,” and in a way, you have to say that this guy that’s coming is actually trying to say, “I know you’re going to give me some really kind of wonderful response of saying, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You’re amazing.’” And Jesus looks at him, knowing that he’s wanting so badly to do everything he’s called to do but subtly says, “You’re lacking one thing. Go let go of everything you hold on to. Let go of the treasure that you’re holding on to.” What is his treasure? Performance, perfection. It’s the most subtle evil that slips into our spiritual life when we think that the gospel is calling you and me to do exactly what we’re told to do and to absolutely control our behavior and avoid all sin, all evil thoughts. It means that we’re going to have to use our will and our mind to control who we are and make us into something that is pleasing to God, and nothing could be further from what God longs for. He’s not interested in your perfection, not interested in your performance. So when he tells the young man, “Here’s what I want you to do. Get rid of all of your possessions.” What are his possessions? It doesn’t say anything about the things he owns. What does it mean to have a possession, or what does possessiveness mean? Possessive means that you have control over something.

Isn’t it interesting that we use — in our religion, we use an image of evil possession or the devil possessed someone, or evil possessed them. What does that mean? It means they had control over them. So when a person has a possession, it’s something that they own that gives them a sense of their value, and that’s different than ownership. Ownership is, “This belongs to me, but it’s not me.” But the possession this young man held on to so tightly was his performance and his perfection, knowing that’s the way you get to heaven. That’s the wide gate that we’re going to hear about in just a moment, the wide gate. It’s the easiest thing for the ego to understand that your relationship with God is based on performance. I don't know what your background is in your family of origin. I know what mine was like, but I know that, in my life, I was always under the pressure of pleasing people in order to be accepted. And the way I learned to please people was to do whatever I think they wanted me to do. So if your image of God is that he wants you to avoid all these negative actions, all these negative feelings, if you feel that he’s asking you to live this kind of perfect life, and you think that that’s going to get you into heaven, you’re making two mistakes. You’re missing the goal he’s really giving you, and you’re putting yourself in the position of earning salvation. We don’t earn salvation. It’s a gift.

And so the narrow gate that is so beautifully described by Jesus to his disciples is this way in which he’s saying, “Look, it’s difficult for you all to understand exactly who I am and what I’m doing. It’s hard for you to understand that, in a short time, I am going to surrender my goal of being everything that I believe that the gospel wants me to be, being successful, changing the world. All those things I’m going to be asked by my Father to surrender to something that makes no sense to my ego, and when I do that, I’m going to save the world, and I’m going to show you what it means to enter into the kingdom of God. It’s not what you think. It’s not about being perfect. It’s not about doing everything right. It’s about somehow surrendering to a process of being loved and listening carefully to the image that comes through, that loving, beautiful face of God looking at you and saying, “I’m not interested in you doing the right thing over and over again. I’m interested in you becoming who I call you to be, who I want you to be.”

If wisdom is something that we learn, if it’s something that is required for us to achieve, and yet the way in which it seems these set of readings is making very clear that wisdom comes through suffering — suffering comes through acceptance, accepting the relationship we have with God. He’s not asking you to control your life. He’s asking you to surrender to the life that he will show you that is yours. And I don't know how exactly you’ve experienced this, but I know the thing that is in my life and my experience is I resist more than anything else those events, those times in my life where I’m being told by God, through an experience, that I’m not enough. Isn’t it interesting to think there’s something wrong with not being enough, enough for the people around me, enough for my God, who I think is demanding certain things of me, enough for the church that asks me to do all these other things? What a terrible evil to get caught up in when we don’t even realize what we’re doing.

So what is it that’s at the heart of this beautiful relationship we have with God the Father? He is my brother. He’s my lover. He’s my creator. He’s all three of those things, and in terms of you understanding his creative qualities, understand that he created you exactly as he intended you to be. You are, with your weaknesses, with your strengths, exactly the person he’s created you to be. He even talks about knowing you before you were created. So you are exactly, with your strengths and weaknesses, who God has created you to be. And then his lover, he loves exactly who you are. It’s a reflection of him. It’s a unique reflection of him, and what he’s inviting you to do is to celebrate that, to create an environment in which you embrace it, surrendering to it. It means — and I know this is hard for me, so I hope it touches something inside of you, but there’s something about that image of liking yourself in your imperfection, looking at it the way Jesus in the gospel looked at that young man. And I’m feeling that what you’re doing, when you’re looking at yourself and you’re seeing it not as perfect, the fact that you want it to be perfect is endearing to the God who created you. Yes, you want to be everything you want to be, called to be, but it’s not perfection. It’s not performance. So then there’s this wonderful, creative God, the loving God, and then this brother, this spirit that lives inside of you. What a beautiful image of a comforting advocate called the Holy Spirit. He’s always there pleading your case. Imagine this part of you that’s — well, the part of God that’s in you, that is there saying almost, if you had this image of a strong and powerful God demanding so much, he’s the one who’s saying, “Hey, hey, this image of this God that isn’t really there, that’s demanding, here is your advocate, the same God answering that image that you have of God and answering this God with, ‘Hey, you created this person exactly as they are. You love them. I know you won’t hold anything against them.’” That’s the beauty of this Trinitarian, loving God that we have.

So what we’re called to be then, through this set of readings, is a beautiful image of the God — we have this beautiful image of the God who is and the God who is calling us to be who we’re called to be. So my challenge for you in these readings, my longing for you in these, in my heart, is that you will understand more and more fully the truth of who you are, the truth of who God is and somehow allow that to penetrate into every part of your life that is clouded by some kind of misunderstanding, some kind of need for control, some kind of need for autonomy, all those things that are there that get in our way. Our challenge is to embrace this new life.

I don't know if it feels the same for you as it does for me right at this moment, but what I can feel in my life, if I can understand this mystery that I’m trying to share with you, I can feel something relaxing inside of me, something that relieves the tension, relieves the pressure. For anyone that’s listening to me that feels the pressure of their God asking them to be more than they are at this very moment, please let go of that and embrace the God who is and the truth that is and the wisdom that is there for you and me to drink of and to allow it to enlighten us, and see the goodness that’s all around us.

God, your gift is our life exactly as it is, exactly as you allowed it to be, and whenever we find ourselves judging it, whenever we find ourselves not happy with it, remind us of who you really are and what you’re about and what you call us to enter into. And it’s a journey that is not expected to be so stressful but rather enlightening, experiencing something, growing, changing. It’s different when we know that the events that we go through that are difficult are there for a purpose, and there’s a meaning, and there is a gift in it all. Bless us with that awareness so that we can find the peace that is our inheritance. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Genesis 2:18-24 | Hebrews 2:9-11 | Mark 10:2-16 or 10:2-12

Almighty, everliving God, who in the abundance of your kindness, surpassed the merits and the desires of those who entreat you, pour out your mercy upon us to pardon what conscience dreads and to give what prayer does not dare to ask. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

The readings for this particular celebration that takes place on the 27th Sunday in ordinary time is loaded with some wonderful, wonderful images, and my intention, my desire is always to draw from these images and put them together in a way that awakens in you something that you already know, something that you already feel deep inside of you. When God created us, he created us in a way that enables us to grow and to evolve and to change. That’s the nature of what it means to be human, and the direction that this evolution is taking always is in the direction of you and I becoming more like the God who created us — like the God who created us. If there’s anything fascinating about God that I think we don’t always think about, it is why did he create the world. Why? This God, this being that is like us, so when we think about who is he, it’s not too hard to imagine somebody like us who has all the power in the world and can do anything. We don’t have the depth of his understanding, wisdom. We have a sense of what it’s like to be powerful. And so he has this capacity to do anything he wants, and so sitting around with nothing, it seems that wouldn’t make a human being very happy. So he creates, and creativity is one of the core issues that human beings possess. We want and enjoy doing things, making things, and so this God has that same quality. And so what he does is he creates a world.

Four and a half billion years ago, there’s this explosion of some kind, and there’s this material world. And then slowly, over centuries and milleniums, life is there. Now, I know there’s some controversy on when did God create human life, but let’s just say it’s up for grabs, in a way, whether it happened in one single moment, where poof, there was — or when God formed clay and then breathed into it in one story. We have another story of creation in this particular set of readings, but however it happened is not as important as it’s absolutely clear that everything that happened in this world was intended by a divine force, a divine God that is able to do anything. And what he was doing was creating something that reflected who he is, just like you paint a painting, and you step back and look at it. You make a piece of furniture; you step back and look at it. You do a project; you step back and look at it. So he did that, and then when he created human beings, he took a chance, because what he decided to do is create something that’s going to be enough like God that we were given this one quality that nothing else in creation has — freedom to make our own decisions, freedom to make our own decisions, freedom to say no to God, to reject him, to work against him. Why would he do that? Would you want, if you had your choice of a relationship with someone, would you want one that has no control over whether or not they freely wanted to be with you or they freely chose to love you? No. No, we would want to know that there was something about us that another person saw that was valuable, and when they see that, it awakens something in us that’s valuable.

So that leads up then to the main theme of this set of readings. Human beings are in need of relationship, because the God who created them was in need of a relationship. He wanted to have a relationship with something like him, more free, freer than the angels, more conscious than the rest of creation. He wanted someone like him to love him. If that makes God seem needy, then get over it, because he describes himself as needy. It’s not that that’s a weakness. It means that that’s a desire, a longing he has. So in the very first reading that we have in the Old Testament, we go back to that time when God created human beings, and one of the things we find out about them, which is like God, is that they want a partner. They want somebody to work with. God wants a partner in this world. He created this world and wants to care for it, but he didn’t want to do it just automatically. He wanted someone who could freely decide whether or not they would work with God. That’s the plan, God working with human beings, then creating a world that continually evolves and draws more and more people into the fullness of what they’re intended to be, like God.

So we find this image, and I love — this is the word I want to take from that first reading: a suitable partner. Suitable partner, what’s a suitable partner? Well, if you stick with the story and the images in the story, a suitable partner is somebody like you. The animals were not exactly like Adam. The birds weren’t like Adam. He couldn’t have a conversation with them, didn’t understand much of what they — how they did what they did, but basically God, who then knew what Adam was looking for, realized, “Oh, what he wants is somebody like him.” So he took something away from him, some part of him, and formed it into somebody else. And I want you to see if this works for you, because it works for me. Could it mean, in that very simple action of taking something from man, wo-man, woman, that the partner that God created for human beings is somebody who already is, in a way, a part of them. There’s already some connection. Did you ever notice, when people fall in love with someone, they almost will say something like this, “I feel like I’ve known them forever,” or, “I feel so myself when I’m with them,” or whatever. And maybe that’s in the throes of the beginning of a relationship when it’s all so perfect, but nevertheless, think of it. You are attracted to people that have something that I think you need, and maybe in a very mysterious way, there’s something in the destiny of you meeting that they need from you. So then we get to the heart of what it is when we live on this planet together, and that is it’s all about relationships — all about relationships. The Ten Commandments that were given in the Old Testament, they’re all about relationships, your relationship with God, your relationships with everybody. So intimacy is the key. So when we look at this first story, we’re saying, “Okay, intimacy is what God intended to have with his people, and he intended his people to have it with each other.” Now we’ve got the setting. That’s existence on this planet.

Now, there’s something else about the Hebrew reading, and that’s this: Jesus, who is the one who comes into the world to awaken us to everything that we are, he’s the model of a human being filled with divinity. That’s what our destiny is. That’s who we’re going to be becoming. That’s who we’re always in the process of becoming. So the author, and we don’t know who the author of Hebrews is, but he’s saying, “It seems appropriate that this model of who God wants us to be is exactly like us, and it seems appropriate that the one who comes into the world to save us by doing something gives us a model of what we have to do if we’re going to be in relationships.” And what is it that Jesus did that saved the world? He surrendered. He suffered. He allowed the world to be the way it is, the plan of God the way it is. He surrendered, and he said, “Yes, if this is the way it’s written — it’s not the way I want it. It’s not what I looked forward to. It’s not the way I wrote it myself, but if this is what has to be, and you are the God that I trust, and you wouldn’t allow this to happen unless it was for the reason that I want to accomplish, even though my way of accomplishing it is not to be crucified but to be successful —” And he gave into that. Now, if that’s the way we’re made holy, if that’s the wisdom piece that we need to become whole, giving in, surrendering suffering to the things that we can’t change, if that’s it, it’s perfectly in Hebrews, in the author of Hebrews, it’s perfect that the person that came to teach us that was exactly like us. He calls us brother. Okay?

And now I want to go to the gospel, because the gospel is — every time this comes up, I just shudder, because I’m saying, “Oh gosh, we’re going to talk about divorce from the pulpit.” So everybody in the room who’s had a divorce is going to listen to these words, and it says that anybody that gets a divorce commits adultery and is going to go to hell. That’s at least the way some people read it. It’s not what it means, but I always hate it, because should I talk about annulments? What should I talk about? Well, I think God gave me an insight unto this reading that’s for all of us that are listening, including myself, because when I say these words, I’m listening to them coming through me as much as you’re listening to them coming out of me. But anyway, in this reading, what we have is a statement on the part of Jesus that is radical, and it’s not so much about the idea of no longer allowing divorce. It’s about changing dramatically the value and the dignity of a woman, of the feminine, of the part of all of us that is there that needs to be nurtured, developed, honored. And one interesting thing about this is, when the disciples are kind of confused and they all say, “Wait a minute,” and the Pharisees are approaching Jesus, and they say, “Is it lawful for a husband to divorce a wife,” it’s a setup, because all that was needed in the time of the Old Testament, before Jesus came, was that all a man had to do was write a little note, and the woman was out, and she had nothing. And so she was like a piece of property. So Jesus says, “No. No, the woman has the ability to cause the husband to commit adultery.” In other words, she has the same rights to the marriage as the man does, and that’s what Jesus is really underscoring when he says, “No, you just can’t divorce for any reason whatever.”

Are there reasons why husbands and wives should not be together? Yeah, sure there are. Of course there are. The interesting thing about marriage, just for a moment, is that the marriage, the whole notion of marriage is, in the Catholic tradition, and in the Christian tradition, I should say, not just Catholic, but the minister is not the one that makes this sacrament happen. It’s the intention of the individuals involved in this. So it’s always considered that the minister is a witness to the sacrament being performed by each of the people engaged in this relationship. “I give myself completely to you for better, for worse, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health, until death. That’s my intention.” And the other repeats it. So what’s going on is —there’s a line in this that I think is so important. When Jesus said you can’t have any divorce, what he’s saying is, “Anything that God has joined together cannot be broken, should not be broken — anything that God has put together.” Well, when you think about the ways that people marry and the reasons that people marry, would that necessarily be the one that you might say, “Well, it’s clear that God really wanted these two people to be together.” Why would he want two people to be together? Pretty clearly he’d want them to be together because they have something for each other. They have a gift somewhere buried inside of them that they don’t even maybe know is there yet, but the other person who needs it, that God has put them in touch with, that other person is going to draw it out of them, because they’re going to need them. And the person who’s watching this person they love who is in need, they’re going to want to give this gift. And maybe it’s just in seed form, but they’ll develop it so they have something that they can give to the person that, in a way, they see as part of them. So when they give to them, they give to themselves. That’s the beauty of this whole thing called marriage, and it’s so interesting. When you have somebody that comes to you, someone who has experienced this — as a minister in a parish setting, I was a pastor for 43 years, been ordained for 55 years. I’ve listened over and over to the struggles people have in marriages, and I know what they always will come to me and say fundamentally is, “There’s no life in this. I have no feeling of being fed or nurtured,” or, “I try to feed and nurture someone, and there’s no way in which I feel they’re receiving it or appreciating it or responding to it.” Is that what God calls into, that kind of relationship? Of course not. So there is a thing, at least in the Catholic tradition of annulments where we say, “Well, in a way, if they say it’s not a valid marriage, which is pretty tricky, let’s use another language. This is not a relationship that it seems that God has been engaged in calling these two people together. God has not joined them together.” And that doesn’t mean that marriage doesn’t work, but how can a ceremony bind two people together when they don’t intend to be together? The sacrament of marriage is a grace poured into a couple to enable them to do the work that we’re here to do, which is to be these nurturing figures to one another.

And then that gets us to the heart of really what I want to say. How is it that we can be these agents, this flow of life flowing from us to one another? How does it work? Well, the minute you think that it’s up to you to come up with all the things your partner needs or to expect them to come up with all that you need, it’s not going to work. So what works? Well, the last part of this gospel is perfect. Unless you become like children, you have no idea what I am talking about. Unless you have the imagination of a child and the openness to things you can be told that you will believe in but you don’t have to be told how it happens or why it happens, you might be able to understand all these things that God is trying to awaken you to seeing about him, about you, about the relationship you have with each other, but primarily, the heart of it all, the foundation of it all is the relationship you have with God. It’s all based on that, your relationship to God. Jesus is the model, as I said earlier. What is he? A fully human being, and don’t confuse this with the idea, yes, he was also God, but no, he was fully human and fully divine. Now, that’s not going to happen to you and me, but what is going to happen is that we are human, a human being filled with shame, fear, anger, sin, all this stuff. We’re imperfect, but into that imperfection comes this incredible generous gift of a God who says, “I want to dwell in you. I want to be in you.” Jesus says it so beautifully, so powerfully. “Eat my flesh. Drink my blood.” What? “What I’m saying is, unless you take me, this image of me, this truth of me, unless you take it in and understand it like a child and listen to it and can believe in it — wow, if you can do that, you can experience my presence inside of you in a way that will be the source that you need for the things that you require to be for one another and the relationships, not just in marriage but in friendship, in family, everywhere.” That same principle that belongs in marriage is in every friendship and every relationship.

It’s interesting. How many people do you think in the United States are married versus those that single as adults over 18? Half. Half of the people that are potentially over 18 listening to me right now are living a single life, and so we can’t take this image of marriage as the model of the perfect way in which life flows between people and make it too literal, saying your life is not complete, because you’re not married. That would be a horrible thing, yet that’s what it used to be like when I was growing up. There was even a derogatory name for a woman. I think it was spinster, that she wasn’t married. At least it sounded derogatory to me. No, the wisdom in marriage is the wisdom that we need to embrace and take in that has to do with every relationship that we’re engaged in.

So back to the image of a child’s imagination. I want to close with one little story. There was a movie that I love called Crash. Many of you maybe saw it. It was a couple, I don't know, four, five, six years ago, won the Academy Award. And there was a little girl in it that was terrified and scared, because the neighborhood she lived in, there were gunshots, and her father found her bed one night, scared to death, and he went to see her. He found her under the thing, and he said, “Why are you down there?” And she said, “I’m scared. Those sounds scare me.” And he said, “Well, I’ll tell you what.” He said, “I have something for you. Come out, and I’ll show you. I found — I have a cape. I have a little cape that I was given by a fairy princess, and she gave it to me to protect me. She said, ‘Whenever you wear this, you’ll always be protected.’” And the little girl said, “I don’t see any cape.” He said, “No, no, it’s invisible. It’s an invisible cape.” He said, “Let me give it to you.” And she thought, “Okay.” So he unties it carefully and takes it off slowly and puts it on her and ties it and said, “Now you’re going to be safe.” Well, later in the film, there’s a horrible experience where this man is holding his daughter, and a man has a gun pointed at him, and the gun goes off, but there’s no bullet. But the man thinks the bullet went off, and he thinks his daughter was hit, and he screams and screams, and he thinks she’s dead. And then he realizes all of a sudden, no, no, it didn’t harm her, and he’s so sobbing, happy that he realized that the man missed her if it was a bullet. It really wasn’t a bullet, but nevertheless, the point was the little girl says to her dad, “Daddy, you shouldn’t have been worried. I have the cape on. Nothing can harm me.” That’s what I child can understand about something as mysterious as divinity inside of you, protecting you from everything that might harm you by keeping you from being who you need to be for other people.

God, in the response of a Psalm we acknowledge your power to bless, to bless us, to consecrate us, set us apart as instruments of your grace. Bless all of us with this great gift, and let us feel the strength and the wisdom and the power that we do not possess but can flow through us whenever it’s needed. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Numbers 11:25-29 | James 5:1-6 | Mark 9:38-43, 45, 47-48

O God, who manifest your almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy, bestow, we pray, your grace abundantly upon us and make those hastening to attain your promises heirs to the treasures of heaven. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

We’ve been listening to Mark’s gospel these last couple of Sundays, and it’s clear that one of the things that this section is speaking about is the distance between who the disciples were at this time and who they would become after Jesus’ death and resurrection and the Spirit descending upon them, radically changing their understanding of who they are and who God is and why they’re here. If we go back to the very beginning of the story of salvation history, we have this interesting story about a garden called Eden, and the first human beings are there. And they’re in a situation where they’ve been told one thing, and they had been tempted to do something else. And the way we’ve interpreted that story varies, but I think the thing that I’ve grown to understand about it, it’s not so much about simply saying that the real problem with human beings is that we don’t do what we’re told. We don’t follow the rules. We break the rules. We disobey, and it’s much more nuanced than just simply saying human nature has a resistance to being told what to do, because some of that is really valuable, because we should not be governed by something outside of ourselves but by our own inner decisions. And that’s the goal of Christianity, to change our heart so that we’re not being told what to do, but we do what we know we should do. It’s who we are. But the interesting thing about the sin, as it’s described by many people, is it sounds like it’s just about breaking the rules, but basically what it’s about is a deep longing in human beings to work to become everything that God wants them to be. It was a temptation to follow the ego, to be as good as you possibly can, to be as good as God is. When you think about that, it’s a little bit less attractive in a way. Well, I’d say it’s more attractive than thinking that we just don’t want to be told what to do. What we’re seduced into is a misunderstanding of how it is that we serve the God that has created us, and we tend to want to do it by being the best that we can be, to be like God. And then if we’re like God, if we’re as good as he is, then he’ll like us. It’s almost like we don’t have a comfort level with the way in which God describes our relationship with him, where the only way we exist in that relationship is because of God’s mercy, his understanding, his compassion. That’s why he had to teach and preach the fullness of his message with the idea and the ideal of forgiveness. His whole focus is not so much to look at whether or not we are who we should be but rather can we allow God to enter into us as we are and taking us where we are to the next level. It’s very different. One takes humility; the other is all bound up in pride. So in this particular part of Mark’s gospel, we’re watching, in a way, Jesus pointing out the selfishness, in a sense, but it’s the humanity of the disciples. They’ve been arguing about who is the greatest. They’ve been trying to figure out — they know that God, Jesus is going to save the Jewish people, and he’s going to put them in power, and they’re going to run the whole situation, all the ego, ego, ego stuff. And so in these readings, we’re having a kind of refresher course about the way human nature is and what it’s really made for.

So you take that first reading. One of the things that we love is not only to be the best that we can be or better than other people, but we want to be in the in group. We want to be among the chosen, and so it’s interesting. When God called Abraham, he said, “I want you to choose these people. I want you to tell them that they’re my choice, and they’re my favorites. They’re the best.” And so right away, you have this image in the followers of Abraham, the followers of God under the direction of Abraham, that they are the special ones. So you can see, in this first reading, that when they think that somebody outside of this group is able to do what God asks them to do, it bothers them. It says, “Wait, this isn’t fair. God does not favor anybody but us.” But by saying that, “I’ve taken you as my chosen people, it’s not to say that I haven’t chosen everyone, in a sense. It’s to say I’m working with you as a special group so you can understand who I am and what I’m up to and why I’m in your life so you can tech it. I need to get — I need to form community.” In a way, that’s the way we grow in anything. Education about anything, you get a community together, a group of students that are studying something. We work together. We feed each other. So that’s why God called this community of the Israelites together, not because they were better than everybody else but just because that’s the way it works, to be a part of a community. So when there’s a complaint, Moses stopped them, stopped them. He says, “If they’re for us, why should we be against him?” Nobody that is working for what God is calling them to is considered to be an outsider. That’s what Moses is basically saying. “Look, if they’re doing what we’re doing, they’re not against us, so leave them alone.”

And then the next thing that comes up, in the reading from James, is the whole idea of wealth and riches, and in the Old Testament particularly, and in the New Testament also but more in the New Testament, there’s this condemnation of people with wealth. The reason is not because they happen to have money, because wealthy people can be extremely valuable and philanthropic. And there were wealthy people that took care of Jesus and things like that, but the point is that so often, when you look at the way wealth was developed in the time that James was writing this letter, is that simply they were always, in almost every case, rich because they were stealing from someone who was poor. They didn’t run great companies and end up developing a wealth that they earned and struggled for and then shared with other people. That’s not the image that is being condemned in these words from James. So what basically this is underscoring is that there’s a part of all of us that remains greedy, and we want the best of everything.

So right away, we’re looking at images in this set of readings that have to do with our ego, and we get to the gospel. And basically we start off with the same theme, exclusivity. The followers of Jesus were special, and they were the ones who were able to do the things that God enabled them to do, and no one else could do them, because they were in that special group. Well, the same thing is in the gospel that says, “Look, someone’s driving out demons in your name, and they’re not part of us.” So John’s saying, “Stop them,” again. No, anyone that’s out there, whether they belong to our company or not, if they’re loving, if they’re forgiving, if they’re doing anything good, they’re part of us, and so don’t get caught up in this image of being part of the exclusive group that God loves in a special way. And that is such a shadow of all religions.

Catholicism, we used to do it in spades. When I was growing up, I thought that my Methodist friends, my Baptist friends, my Presbyterian friends, they were all going to hell, because they weren’t part of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, and other religions have done the same thing. Isn’t it ironic when you think about it? Believing in this generous, loving God is the heart of every Christian religion, and yet we like the idea that he only really loves us. So what are we dealing with here? A universal problem of what we would call basically undeveloped, unevolved — or low-level of evolution of human nature. “I want to be special. I want to be really, really good in the eyes of others and the eyes of God.”

So then we get to the part of this gospel that is the heart of what I want to talk about today, because I’ve looked this up in commentaries on the gospel, and sometimes they just skip this section, a weird, kind of, little statement — not a little statement, a powerful statement coming from the mouth of Jesus. “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. Better the life entered maimed than with two hands. If your foot is your problem, cut it off. Better to be lame than to be — than to enter into — and if your eyes are your problem, pluck the other eye out.” It’s crazy. Where does this come from? Why would he make such a dramatic statement to people about self-mutilation? And it’s got such a beautiful piece of wisdom in it if you can just hear it, but he used something so dramatic. And I know in the scriptures, when Jesus does this, when he throws out something, he just completely flips your mind, like, “Unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you can’t be a part of me,” things like that. This is one of those kind of statements, and can you imagine the discussion of the disciples after he finished this? “What are you talking about? It’s better to be lame, to be half-blind, to not be able to do work? Is that the best way to be in life?” Well, maybe what he’s saying is unless you embrace, unless you accept, unless you recognize that our human nature, by its very nature, is never going to be enough to accomplish the work that we’re here to accomplish. We’re not capable of any of the work that God is calling us to do, in terms of the real depth that it has as a potential. We have to be guided with and filled with and aware of a Spirit dwelling in us, dwelling in us, giving us the wisdom that we need, the insight that — we can see so much. We can see so far, but we can’t see the depth of what’s out there. And so we only have one eye. If we can accept the fact that we have only one eye, then we know that we need two eyes to be full, and the other eye is not ours but God’s. Same way with your hand. How do you do and accomplish all the things that you’re called to do? The gospel makes it so clear that you and I are called to care for the needs of other people. Do you think that then that’s up to you to be the one who does everything for someone? Do you realize that, when you actually reach out and give someone something, your time, your energy, your love, your advice — do you think that that’s all that’s being given through you to them? Or do you really believe than, when you have an intention to give something to someone, you’ll give some things that are valuable, but they’re more than what you can give, though I’m not diminishing that. It’s what God gives you through the intention that you have when he flows through you, because when you’re in the flow of life between you and someone else and God is in that trio, he is so powerful and effective. And if you don’t feel that the little you did is not all that’s been given but so much more has been given, unless you have that, you’re not going to really feel the fullness of what it means to be his follower.

And the image of a foot, we’re on a journey. We have to go and move and evolve and change, and all of that seems so beautiful to me, that we do stretch our imaginations and try to find the newest insight. But at the same time, if we think we get those — they come from us, that’s where we’re limited. So the image of entering life maimed is the image of entering life needy, never expecting you to be enough for the things that you’re called to do and never using your gifts or your talents as a sign that you are loved by God or that you’re esteemed by other people or that you’re part of a special group. Wow, that’s not easy. Who said it was supposed to be easy? It’s impossible. All the things we’re asked to be are impossible without him, but with him, everything is possible.

Father, without you, we cannot achieve the goal that you’ve set for us. Yet we struggle, and we try to please you by attaining it out of our own energy, our own strength. So bless us with the humility that is key to being able to engage in a relationship with you where we can find the peace, knowing that we are the instrument that you’ve called us to be, feeling the effectiveness of us working with you, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Wisdom 2:12, 17-20 | James 3:16—4:3 | Mark 9:30-37

O God, who founded all the commands of your sacred law upon love of you and of our neighbor, grant that by keeping your precepts we may merit to attain eternal life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

One of the things that we all deal with, whether we want to or not, is our human nature, and one of the things about our humanity that I think helps all of us understand more fully what we’re dealing with is looking at the history of the evolution of the human being. We came from a very low level of consciousness that was always focused primarily on self, self-preservation, self-survival, procreation. It was very, very, in a sense, primitive, yet we know that in this whole process of the evolution of human beings we’re being invited, by the God who created us, to move more and more in a direction where we become more and more like the God who created us to be like him. So we’re moving more and more out of a sort of selfish, self-centered world into an other-centered world. Instead of serving self, we learn that our goal is to serve one another, and yet this human nature that we all have is not something you can necessarily completely — how would I say it — destroy it so that you no longer have any selfish feelings whatsoever, no jealous feelings, no envious feelings, no competition. The beauty of living as long as I have is you know that there is a desire in all of us, when we’re younger, that we’re going to get rid of all of this negative, selfish, self-centered parts of our life, and then we’ll overcome that, and we’ll become these loving, selfless people. And I have not yet seen that happen in my life. So 81 years into the mission, I still struggle with jealousy and envy and self-centeredness, and I think to myself, “Does that mean I haven’t grown at all, or does that mean that that’s exactly the way we are asked to live in this world?” We are not asked to become, through God’s grace hopefully, but if even less selflessly, we just said, “I am going to make myself into this person who never has any jealous or envious or selfish thoughts. I will do that, and then I’ll present that to God as my performance is now free of all selfishness, and I, I , I become what, his favorite? Or at least I can go and claim my salvation and my place in heaven after it’s over, because it’s all about me and what I’ve done.” That’s the danger. No, we live with weaknesses all of our life.

The first two readings do describe those weaknesses pretty clearly. When we’re being attacked, maybe, by another idea, another way of seeing things, we get pretty defensive and often attack the one who attacks us. And so in that first reading, we see the image of a prophet who comes to speak the truth, and then the response to that is not to ponder that truth, to wonder about it, to question ourselves as to whether or not that truth has any value. No, let’s attack the messenger, and just in a sort of casual way, let’s see if we can torture him and threaten to kill him to see if he’s really, really authentic. I don’t think that’s the way you question authenticity, by trying to destroy the person who’s bringing you a new idea. And the next reading is about the kind of thing that happens when someone else in your world does better than you are, and there’s a kind of feeling or tendency of jealousy or envy. Or you see someone with all the things you want, and you can’t have them. There’s this separation that is created by your envy and your jealousy. This is all human nature, and it doesn’t go away. That’s the hardest thing for me.

So what is it that we’re here to do? How do we work with this lower level of consciousness? The one thing we have to do is accept it as part of what it means to be human. The other is to forgive it, meaning that we have to have patience with ourselves, and that encourages us to have patience with other people who have not yet achieved this perfection that we all get caught up in, which is really not what the gospel is asking us to become, perfect. We’re asked to become forgiving, loving servants. Patient, understanding, compassion, empathy are all the signs of a person who lives in the kingdom, and the kingdom is a world of two elements: the dark and the light, the selfish and the selfless. And we struggle with those things throughout our life, and so what’s the key? What do you have to do? I think the gospel is loaded with some beautiful images. First of all, the gospel is pretty much presenting — and this is Mark’s gospel. He’s presenting to us the image of, a not-so-attractive image of the disciples. Jesus is finished with his public ministry. He’s done everything he can to bring the people that he wanted to teach and preach into a place of life and goodness, and they’ve rejected him completely, and they’re ready to kill him. And Jesus knows that, and he’s predicted it to his disciples. “Get ready. Everything you think we’ve been working toward that’s going to put us in a position of power and authority, it’s not going to work. We’re going to be — I, as your leader, am going to be destroyed, but I’m going to surrender to my destruction. And when I do that, something radically is going to rise and change in human nature.” Well, they didn’t understand that at all, but in a sense, maybe what they did understand is that, when Jesus was saying all that, it questioned their own images of what it was going to be like to follow Jesus through the whole process that he was here to accomplish. And their initial thoughts were always that it was going to be — we were going to be in positions — the disciples were going to be in positions of great authority. They were going to have an incredibly powerfully position in the way Jerusalem was run and the temple. They must have dreamt and thought about all the esteem and power they would have had. And so in the process of thinking about their future, they were on this journey with Jesus, which is — I love when Jesus teaches people while they’re walking. I love that, because it’s like the journey will teach you. Keep living each day, and learn something each day. It’s going to be more and more insight as we move along. And so he’s overhearing them, and it’s interesting. In looking at different translations of this, some people say the disciples were discussing who was the greatest. The one I like better is where they were arguing about who was the greatest. I would loved to have heard that conversation. And they were obviously caught up in their humanity of wanting and needing to be in a position of authority and power and esteem. It’s in all of us, and we’re never going to get rid of it. But it can be tempered, and we can see through it. And when it comes up, we don’t have to surrender to it and act on it.

And so what Jesus does, which is so fascinating, is after he’s kind of basically exposing who they are, then he does something. He sits down. There’s a child nearby, I guess, and he takes the child. And I love the details of this. He takes the child, and evidently they’re sitting in some kind of circle, as they must have done when he was continually teaching. They must have been resting on their walk. He puts his arms around the child. He just doesn’t place him in their midst but puts his arms around the child and said, “If you receive one child in my name, you receive me, if you receive me, not just me but the one who sent me.” What’s he saying? Well, one of the things it might seem at first he’s saying is that here is a child. A child is vulnerable and has no rights of their own. So you should always go out there and take care of children and anyone else. It’s a way of saying, “This is what you should be doing. You should take care of people. That’s the whole notion of who I am as the Messiah. I’ve come to awaken people to the joy and the challenge and the joy of being there for others.” And it flies in the face of our self-centeredness, but nevertheless, what I love about the way Jesus continues to use this image, he shifts it away from simply saying, “You should take care of the people who don’t have anybody taking care of them,” and it goes something like this. The child is not just someone who should be served, but he says, “Unless you receive this child —” Now, what does that mean? What? Serve him, or does it mean become like a child? I really think what Jesus was doing was saying, “Look, I want you to understand that there is something in you that, like a child cannot accomplish, doesn’t have the wherewithal, the wisdom or whatever, or the position of power in the world to be able to accomplish what they want to accomplish —” And so what he’s saying is, “What you have to do is become like a child who is in need of something outside of themselves to be able to accomplish the things that they need to accomplish, and if you can become like that, then you’re going to be able to do something that is so crucial and so essential for this journey you’re on. You’re going to be able to receive me.”

Now, what is he saying? Think of it. Jesus has been giving them information, information, information, insight after insight and saying, “Take this in. Receive it. Ponder it. Wonder about it. Try to figure it out for yourself, because I’m giving you not a simple, clean answer to all your questions. I’m giving you a way of finding a wisdom that can only be accomplished by your own figuring it out and your coming to a decision that this is the way it is. I know it is. I feel it in my gut.” And so what he’s saying is, “If you could allow me to enter into you —” Let’s take that as, “Take everything I’ve shown you and everything I’ve been. Take it in and ponder it. Hold it inside of you, and when you receive who I am and what I’m teaching, you know what’s going to happen? You’re not just receiving me the messenger. You’re not receiving me, Jesus. You’re receiving the one who sent me, meaning you’re receiving the one who gives me,” Jesus is saying this, “Who gives me the strength to do whatever I am asked to do.” And Jesus had to be so conscious at that moment in his ministry. He knew it was going to end badly. He knew he was going to have to be crucified. He knew he was going to die, and it was a struggle for him to be able to accept that. And so he knew he couldn’t accept it on his own. He had to have someone in him enabling him to accept it, and that’s what he’s trying to tell the disciples.

You will always be selfish. You will always have these struggles. You will always — there will always be something in you at war with the person you know you would like to be or who you should be. That’s always there. So how do you deal with that? Well, because human beings are so fond of autonomy, the way I’d like to do it is, ”I’ll work on it. I’ll get myself past all that selfish stuff, and I’ll be this wonderful, loving person. And then I present myself to you, God, and you’re going to say, ‘Wow, well done, good and faithful servant. Come in. You deserve heaven.’” That’s what an autonomous, kind of self-centered human being wants to do, and Jesus is saying, “Look, guys, gentlemen, my beloved friends that I’ve spent my life with, don’t fall into that trap. The only way you can become who you’re called to be is allowing something to be inside of you that’s like inside of me. And every time you see me doing something that goes way beyond my human nature, I point to God. I keep saying to you, ‘This is not me. This is God in me doing this work.’” So he’s trying to teach his disciples, “Can you really grasp this? Receiving a child is like becoming like a child where you don’t have the ability to handle your life in the world. You don’t have enough stuff. So you become like I am.” It’s funny. Jesus is actually saying, “I am a child of the Father. I am able to do the things I do, because the Father is in me.” At no time in his ministry could he have been more sensitive and aware of that than the time that he had to face the ending. The fact that God says to him, “Instead of being the one who accomplishes all these great things and becomes the hero of the world, I want you to surrender to all the enemies out there and let them do all the negative things they do to someone, destroying them.” And when you say yes to that, meaning a human being has a really hard time saying yes to being destroyed because of its deep, deep commitment to being self-preservation — self-survival — he surrendered to all of that and said, “No, the only way I’ll be saved is my God, my Father in me enables me to do this. That’s the key, gentlemen. That’s what you have to understand.”

And you wonder if this moment couldn’t have been the one they might have turned to most when they realized what had happened in those days between the death of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus and the sending of the Holy Spirit into these men, and they understood and saw things finally as they really are. And they knew God was in them. God was there for them. God took them from a place of arguing about who is the greatest to men who wanted nothing more to do but to serve each other and other people. That’s the transformation that is the will of God. It’s the transformation we work with as we struggle with these scripture stories. It’s the thing I pray most that I’m able to share with you and learn it myself, and we enter into an entire new world of peace, confidence, not in our self, but in the God who made us and who loves us.

Father, the key to everything that you invite us into is a relationship with God the Father. Help us to feel his presence in us as you knew and felt him in yourself. And enable us somehow to be able to convey to others the goodness that we find in this relationship and to never get caught up in our own self-importance, our self-value, but know that everything that you call us to be, everything you call us to do is through you, with you, in you so we can find peace, a peace that’s beyond any kind of understanding that human nature has by itself, but only that can be taught by you. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Isaiah 50:5-9a | James 2:14-18 | Mark 8:27-354

Look upon us, O God, creator and ruler of all things, and that we may feel the working of your mercy, grant that we may serve you with all our heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

In getting ready to reflect on these readings with you, I was thinking about the amount of time that I have spent in my life going over these same stories over and over again. It’ll be almost 55 years that every Sunday I’ve been working on a gospel, the first reading and an Old Testament reading, trying to figure out what is at the heart of this incredibly powerful book. It has two parts, an old part and a new part, and all we know about these works is that they’re packed with a certain kind of wisdom that, for centuries, people have gone to this source and have said, “I know there’s a truth here.” And if you know the scriptures well, it’s in a way always hidden. You have to dig for it, work for it, try to get to the heart of what it’s saying, because it doesn’t make it that clear in a sense. It’s almost like it’s there, but unless you find it yourself, you’ll never own it. You’ll never live it, and so there’s a wisdom in this second reading that I’m so drawn to. And every time I go back into these stories, I see something I didn’t see before, and I say to myself, “If you’ve done this for that long, you would think by now you’d say, ‘I know exactly what this one’s about. This is exactly — I’ve got it down.’” No, every time I go to one of these — and I think you feel it if you’ve been listening to me for a long time — is that together, you the listener, me the speaker have been working toward digging into these stories and finding what’s hidden. When we see it, when we know it, it’s not because it’s been told to us that we should believe it. No, we know it, because it makes sense on some deep, deep level. This is the truth. We’re made for that. We’re made to live in the truth.

In fact, I love the phrase in the Responsorial Psalm that we live in the land of the living — the land of the living. What does it mean to be alive? It means we’re a seeker. We’re trying to figure it out. We’re working always on this idea that we’re here for some mysterious reason, and we’re here for a purpose. And the more we enter into the fullness of that purpose, the richer and the more potent our life is going to be in terms of experiencing life and sharing life with other people.

So in this reading from James, we hear this idea that there’s something about how you believe and how you live, and he’s saying a person’s belief is going to affect how they live. If you believe in the world as, say, a place where you’re called to be, by your faith — and this is a shadow that I certainly found in the early years of my life, living as a Catholic, that Christianity was calling me primarily to be sinless. So I had to do everything I could to be better, and the way I chose to be better was a combination of control — I will not give into that desire that I have — and also, in a way, presentation to other people so that I could kind of get some feedback. And if they’d say, “Oh, you’re such a wonderful person,” then I’d kind of work on that image and present that to the world. But I noticed how self-centered that all is. If Christianity is calling you to be a better person and to be less engaged in things that are offensive to people or, let’s say, that harm people or whatever, it’s — if you’re doing it just for the presentation value of it so you’ll look good, you’re really not living out of the faith that you should be living out of. You’re living out of a faith that says perfection is the goal.

So what is the goal of Christianity? What have I discovered? What have we discovered together, hopefully, about it? It’s not about being better in that sense of more perfect, more sinless but being more authentic, more yourself, more alive, more vital, more connected. If there’s anything about Christianity that we learn from this set of readings and so many other places in scripture, it’s that this whole thing is about the way we relate to other people, and the way that we relate, if we believe in the God that has created us, he said it has everything to do with intimacy, which has to do with compassion and empathy. We care deeply about the darkness and the pain in other people’s lives as we do with the same kind of concern for the darkness in our life, and darkness to me is separation from who you are, from who somehow you deeply know you are. But you’re addicted to something that isn’t really you, and you know it, and it keeps you up at 3:00 in the morning. And it is a kind of death, and we’re in a land of living. We’re in a land that we’re called to understand with our hearts. In the opening prayer, understand with your heart this message, and the heart is the place of empathy and compassion. Where the brain is more about understanding things, the heart’s all about connection.

So if we are living out the faith that is, the faith that God has invited us into, we are going to be the kind of people that James said we should be. If we see someone who has no food, who has nothing to wear, what’s our reaction? Our reaction should be, “We want to help you. We want to sustain you. We want to be there for you. We want to help whatever it is you need.” Now, that implies to me that there’s an understanding at the heart of our faith that we are here for a reason, and let’s go back to the image — I love it — not perfection but authenticity, to be who we’re called to be.

And if you look at then who Jesus is, we’re going to see in this God filled with divinity the model of what it means to be a person who is authentic, authentic to who God created us to be, and so in the Old Testament, when we listen to prophecies — just a side note. Whenever you go to the Old Testament — I used to think that was the old story, the story that we no longer pay attention to. Now we’ve got a new story. The new story is the New Testament. No, the wisdom found in the Old Testament is essential for you to understand the New Testament, and there are 300 references to who the Messiah is going to be. It’s so interesting to me that the Pharisees, who are supposed to be absolutely grounded in their understanding of the Old Testament — they should have understood that Jesus represented, in a most perfect way, what was being prophesied about who the Messiah would be. It’s a little frightening for me to think that there were those who did understand that Jesus really was, and because he was going to turn the world upside down, especially the world of the Pharisees, then they rejected him, because they realized he was the one. That would be even more scary, but this Old Testament, if we understand it clearly, it’s going to enrich our understanding of who Jesus is, therefore who we are and why we’re here.

There’s a series of beautiful prophecies in the book of Isaiah. In fact, most of the prophecies about Jesus are in Isaiah, and one is the suffering servant. So we have that in the beginning, the first reading of this set of readings, where you listening to the suffering servant figure, and he’s saying, “I have this task to do, and I know that God is there with me, but my life seems to be in constant tension with the way the world thinks. And so I’m sitting here as one who speaks a truth radically different than the world is living out of.” The truth of the world in the past would have been, again, some kind of self-centered world. It’s all about me. The suffering servant takes on all the pain and all the suffering. It happens in a culture and in a world where there is no compassion, no understanding, no connection with other people. Everyone is out for themselves, and so the suffering servant, in some mysterious way, said, “I want to take away that pain that’s in people who are not loved and cared for, and I’ll take it on, and I’ll allow that pain to be my pain. And in doing that, I’m going to heal the world.” And that still to me sounds strange. How does that work that he takes the sins of the world upon himself and therefore he changes the world? Well, I don’t even know if I’m going to be able to say it clearly enough. So listen as attentively as you can, because I’m always working out of my — I don't know — this weird place that I go to, when I’m preaching, where I don’t really know what I’m going to say next, but it’s something like this: When there is suffering in the world, there is some kind of justice that’s demanded. If somebody is imposing pain on someone else, it creates this place of darkness for those that are being afflicted, used, abused, and somehow when Jesus takes all that pain on himself, what he’s doing is somehow equalizing the world so that this negative energy is stopped by somebody saying, “I’ll take it on myself. I will surrender to it and not return revenge. I will stop it.” When a pain is inflicted upon you, there’s a way in which you are angry, and you want to get back at them. And what Jesus is saying is, “No, I’ll take all that pain on, and I will not try to punish the people who have harmed me.” And what he’s saying is, “That’s the model of who you’re supposed to be as a representative of who I am in the world. If you want to follow me, you’ve got to understand that you have got to not return evil for evil. You’ve got to allow evil to happen to you in the world, and you have to say, ‘I will take it on. I will suffer it, and I’ll learn from it. I’ll be changed by it, but I will not return evil for evil.’” And that’s the image of the suffering servant. “I take it all on, and I sit there without any resistance.” Wow, that’s amazing.

Think of how many things you and I resist, are angry over, because the world isn’t there for us, being what it’s supposed to be for us, taking care of us. We’re going through a pandemic. We’re going through something that the whole world is having to deal with. Think about the way we’re dealing with that. When things are not the way we want them to be, we’re often depressed, angry. “It’s not fair.” When people aren’t pulling their share of what they should do, we want to attack them, and is that really the way we live out this faith? It’s like we have compassion and understanding for the people who are not who they should, and when we — I don't know how this work, but when you somehow will not go back against them, you will not attack them back, that changes the world. And you’re authentically living the world that Jesus teaches us to live, a suffering servant, allowing things to be as awful as they are, enduring it, recognizing it, learning from it, developing a kind of strength inside of you because of it, but you will not return evil for evil. That’s who the suffering servant is. That’s who we’re supposed to be, and when you don’t have anger and you don’t have this feeling that you’re being abused and you somehow see value in this entire crazy world we’re living in, there’s a peace that you cannot describe in words. Somehow it’s all okay. Everything’s going to work out, and somehow, if I’m patient in enduring all that isn’t what I want it to be, I’m living out my faith in works.

Father, you have created for us a challenge to open our hearts to the wisdom that we find in this God/man Jesus. Bless us with an open heart that we might be able to see what he’s teaching us and what he’s inviting us into so that we can be a participant in saving the world from darkness and inviting people into a life of light and peace and goodness. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Isaiah 35:4-7a | James 2:1-5 | Mark 7:31-37

Oh God, by whom we are redeemed and received adoption, look graciously upon your beloved sons and daughters that those who believe in Christ may receive true freedom and an everlasting inheritance. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

The scriptures this week begin with an issue that I think is probably one of the most important issues for all of us who are believers in the God that is revealed in the Old Testament and New Testament, and that is the issue of fear. There is nothing stated more often in scripture than the phrase, “Be not afraid.” It’s 365 times. I think that’s so interesting, a time for every day of the year, and yet there’s so many of us that live a kind of fear-based life, and it’s an interesting thing. Why is it that we human beings have this sort of anxiety in the core of our being that somehow we’re not enough, or the relationships we have will not be there for us, or that financial security in the future won’t be there for us? There is this voice that I always talk about, this voice that is a critic that comes along and constantly tells us we’re not enough, and if you’re told you’re not enough and you have to look at your future, you’re wondering, “Who outside of me or what outside of me is going to take care of me?” And then you end up with a severe to mild case of anxiety, and it stays with you. And I never thought of this before, but one of the reasons why we get addicted to things that relax us, be it some kind of medication or alcohol or activity or whatever we choose that keeps us from thinking and feeling things, that the root cause of so much of that addiction is simply that we have this unsatisfied longing for something that we think needs to be there in order for us to make it. And I’m thinking to myself, “What is it about believers in God that doesn’t trust the most simple, direct statement that he’s made to us throughout the history of his story revealing himself to us?” For the most part, he’s there for us. He’s there to care for us, to awaken us to things that will satisfy us. There’s a life that he’s created for us, and he promises that we’ll be able to be in touch with it. And it’s core value is that it has a resonance of peace and well-being. When he says over and over again, “Don’t be afraid,” another way to say that more positively is, “Be at peace. Relax. Everything is going to be okay.”

Now, what’s interesting to me about this notion of not trusting God, one of the reasons, I think, is because the God of the Old Testament had a way of entering into our life and being there for us. And it’s not as comforting as it is in the New Testament, but basically, when God entered into people’s lives through Abraham and then the journey to freedom from a place of slavery, the core gift that God gave to his people to give them a sense of hope and well-being was a law, the Ten Commandments. We talked about them last week, and when you think about it, basically the law was given to people, and its effect, how it worked on them, it was controlling their behavior. And it controlled their behavior with a certain motivation, and the motivation was reward or punishment. So the most part, you look back at the Old Testament, and you see a God who is dealing with people who, I would say, from the way he dealt with them, were very childlike. I think it’s interesting. Just recently I’ve been doing research on how long ago was Abraham. When did he appear in history? And it was 4,000 years ago. That was the time when the wheel was invented. The alphabet was invented. The government, the kind of control of a government over people, all that was brand new. So to have a God entering into the lives of these people at a time when, in a way, they were just beginning to understand the fullness of who they could become, it made sense that he had to treat them like children. “Do this, and if you don’t —” What he’s really saying is, “If you don’t do this, your life is going to be miserable, and you’re going to be living in fear and anxiety and worry, and blah, blah, blah.” But basically he said, “If you don’t do it, I will punish you. I will destroy you.” And that doesn’t exactly instill in a person a lot of confidence, because if a God who is giving you the things you need to do, if you have to do them in order to please him and you don’t do them that well, then you’re always going to be, in a sense, anxious over whether or not you’re going to be condemned. So you’re afraid of his judgment.

Now, take that as something that is in the Old Testament. Take that as our origin in our families. Often we have — it depends on the parents that we have. I know when I grew up in the ‘40s, disciplining a child was the smartest, wisest thing you could do. Punish them whenever they do anything wrong. That’ll teach them both what’s right and wrong, but it’ll also teach them how to be disciplined, control their behavior. And that lingered, still lingers in people’s imagination. That’s what we’re here to do, control our behavior so that we act in the way that we’re supposed to so that people accept us and God accepts. And that isn’t very comforting, because you know what it’s based on? My performance, my ability to do what I’m told.

So in the New Testament, it’s very, very different. In the New Testament, we have a God who is revealing not simply the wisdom of a law, a way of life that we’re asked to live and if we don’t we’ll be punished. He brings something else onto the scene, and it’s very different. I will call it the gift, a gift that he wants to give us, not a rule to live by but a gift, and the gift is something that he’s going to give to you and to me that awakens us and empowers us. The law had the role to awaken, awaken people to what people really basically want. They want to live in a community where people are grounded in something besides their own egos. They want to live in a community where people are caring and loving and supportive, but when we come to can you do that, what’s the motive to do that, well, it seems like the motive that you need, in the New Testament, which is where we are supposed to be living now, the real core challenge is not to follow a rule or a law but to believe in a promise. And the promise is, “I will really take care of you. I’m not any longer going to hold you responsible for your actions.” This is something that’s really hard for people who are grounded in the Old Testament to believe, that God comes with this most amazing gift. He wants to be the one who comes, and he just basically takes care of you and forgives all of your sins and releases you from everything you owe. And all you then have to do is allow him to take away all your faults by just not paying attention to them, and then he’s going to be there to take care of you and guide you and lead you and empower you.

And if you want to know exactly how we’re supposed to imagine that fulfillment of who God is — because he talks about it in the Old Testament, but the Isaiah piece we have today is part of the Old Testament, but there’s so many other passages in the Old Testament that sort of fly in the face of that. So it’s interesting about the New Testament and Old Testament. There’s 300 references in the Old Testament to the New Testament, but the New Testament didn’t happen until God entered the world as a human being, and this incredibly [sic] connection between humanity and divinity, this God and this man were in such union. And they did something for the human race, and they took away all of the punishment, all of the retaliation that is due us because of our faults. It’s all gone. Well, if that’s all gone, then I guess we can do anything we want, right? Well, that’s probably what they would have thought back in the Old Testament 4,000 years ago. They had to have some kind of punishment. What we have now is the image that we have in the gospel of a healer, a miraculous healer. This is the image of God now not just holding us against a law that we have to — that controls our behavior but a God revealing to us a promise, and the promise is, “I will awaken you into who you are, and I will empower you to live out of that awareness you have of your core nature, your authenticity.” And so that’s the miracle.

And the one we have in the gospel today is the one that I think might be the most interesting. He basically is saying that the gift — I don't know if this makes any sense to you, but I think it’s interesting that I heard this this week, but it’s the idea that of all the senses that we have, the last sense for us, if you’re dying, let’s say, and your brain is shutting down, the last sense to go is hearing. To the very end, you’re listening for something, listening. So in this gospel from Mark, we have one of the miracles of Jesus, and it’s the one in which he enables a person to speak clearly by improving the way he listens. Now, think about speaking as proclaiming something that is true and authentic. That’s what we’re here to do. We’re here to speak the truth, and the thing that keeps this figure in this gospel that’s healed, what keeps him from doing that, he can’t hear. He can’t hear right, and it’s true. Speech is a — how would you say it? It is established in our brain by what we hear. So if you live in a certain country that has a certain language, you’re going to speak that language, but let’s just say the speaking that we need to hear, in God’s plan for us to grow into who we are, is the truth. So the man can’t hear. He’s not ready for the truth. When you tell someone the truth about who they are or what they’re doing, they’re very likely to say, “That’s not true, because I can’t hear it. I can’t accept it. I’m not open enough to it.” So he opens his ears with his finger. It’s interesting. And then he does something else interesting. He takes spit, which is considered to be breath, which is the Spirit of God in a tangible form, in saliva, and touches his tongue. Your tongue is now touched by Spirit, by truth, and the other interesting thing about this thing is that, when Jesus does this, he does two things. He looks up to heaven, which is to say, “This is not me, the man Jesus, doing this. This is God.” And he groans, and I don’t know what the groan is. It’s fascinating. What is — was it difficult for him, or was it risky for him, because he knew, if he did this, it was going to get in the way of his ministry, and that’s one of the reasons why he would always say, “Don’t tell anybody about this. Don’t tell anybody”? But he almost had to do it, which is a beautiful image of God. He can’t resist the healing that he wants to give to people. So in this story, we see then the man who can hear the truth is able to speak the truth, and everybody is astonished. And you look at all the miracles of Jesus. It’s so interesting. Every single one of them has to do with awakening and empowering some natural quality that we have from God in terms of being a human beings, eyes that see, ears that hear, tongues that make speech clear, hands that get the work done, legs that get you going. Every one of them, if you think about it, direction of awakening and empowering human beings to be exactly who they were intended to be.

The law, it seems, in the Old Testament was controlling people, and they weren’t yet able to understand the reasons perhaps that they had to follow these regulations. But the New Testament is all about somebody now who realizes these regulations are nothing other than who I really am and who I want to be to the people I love and what I want other people to be to me. And all of a sudden, the healings don’t sound so like they’re magic and out of the realm of what happens naturally. No, to me, the miracles that Jesus performed are the natural ways in which grace works in your life and mine, and that’s what we trust in. We trust in that, and if we live in that kind of life, with all of those senses active and alive, we’re going to have the capacity to surrender our anxiety and our fear and be free of our addiction to whatever we have. Another glass of wine, another big deposit in our bank, another absolute certain sign from a friend that they’re not going to leave you, all of that kind of melts away into the fact that, if this is the God who I believe in, if this is the God who I believe is real, he’s doing all this for me, giving me all this capacity to handle it. Why wouldn’t he be able in doing that to give you everything you need to deal with whatever loss or whatever struggle you’ve got in your future? God doesn’t promise to not have difficulty, not have us go through difficulties, but if you understand how he’s always about empowering people to handle whatever comes their way with a kind of — not without pain and the need for grief and all that and loss, but never are we going to have that experience that fear sets up for us that we’re going to be in a situation where we will not survive. That’s impossible to believe if you know who God is and you trust him and you allow him to be exactly who he is for you. That’s peace.

Father, you tell us over and over again not to be afraid, but it seems to be something that we tend to fall into more quickly and more often than we wish. So bless us with this confidence that comes not so much from how the world is going or how our situation is unfolding but rather in a deep conviction that you are there with us in everything, and empower us to be able to cope with whatever comes our way. So bless us with confidence. Take away our fear, and we ask this is Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8 | James 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27 | Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

God of might, giver of every good gift, put into our hearts the love of your name so that, by deepening our sense of reverence, you may nurture in us what is good and, by your watchful care, keep safe what you have nurtured. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

Today we focus on one of the first times that God truly spoke to his people. In the Old Testament, we find God speaking to Abraham and to Moses, to the patriarchs, not so much to the people, for in the Old Testament, the image was, if people were sinful, then God could not be connected to them because of God’s holiness and their sin and their corruption. So in the beginning, God only spoke to the people through someone else. In the New Testament, we have a completely different way of communicating with God. He speaks to our hearts.

But what’s interesting about this particular theme of the Ten Commandments is this came at a very interesting point in the history of humanity. It was during the Bronze Age. It was 4,000 years ago. This was a time in the history of human beings when civilization was beginning to be formed. Governments were beginning to be formed, and the alphabet was created during this time. The wheel was invented during this time. So it’s interesting to think: what were people like 4,000 years ago? What was their moral life like? Well, there’s something in scripture that says something that I always find fascinating. Before there was a law, there was no sin. So in a sense, you could say there was no clarity of making a wrong decision, because there was no sense of what the right decision was. So people basically lived the way they intended to live, the way their ancestors lived, and what they did to each other was considered the norm. But God enters into people’s consciousness with this incredibly interesting Decalogue. It’s called the Ten Commandments, and so what’s fascinating about these Ten Commandments is what they are and what they’re asking of people. And so this first reading makes it clear that, when God is giving the Ten Commandments to people, he’s giving them what is considered to be the truth. And the truth, according to James in the second reading, the truth is something that is already in all of us. It is a sense of what is our nature, and so it’s clear that what James is saying is that, when the Ten Commandments were given, it was igniting us, connecting us to a truth that’s inside of us that was perhaps underdeveloped at the time the Ten Commandments were given, inviting people to understand, “This is who you really are. These are the things, if you did these things, you would find a community that you wanted to live with, people guided by this wisdom.” And when people — in the first reading it’s clear that what we’re being told is, when people see the wisdom of these Ten Commandments, they’re going to say, “Wow, these people are really intelligent. They’re smart,” because somehow there’s something already given to everybody. You might say the Ten Commandments are already written on our hearts. So it’s almost like — well, it’s not almost like. It is that God was telling people, when he gave them the Ten Commandments, that, “This is who you are. This is your nature.”

So let’s look at it, these Ten Commandments, because they’re clearly describing this life force that’s in a human being that, when it’s ignited with divinity, when divinity enters into it and the two become one, as it does in the New Testament, there is this force of life coming out of a person, divinity and humanity working together, living out these Ten Commandments. And so let’s look at them, as I said, and it goes like this: the first thing is that we need something more than ourselves. So we need to believe in something beyond ourselves. So the first commandment is you need to believe that there is a God who is there for you, not so much a God that you have to serve. That was the way it was basically described in the beginning, but here’s a God who is there for you. And the first thing he wants you to do is believe in him, believe he exists, then to allow him to be who he is, and who he is, is somebody who wants to enter into you and awaken your nature. And what he needs you to do is spend time with him. So one of those first three commandments is keep holy the Sabbath Day. That just means take some time to spend time with God, listening to him, and in the other — in the Ten Commandments, it’s all about our relationship with God. It’s don’t use his power, don’t take his power in vain. In other words, don’t take the gifts that he has given to your nature and use them in a way that is destructive to other people. Don’t use God’s name in vain, and when I was a child, that always meant you can’t say, “God dammit.” And in a way, that was kind of a primitive way of saying, “Don’t use the power of God to harm anyone or to have power over someone.” So the first three are about our relationship with divinity, intimacy with divinity, the rest primarily about our relationship with each other.

And if you listen to the gospel carefully, when God is — excuse me. When Jesus is talking about the law and about the hypocrisy of the pharisees who have not paid attention to these core laws and have replaced them with human traditions and all kinds of regulations, what we’re hearing him saying is that, when these laws are not followed, inside of human beings, there is this list of things he makes, and they’re almost exactly the same list that the Ten Commandments are asking us to not get engaged in these things. And so he’s saying the opposite of these laws is living inside of a person’s heart, meaning their very core, then there’s always going to be horrible destruction. And what he’s saying to these pharisees is, “You’re not teaching the Ten Commandments anymore. You’re teaching customs that keep you in power, and you keep people doing the things that they think are pleasing to God by these 600-plus rules and laws, and these are all customs.” But the core of what it is they’re supposed to be — the scribes and pharisees decided not to focus on, the Ten Commandments. It’s crazy. Because they weren’t living them, and so they put something in its place, because people in a way, in a relationship with God, always want to say, “Well, what is God asking from me?” Well, the 613 laws that they had were all about these customs about — many of those rules and laws made sense in terms of — it made for a better diet. It made for better cleanliness and all that, but you had to watch how you washed your hands, how you made your bed, how you cleaned this. All those things had become their religion, and the heart of it was missing.

So let’s look at those other seven commandments that are talked about in the gospel in a negative way, but let’s just listen to what they’re asking, because it’s really beautiful. First thing is there’s people around you that have given you life. Respect those people. Respect anyone that gives you life, increases your enjoyment of life, opens your life to what is true so you can live, in a way, engaged more in the things that mean the most to you. So the first thing is just honor those who are there giving you life, and we tend to think, of course, parents. It’s so interesting. Our species is the rare species that demands so much care on the part of those who create us. Animals can sometimes give birth to an offspring, and they get up and walk away and start eating, and they’re on their own. I haven’t had children, but I know people that do, and it’s a commitment where it’s 24/7 for years and years before the child is able to do much of anything on their own. Honor that. They may not have been the best. They may have been abusive in some ways, but honor that privilege of bringing life into the world and nurturing it. And in your relationship with each other — it’s so simple. Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Don’t kill. Don’t break your promises. Those, when you think about it, they’re so basic to human nature that any one of them, you know, if you don’t follow them, there’s no real integrity in the relationship. It would destroy — any one of those left unchecked would destroy a relationship, and it’s all about relationships. And the last two are so beautiful, in a sense, because we don’t pay much attention to them. It’s just be satisfied with the life you have. “It’s your life. I created it for you.” The people in your life, they’re there for a purpose, and we can be jealous of other people’s relationships, jealous of healthier families, jealous of people who have, I don't know, more of something that we don’t have. Or there’s just that simple thing of, “God, look at the things they have. I wish I had those things.”

All of these commandments then are things that, I think, anyone with a little bit of consciousness would say these were a good idea, but what happens when regulations and rules get out of control, in particular religion, and people are asked to do things that, when they think about it, don’t really match up with these Ten Commandments, things that aren’t so essential. All we need to do is look at the world today. It’s so fascinating to see how many people in the world, when a rule and a regulation are place on them, and they don’t believe that it’s necessary or they feel they have a right not to do it — wear a mask, don’t go to these places, don’t do this, don’t do this, all of that. Look at the reaction in human beings when they are told to do something that they really don’t believe is important, and they are violent against that sort of thing. And you might say, “Well, come on. Get a life. Understand the thing more.” All I want to underscore is the fact that there’s something so negative about a regulation and a rule that one doesn’t feel is the most essential thing or isn’t an essential thing and it impinges upon their freedom, and that’s what’s happened to religion. So many people have left religion, and they say, “I’m no longer religious.” Well, they usually mean I’m no longer Catholic, or I’m no longer Methodist, or I’m no longer Baptist, and every one of those religions have certain things in them that are customs that you have to do if you’re a part of that religion. And people say, “They don’t make any sense to me anymore,” and therefore they leave, and they go off to find something else. And all I’m saying is there’s a wisdom in what they’re doing that is worth paying attention to as a religious leader that I am, a Catholic priest. I need to listen to what they’re saying, because as I say, these regulations don’t make sense to them anymore, and when the church refuses to change them or refuses to listen to exceptions, it really creates a tremendous, unnecessary separation between that religion and that person. Most people don’t leave a religion because of the Ten Commandments or even because of the ritual, because ritual is so powerful. But they will leave a religion that’s asking for things that they no longer believe are the right of a religion to refuse to allow you the freedom that you feel is yours to be able to accomplish something. It’s interesting and fascinating to me how many people are in that position, and what’s the solution? Well, the solution is to always go back to the religion that you left perhaps. Not that you have to go back to it necessarily. I’m not pushing that as a have-to, but there’s so many things in religion that are valuable: the rituals, the community, all that kind of stuff. And just it’s so important to somehow understand that the core of what religion is supposed to be, and Catholicism tries to really stress this, is your human conscience. And you have a right to be able to make decisions about things that really matter to you when they don’t seem to matter that much to the institution that you belong to, and they’re more of a custom than they are a commandment.

So we live in a very fascinating time, but I think the most important thing is to keep in mind, at the heart of all religion, in terms of regulations and rules, there are just ten, and those ten are a connection to your essence, your nature. And as long as you’re living in those and as long as your religion primarily is focused on those, it will be a relationship that brings an abundant life. And it never will tend to feel like it is an obligation that is unfair and there is then resistance that is so natural to human nature that, I think, for it to be written off is selfish, is a mistake on the part of religions. We need to listen to the heart of people and what they really believe in, what they know, and trust them.

Father, your will, your desire is that we become who you created us to be. The rules and laws, the only ones you’ve given us are those that awaken us to that nature that is so embedded in everything that we choose to do or decide not to do. So bless us with the wisdom that comes from these Ten Commandments. Awaken them so they are no longer obligations but simply the most wise, prudent and loving thing that we can do to care for one another and to bring your life to fullness in one another. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Joshua 24:1-2a, 15-17, 18b | Ephesians 5:21-32 or 5:2a, 25-32 | John 6:60-69

Oh God, who cause the minds of the faithful to unite in a single purpose, grant your people to love what you command and to desire what you promise that amid the uncertainties of this world our hearts may be fixed on that place where true gladness is found. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

I’ve said to you often that the opening prayer sets the tone for whatever a man like me, wanting to communicate to you what these readings mean — it just sets the tone, and it’s saying what I want from God. Would God please, please give me this? Give me this, God, and that is I want to understand what you ask of me, what you command me to do. And I want you to remind me always what it promises when you say I need to do what you command, and then you also promise me that there’s going to be a gift, something wonderful. I love the way that opening prayer sets it in this way. It says the world is filled with uncertainties. We turn to the world for understanding, for protection, for all the things that we need, and we know that it’s wanting. So we need something, something that we can go to that’s going to nurture us and remind us of a promise that there is a place where we can find wholeness, gladness, joy. So with that focus for the homily, we’re going to be looking at what is it we turn to, to give us some kind of sense of stability and strength in the midst of all the uncertainties we deal with.

Let’s take the first reading, because the first reading says everything about who God is, not so much about what people are supposed to do for him but who he is. Joshua has gathered all the people together, and what’s interesting about gathering the people together, it’s the ordinary folks, but it’s also everybody that has any kind of authority over them. So there’s everybody, judges, leaders, elders, and they all gather together. And he wants to say something to them, and he’s basically saying, “All right, you need to be able to turn to a source that’s bigger than any individual or any other of these authorities that I’m gathering together. Everyone needs to turn to a power beyond themselves and invite that power to come into them.” Now, whether Joshua understood or the people understood all that that meant, but what he was saying, “I want you to choose the God that you believe in, that you trust in, because that’s going to say everything about who you are and what you want in the world. The God you serve is going to be the one that has formed you, given you everything.” So what you hear in this story is what’s the motive for surrendering to the authority of someone. Well, it’s not just because they’re the boss. It’s because you see this authority giving you something that you couldn’t have on your own. You’re being served by it, and so these people are saying, “Okay, if we think about it, who do we want to serve, a false god or a God who’s taken care of us and shown us all kinds of kindnesses and fed us and is guiding us on a journey? He’s been taking care of us. Why would we pick another God? So we’ll serve the God who serves us.” And that’s exactly what we do. The God we choose, the truth we choose to live by is a truth that we believe, when we choose it, it will produce for us everything that we long for, everything we want, everything we need. And yet the truth is there’s only one truth. There’s only one God.

There’s only one message, and everything else seems perhaps valuable and interesting and something we desire, depending on what we believe in, depending on how we see the world, but here’s the weakness of human nature. It was there at the very beginning in the story of Adam and Eve. What was Adam and Eve’s basic sin? I’ve said this to you over and over again. Autonomy. God said, “Don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Don’t ever think that you can have an understanding and a complete comprehension of what is and then you determine the rules and laws, you yourself will set them.” An autonomous person is free of any outside authority, any outside law, and they can create a world of their own making. It’s like an author can write a novel, and a novel can be a comedy or a tragedy. And basically he can do that. Then he has a book, but basically the image of that that’s terrifying to me is we can write our own book. But then the danger is that we expect like to then be like that book, and the things we’re choosing, that we believe will promise us fullness and wholeness, if it’s not true, if it’s not real, if it’s fiction, then you’re in trouble.

So that’s the fundamental issue in terms of what Jesus asks, or when anyone asks, or when you ask yourself the question: “What do I believe in? What do I believe in? What God is the God that’s guiding me and directing me and showing me how I should live?” Well, it’s the God that serves. That’s one way to look at it. What is it that brings me the most joy and the most satisfaction? Well, depending upon your level of consciousness, you may pick something pretty lowdown, like saying, “When I get everything I want, then that’s the only time I’m happy.” But if you live in that long enough, you lose it. So let’s hope you have a higher consciousness where you realize, “You know what? I really don’t know what will make me completely content and happy, but if I pay attention to what does, I begin to see it.” And it has something to do — like that great mystery that Paul reveals about marries. Everything that God is asking you to live in, when it comes to a truth, is not just about yourself and God, but mostly about you and your neighbor, you and yourself. All of his commands, his commandments are about your relationship to God and your relationship to each other. So basically the wisdom that God wants to give you is the wisdom that will enable you to live in the world as it is, as he has created it, and it’s going to be a lot like a marriage. And a healthy marriage is when husbands love their wives as they do themselves; wives love their husbands as they do themselves. They’ll listen to each other. That’s what the word obey means, to each other, and they will grow from each other’s experiences. And they will be able somehow to feel that they are to each other something so valuable that you want to give back to it, because it’s constantly giving to you. That’s the ideal, to live in that kind of world. And so what Jesus is inviting us into is that kind of world, but then there’s something else he has to do for us.

To tell us there’s a world out there that’s truthful and, when we’re in it and living it, we’re going to be able to find all the gladness and all the joy we want, well, the problem is human beings have never been designed to be able to do that on their own. You’re not given that gift at birth. No, it had to be won for you. It had to be given to you, and so when Jesus is talking to his disciples in the gospel and he’s asking them, “Look, there are a lot of other ways to live out there. I know you have choices. I know you can turn away from me. I know the things I’m explaining to you are so tough.” He’d just been saying, “Eat my body, and drink my blood.” And they’re saying, “I don’t understand any of this.” So Jesus is talking to them as if they had the capacity to understand what he’s saying, and Jesus knew in his heart they couldn’t understand it yet. They couldn’t. They had to be given something, and the whole story of salvation history is what they’re given is given in this thing called redemption, Jesus dying on the cross and, through this death, somehow empowering human beings to see more than they ever could see, understand more than they could ever understand and be closer to their true nature than ever before. And when that happened at Pentecost, the disciples went from frightened young men that didn’t know quite what they believed and didn’t know quite how they could ever accomplish what they were going to do, if they were going to do it, and they weren’t sure they were going to do it, they were like the rest of us most of the time. And then redemption happened, and boom, they changed, and all of a sudden they saw it. They understood it, and their understanding was like a power of communication. Everybody understood everybody, because there was one truth everybody was immersed in. It’s the beauty of living in a community that is grounded in what is real and what is true, and the key is you’re living in a community where everyone is serving everyone else.

So there’s a line that I really want to focus on in this gospel, because it’s the one that I think may be most confusing to a lot of people. We’re talking about faith, believing in the truth of who you are and what will make you happy, and the point is that, in that very thing that you’ve been given, where do you get the conviction? Can you prove it? Do you have examples that are the opposite of it? Absolutely. So what Jesus is saying in this gospel is that God has to give you something that you don’t have, and if you don’t have it, you’ll not be able to comprehend and live what I’m asking you to live. So basically what he says, “No one can come to me unless the Father draws him.” Well, how does God draw you to him? He has this gift of redemption. What is redemption? The Spirit enters into us. What is the Spirit? Wisdom, understanding, knowledge. We have to have some core intuition. I’ll call it first in a negative way. We have to have some intuition that the things the world presents to us, power, control over people and all that stuff, as exciting and as interesting as all that is, it’s never going to work. How do you know that in your gut? Do you have to go through 1,000 experiences? I hope not. Collectively, whenever we go through a bunch of experiences as a human race, we grow, and we change. We evolve, but what I’m saying is there was something that happened at the time that Jesus died on the cross that lifted us to a higher level of a capacity to understand the mystery of what it is that finds — that gets us to the place we need to be, and it’s not by writing our own story. It’s not being the author of life. It’s not being autonomous.

Isn’t it interesting that the freedom we long for, that’s so core to our body, almost gets interpreted like, “Well, if we’re free to be who we want to be and who we need to be, we’re also free to decide what that is.” No. Yeah, you’re free to accept the journey toward that which brings wholeness only if you awaken yourselves and open yourselves to the reality of a gift that comes from God. Some people don’t call it God. They might call it an insight to what is real and what is true. Think about that: something given to you by God, through his death on the cross, that enables you to have in your core a compass that has the right direction branded in you. Now you have something to guide you, to take you, and what it’s going to take you on is a journey with a God who is not only inviting you into a place of wisdom and knowledge and therefore joy but is taking you on a journey where it’s going to take you — it’s going to require of you a deep conviction that the path is going to be challenging, and the key to getting through the path is trust — trust, belief, because belief is not just that God exists or the law exists. It’s I have within me — because of God I believe that I have within me the capacity to find what I need, what I want. I call that God’s presence. Most of us name it God. The reason we allow it is because we know that the intention of this God is that he will give us something that will guide us and give us this focus of where to go and where to find the things that we need. So belief is not just he exists, but he has a purpose in his existence. And it’s the answering into us, which is redemption, the possibility of God entering into us, living inside of us, guiding us on a regular basis. And you know what?

The greatest thing that faith promises is not just that you’ll see this as a way of understanding it, but you will experience it — experience it. Until we feel the service of God living inside of us, giving us life, and that’s given to us in glimpses, it never really becomes quite as real as it’s intended to be.

So bottom line, we have to serve someone. So serve the God who has taken care of you, guided you, given you life, given you a destiny. If you believe all that, you’ll serve him without ever questioning it. And when you’re in that, you’re going to feel his service, but usually it starts, because we’re human, with him serving us first. Taste that and know it will never stop. That’s the gift of faith, so much more than just a flat, “I guess God does exist.” No, he lives in you and powers you, awakens you, and you’re a new person. Let us pray.

Father, we are weak. We are longing for your strength and your support, and that support comes in the form of awareness. Bless us with greater knowledge of who you are, how you work within us, the promises that you’ve made, the support you give us so we can see you as you are, believe in you as you are, and find the gladness that is our inheritance. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Proverbs 9:1-6 | Ephesians 5:15-20 | John 6:51-58

Oh God, who have prepared for those who love you good things, which no eye can see, fill our hearts, we pray, with the warmth of your love so that loving you in all things and above all things, we may obtain your promises, which surpass every human desire. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

WE continue with the theme of the bread of life, and one of the things that I find so fascinating in the opening prayer of this liturgy is the promise that it is reminding us of — a promise made by God initially to Abraham. This promise was that he would choose us, (in the beginning it was just the Israelites, but obviously in the fullness of his revelation he chose all of those he created) every man and woman, that while we are on this journey here on earth, to move from a place of slavery to a place of freedom, from a place of scarcity to a place of abundance. This is his promise: “I will take you there.” So in the opening prayer, we have a beautiful image of this thing that we are called to experience. This fullness is something very good, yet it’s clear in the prayer that no one can see it. Perhaps what that points to is that this process we’re moving toward, this wholeness, this fullness of life, this abundant place is not something that is literally promised to be at a particular place and time, but something much more mysterious. When it happens, when is that? It strikes me that it’s more like moments, at least before it becomes full, when we leave this earth and enter into another place, that those moments of peace where all seems well and everything is in its place, those are beautiful moments. It also strikes me that the slavery that we often get caught in is the slavery of judgment. Judgment. It is one of those things that God made so clear — stop judging. We do it all the time. I do it all the time.

The opening prayer says we are given this great promise. It will happen. You’re not going to be able to stop it. You can say no to it and, in that sense, maybe stop it, but would you really say no to life, to fullness, to freedom? Maybe, and that’s a reason there is a hell, because it’s possible that we can deny that fullness, that freedom. Otherwise we’re puppets. In my own understanding of human nature, unless there has been such severe damage, most of us will choose to be free, to be alive, to be connected, to be at peace. So as we look at this promise unfolding, we’d have to say, “All right, what is it that we need to do? In what do we need to be engaged for this promise to be continually feeding us, nurturing us, enabling us to grow, and to not lose hope?” Well, everything in the Old Testament is a prefiguring of everything that happened in the New Testament. Everything in the New Testament, in a sense, reveals what the Old Testament was all about. They are not two separate stories. It is one story, and they are both filled with incredible wisdom. The mysterious thing that we listen to in the first reading is about this feminine figure that wants to do the same thing that Christ wants to do — she wants to feed us. She feeds us with this rich food and choice wine, and somehow she knows that the thing that she is giving us is not something that can be explained or figured out. Otherwise she might have called it knowledge. No, she calls it wisdom. A good definition, I think, of the difference between knowledge and wisdom is that knowledge is information, but wisdom is a knowing, a kind of inner knowing about one primary thing — life. Life. You can be smart and not grounded in the truth and not have life, but if you have wisdom it would seem that you would be grounded in the reality of what God has asked us to participate in — the fulfillment of a promise.

Sometimes it feels like we’re on a test track. Do you get that feeling sometimes? I did when I was younger. “Here are all of these beautiful, wonderful things you could do, but I’m telling you, those are things you can’t. They’re very attractive, but if you don’t do those for me as a sign that you love me, and you get through this whole test, I’ll grade you at the end. And if you make a C-minus, you can get in, but then a D-plus, that is purgatory. An F, well, you know where that goes.” It’s not that kind of test. No, it’s an adventure. It’s an experience. It’s an experience we’re asked to be engaged in, and this experience is called life.

So wisdom, that knowledge of what it really is about, the ability to be engaged in something that’s mysterious and hidden and trust in it, that’s the gift of wisdom. It is interesting that the gift of wisdom in the Old Testament is feminine figure. However in the New Testament it becomes a person. It becomes Jesus, and this Jesus — the wisdom is in his essence, his body, and the blood that courses through him. It is in his life. The wisdom of Jesus is that he is the manifestation of the work of this journey. The fullness of this work is primarily in allowing the same thing that happened to Jesus to happen to us — God entered into Jesus, God is in Jesus and Jesus is God. Jesus said it over and over again. “The Father is in me. I am in the Father. I want to come into you. If I come into you, I’ll bring the Father to you.” The goal is the Father. The goal is a life-giving relationship with God the Father.

Since the beginning of my spiritual life until rather recently, my focus was primarily on Jesus. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that, but if I met him, if I stood before him and said, “I love you so much. I want to do everything for you, Jesus.” He would say, “Well, I know you do, but know that I’m the Father. If you’re looking at my face…” these are the words of Jesus, “that is God. That’s what your God looks like, just like you.” If you could believe that this God is just like you and get through the mystery of the way he reveals himself in the Old Testament where he seems often so violent, so harsh, so difficult. it is only working with people who are only capable of understanding him if he’s like someone that they know, some God that they know. He can change their mind about gods if they first see, “Okay, he’s saying, ‘I’m a God, but I’m the only God, the true God, and I’m like the other gods, but watch me. Listen to me. Pay attention to me, and you’re going to see me revealing myself,” self-revelation, self-disclosure over years and years of working with him. Then you see him finally manifested in his absolute incredible power, the God who wants to come and dwell inside of you and in me.

When Jesus pointed that out to people, they had been informed by the Old Testament, by the images of God but also by the images of the people who ran their religion. The thought of God even being able to get near material things was considered to be a blasphemy. God is perfect. God is pure. The world is impure. Material world is evil. That’s what basically happened. That’s one of the great heresies in the early church. For the first thousand years of the church, there was a thing called Manichaeism, and it was that very teaching. God is goodness. God is pure. God is grace. God is life, but the material world is destruction and darkness, sin, corruption. That’s like saying that the two are separate, but they are not. God is the world. God is in everything. God created it exactly as it is. The idea that it has been corrupted is a misunderstanding, I think, of the power of the fallen angels who came into this world to test us, to work with us, to be almost like a personal trainer. I’m sure they wouldn’t like to think of themselves that way. They’d like to think they’re robbing you of life. However, if you have this core trust in a promise and then you feel like you don’t have it, rather than doubting that it is there, you say, “Wait, I believe it’s there. I know it’s there. I’ve got to exercise this kind of faith, and believe it.” When you then trust in it, knowing you can’t see it yet, but you get glimpses of it, and then you keep pushing, struggling and cease judging you’re going to find that it’s exactly the way life really is. The truth is reality. So if I say, “Who am I?,” Well, I know that I’m a male. I know that I live in the United States of America. I know that I’m 5’11”. I know that I’m 78 years old. I know that’s not my full identity, but that is part of who I am. That’s my body. That’s part of my essence in this world, and some day I’m going to have my body back again. So there’s something about the way I look that’s important to embrace and to accept. However, in the culture I grew up in, I was filled with judgment about something as simple as my body — I was a late bloomer. I was the last guy picked in the gym when we chose teams. I was 5’2”as a freshman in high school and weighed about 80 pounds. I always thought I had a bad body. I just thought it was not as good as I should have had or wished that I would have had. There’s all that coveting. Coveting, I wish I had this. I wish I was that. I wish I was taller, shorter, thinner, more muscular, whatever. Judgment, judgment, judgment. It becomes almost a way of life.

So I wonder about how you enter into life or live a full life? Well, the first thing you do, if you stop judging, is you stop acting as if the life that has been planned for each of us, all of the people in it, the place and the time of it, all of that, if you stop judging it, then it means that it’s random. It just happened. It’s like if we were models that came out of some kind of factory, “I wish I’d got that other model, the convertible. I like that one.” Crazy. No, we’re exactly who we should be. We look exactly as we should look. Today is exactly as it should be. I know that can turn into this, “Oh, it’s all predetermined. I’m just sitting here.” No. It’s so much more mysterious than that. There is something so crucial about entering into the fullness of life by simply not judging the life that you have or judging the life someone else has and adding value to that judgment. You end up living with someone that I learned to be friends with sometime ago. It’s called the silent observer. You replace judgment with observation, curiosity. I’m still alive at 78 and a lot of my friends aren’t. I wonder what that means? I embrace it. I accept it. I don’t want it to be different. I don’t want to live longer than I’m supposed to. I don’t want to live shorter. I just want to be present to this thing that God has given me called me, and that kind of life we call a life of real authenticity. Authenticity, what does it mean? It just means it’s real.

When you’re with somebody who acts as if they’re someone else, when you’re with somebody who is dressed in such a way that it doesn’t seem to fit who they are, when you see somebody overly made up or whatever, you say, “Well, I guess it looks better, maybe, but what’s wrong with just working with what you have and enhancing it, make it more what it is?” That’s my way of seeing what God means when he says, “Don,” he says to you, me, all of us, “I want you to have an abundant life.” I’m thinking, “Okay, well then, how do I do this? How do I do it?” Well, if I say to myself or I say to you, “Stop judging. Just observe,” you say, “Well, that’s so hard.” Yeah, it is, but then think of the thing that is at the heart of the promise. “I’m not asking you to do this on your own. I’m not asking you to come up with the strength to do all of this. No, I’m inside of you. I’m with you. I’m there next to you.” Someone once said to me, “Give me a partner. I can accomplish anything. Leave me alone then I lose hope and get all messed up.” We have that kind of connection with the truth, with the God who made us. When you are observing things with his eyes, when you’re sensing that he is in you, and you’re looking at things asking him, “What is this really? What is it really?” Contemplation, meditation, wondering, curiosity without judgment are amazing gifts to that innermost core part of us. Sometimes we wake up in the morning and say, “I don’t want to get out of bed,” when in truth, the essence of who we are is we can’t wait to get out of bed and experience the day and wonder about it and just feel good about being who we are, where we are and what’s happening around us. When that happens, I guarantee you, that there is an inner calm and inner peace that people will pick up. They’ll want to know, “What do you have? What is it about you?” You can just smile and say, “Well, I’ve learned to just accept myself with the support of the God who created me, and I’m enjoying my life, even the hard and painful parts. I have life. I have abundant life, and I’m going to live forever.

Father, your love for us is beyond our imagining, and your interest in the smallest things that we do somehow baffles us, because we can’t imagine you, all your awesome otherness and majesty, are so deeply concerned about each and every one of us. Bless us with this knowledge. Bless us with an awareness of your presence so truly we can be engaged in the life that you planned for us and share that life with our brothers and sisters, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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1 Kings 19:4-8 | Ephesians 4:30—5:2 | John 6:41-51

Almighty, everliving God, who govern all things both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

This is the fourth Sunday in a row that we have gone back to the same image of the bread of life, and what’s beautiful about this image and why it’s worth going back to over and over again is because it’s talking about who is God in your life. Who is he in the sense of what is he there for. What is he accomplishing for you, or what is he demanding of you? Is there a comfort in that image of who God is, or is it a pressure, along with all other pressures, that just make life a little bit more complex and a little bit more stressful? Well, if you use the image of this God as he fully is, as he longs for you to see him is like bread, like food, like energy, the energy is given to you from this God directly into you as a way of giving you the ability to live the life that he’s called you to live. And the goal of religion is not to get you to live a certain way through a lot of discipline, rules and laws and judgments and threat of punishment but to engage in something that’s exciting and life-giving and, in a way, pleasurable, if I can say that. The life that God wants us to live is good, and if it’s filled with stress and anxiety, then something is really missing. Something is wrong.

So I want to take the character in the first reading and give you an explanation of his little story, because I think it so resonates with so many stories I’ve heard from other people about their relationship with God. And here’s the way it goes, Elijah. Elijah in this story has just had a profound experience. He’s been working with the followers of Baal, which is a false god. And there was a big confrontation between God, Yahweh, and the god of Baal, and it was set up by Elijah. And so there was this great contest to see which god was strongest, and the winner was definitely Yahweh. It had to do with Yahweh’s power coming down from heaven and igniting a fire that consumed this offering to God, and it was so dramatic and so powerful and so clear that this God, the God that Elijah taught, is the God, the most powerful God. And so you would have thought, “Wow, God has manifested himself in such a spectacular way. Everybody is going to believe in him.” Did you ever hear that experience of people who say, “When God has done something great and powerful for me, I believe in him. If things are not going very well, I’m not so sure he’s there,” that kind of oversimplification of the love that God has for you and for me is to take away our pain and our suffering? Well, the interesting part of this story is the people who had seen this great sign, did they turn to Yahweh? No, they turned against the messenger, and they decided they would kill Elijah. So instead of being the hero that changed everyone’s mind and opened them to a new image of God, it backfired. So he finds himself running for his life, but the thing that’s interesting about this moment in Elijah’s life is his depression. Maybe he’s always thought, “If I could just have some great miracle and I could prove to everyone that God is more powerful than anything else, they would all believe in me and my message.” It didn’t turn out that way for him in this scenario, and so instead of saying, “Well, that was their problem, and I know God has proven to me once again he is who he is,” no, he just said, “I’m so depressed. All I do — I just want to die. I want to end this whole life here. It’s just too frustrating.” And an angel comes and starts feeding him and said, “You’ve got to take a journey. You’ve got to process all of this. You’ve got to integrate it into who you are and understand it.” That image of taking a journey is so big in scripture. It means pondering, wondering, seeking truth. And so he ends up on a mount, Mount Horeb, which is also Mount Sinai, and he gets in a cave. And in the cave, you know the story. You’ll remember it, that he goes to the face of the cave, opening of the cave, and looks out and asks for God to make himself shown to him. And there’s a big earthquake, and then there’s fire, and there’s storms and all of these spectacular signs of God in the world. And then the revelation is then came a gentle, gentle, tiny whisper, and the point of the story is there, that’s where God is, not in the spectacular, not in the dramatic but in some kind of whisper. When somebody whispers to you, there’s a form of some kind of intimacy. They lean over and cup their hand and give you a message that’s just for you. What a beautiful image of who God longs to be in your life and in mine.

So what we have in this story then is an image of what it is that we need to understand that happens to us when we open ourselves to the reality of who God really is and we drink of that, and that becomes food, and the food changes us. But it doesn’t change the world that much, meaning if I’m looking for signs from God that show his goodness to me by an image I have of what that means, that would mean that God would take away something that’s awful for me. Say I have lost someone or something and it’s gone, and I want it back. I want it healed. I want it found. I say, “God do this, because you said you will help me in any way you can, and you’re so powerful.” And nothing happens. Then there’s this sort of crisis. “Well, God doesn’t answer my prayers. So why do I mess with him?” Especially if it’s something that’s so crucial to you. Why doesn’t he answer it? Why doesn’t he fix things for us? Because that would make him into some kind of figure that we would use, much like money in the bank, much like a power. It would go to our head. It would be egocentric. There’s so many problems if you have God’s ear and God will do whatever you ask him to do, take care of all the pain in you and other people’s lives. It’s just a bad relationship. So what are you expecting from him? What is it you think that God will give you when you turn to him and say, “I need your help”? Isn’t it interesting that one of the things that we do and are able to do, when it comes to some crisis or something, there’s some way in which you go through a cycle of grieving and mourning, and it moves you from — the famous Kubler-Ross things about — you go from denial to anger to bargaining to some kind of acceptance and finally forgiveness. Well, that process of integrating whatever is happening to you into your story, into your process of becoming who God wants you to be, going through that process, that’s the miracle. That’s the miracle of God working in your life, that he is going to be there to be the source of getting you through something, and then going through it is the journey that gets you to the insight that you couldn’t have without that pain. It’s a very different way of imagining God working with you, in you, through you.

Then I was thinking about depression, and the thing in this story that was fascinating to me is Elijah gets really depressed after having this spectacular success. And the thing that’s interesting about that is depression is a loss of a sense of your own value, your own dignity, your own worth. It’s like whatever it is in you that gives you enthusiasm, excitement, confidence, excitement about a process that you might be going through, something that you’re going to be attaining that’s hard, but you know when you get it, it’s going to be worth all the pain — all of that you might call enthusiasm, opposite of depression, depression, the loss of a sense of value, worth. Enthusiasm, I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, which I love to do, and it’s such a fascinating word. Enthusiasm means being possessed by God — possessed by God, entheos, in God. My preaching, my teaching has always been focused somehow on this very powerful mystery of what does it mean to believe in God beyond simply that he exists but believe that he is in you, with you, as intimate as the one who whispers secrets to you? And when he’s in you and doing that, he’s doing this with an indication and a conviction that he wants us to feel that this is exciting work. This is amazing work. This is something that’s going to bring you and people around you some kind of inner worth and inner value, and so I was just so interested in thinking, all right, the food that God gives you, this bread of life, is not ever to be thought of as a miraculous removal of pain or fixing a broken problem, fixing a problem, that something’s broken. No, it has something much more to do with engaging you in a process where there’s an inner well-being, a conviction that all of this that’s going on, as crazy and as difficult as it is, is for you. And then when you digest it, take it in and hold it with this conviction that there is this miraculous part of you that’s called divinity that has a way of dealing with pain and suffering that brings not depression or discouragement or a feeling that we’re not favored by God, just the opposite, that this is really a unique gift. And it’s designed in the most perfect way for me to engage in it so that I am finding something. Now, in the process of waiting to find it, what sustains you on that long journey? Not your own capacity of, “I can do this, my own drive, my own will.” No, it has to be this mysterious thing called bread of life, grace, a power that’s not yours, not mine but comes to us.

So I know a lot of people that believe in God. They’ll tell me, “Yeah, I believe there’s God.” And I say, “Well, kind of like, what are y’all doing together now?” You ask them some kind of intimate question like, “How is it working?” And they go like, “No —” My favorite line is people say, “Well, I don’t have a personal relationship with him. Jesus had that, and that’s not my destiny,” or they have some kind of oversimplified notion of the limitations of God, as if he’s like us and say, “Well, he’s too busy. He’s not interested in just my little problems.” God, is he interested in your little problems? They’re his problems, given to you by him for a purpose that gets you to a place that he knows you want to be and that he wants you to be, because he created it for you, and it’s going to be really, really wonderful but not in that kind of euphoric, everything is perfect sense but in this kind of calm, easy conviction that every morning you wake up, and you feel pretty good. And when you get in the daily grind of things, there is somehow a kind of unconscious sense that all of this is going to be fine. There’s something I’m looking forward to, but even in the process of doing the ordinary, there’s something in it that just feels like I’m being fed, not starved, not neglected and certainly, certainly not judged. How do we ever turn around this image of this God who is fully revealed by the time we get to the point of Jesus’ ascension into heaven? How do we ever fall back to those old images in the Old Testament of a God who is judgmental and demanding and upset and ready to crush those who don’t do what he says? But that’s sort of in there if we’re not careful, and it leads to depression, and what is God’s greatest gift? It’s found in that New Testament beautiful story about someone like you, like me witnessing what it’s like to be infused with food, and we can do the most amazing things, mostly find peace in the midst of stress and tension.

Father, you have made us for joy and for peace and for a sense of fullness in the midst of all things that might rob us of these great gifts. Bless us with a faith in you that understands the process you’ve asked us to go through with you so we never feel that sense of alienation from whatever it is that we need to find that inner peace. So bless us with that food that is always from you to us. It’s not within our capacity to do it, and when we try on our own, we fail. So let us drink of your presence and find that peace. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15 | Ephesians 4:17, 20-24 | John 6:24-35

Almighty, everliving God who govern all things both in heaven and in earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

We’re continuing the same theme that we started last week, the image of the bread of life. Jesus is the bread of life. So what I’m praying I can do in this homily is open your minds, your hearts to a way in which God has intended us to live in this world with him. We’re not here to please him. We’re not here to be tested by him. We’re not here just to obey his rules and laws and prove that we are willing to surrender our wills to his. No, no. He wants partnership. He wants us to be in him and he in us, and we together work to engage in whatever this mysterious thing is that is called life.

Now, this first reading is a reminder, and it’s a great image of what we’re here to accomplish. The Israelites found themselves in a very negative position. They were slaves, slaves to something outside of themselves. They were having to do what they were told to do and couldn’t be who they were. Just keep that in mind, that image of human beings living in a world of authority is not what we’re intended to live in, and so there’s this image of God intervening in their life and calling Moses to lead these people from this place of slavery to a place of freedom, a land of milk and honey, a place of wonder and beauty. That’s a very strong way for you to understand what we’re here on this planet to do. We’re here as participants in a process of all of us together moving to a place of greater fullness, and so in that story, we can see that there is a part of human nature that doesn’t like to go through a process of transformation that demands a loss of certain levels of comfort and well-being. I think it’s fascinating that even though they perhaps didn’t remember what it was like to be in an environment where they were slaves, they felt that the accommodations in this process of moving to a new place was unacceptable. “We don’t like the food. We don’t like it. We don’t like living this way. We want to go back. Even though it was imperfect, it was more comfortable.” That image of we want comfort is so big in each of us, and so what’s wonderful about this story is we see something in God that is, in a way, a sign of patience and a sign of compassion. He listens to the Israelites, who are really complaining about the food. So he said, “All right, I’ll feed you. Don’t worry about it. I will make sure you have some food.” And so Moses is the one that proclaims to everyone that they will then be fed by God with this miraculous, mysterious hoarfrost on grass in the morning, and then quail will be plentiful in the evening. So they were fed for a very long time. That whole journey was 40 years in the desert, and then they were to get to this new land, this new place. And the new place is, of course, the new life that God promises us when he himself entered into the world to guide us. So you have this image that is a strong image of what life on this planet is for. It is about a journey from one place to another, and the journey is not necessarily comfortable. It’s painful and difficult.

Now let’s go to St. Paul. St. Paul says something really interesting about what it is that we are here to become, and he says we have to become something different. And so he says, “The work of God in your life and in mine is to bring us into a place where we’re renewed in spirit and understanding. We put on a new self-created in God that’s whole and complete, living in the truth.” So let’s just talk about this new creation, this new self. It’s different than the old self, and the old self could be described as a lower level of consciousness where we’re always basically longing for the most simple, primitive needs. “Give me a couch. Give me a beer. Give me a football game,” whatever or whatever it is. We love comfort, but there’s a new self in us that needs to be born of spirit, and it has a different disposition about how we are to live in this world. And so we have it in the gospel, the secret, part of the secret.

All right, now let’s go to where the crowds are. The crowds around Jesus were amazing, and the life of Jesus is amazing, and the one thing about his life that is both confusing and wonderful and challenging for us to understand completely is his miracles. And you have to understand what those miracles are for, because the shadow of misunderstanding the miracles that Jesus performed — and he’s saying, “Anything I did, you can do.” We may say, “Oh, well then, if God is in me and I’m a new person in God and I believe that Jesus was filled with divinity and that that’s the symbol of who we are —” The sign that Jesus gave us was this image of a human being filled with divinity. That’s why the work of God, the work of God described in the scriptures today is, in the words of Jesus, is we believe in the one who sent him. When you believe in someone — we tend to think of belief as just — I believe in God. That means he exists. Well, it’s pretty hard to imagine the world without some kind of intelligence when you understand how the world works, but nevertheless, there is something important about believing that God exists. But believing in someone, if somebody says, “I believe in you,” they don’t mean, “I believe you’re alive and standing in front of me.” They say, “I believe in you means I trust in you. I feel something good in you. I would trust you with my needs and wants. I believe in you.” Well, if the work of God is believing that he came and lived in Jesus and that was the model of the new self that we were going to live in in the New Testament, then we’re getting close to the truth. We are gifted, through this mysterious thing called redemption, which was Jesus somehow, as a human being struggling with all the things that he wanted to do, had to face the fact that it wasn’t going to turn out the way he wanted, and he was going to have to endure the humiliation of failure. And he accepted the suffering that that entailed. He accepted the role that God gave him, and it was the most painful thing he could have endured. And when he did it, there was an explosion of life within him, and that’s our model. Jesus is the model of surrendering to the way things are, and yet we make him the model of a world that he created for us where he says, “I’m in the world with you,” and we put on the emphasis on Jesus. “Jesus did this for me.” But just like the people said about Moses — they said, “Moses gave us bread from heaven. Why can’t you do these miracles for us?” And Jesus said, “No, Moses didn’t give you the bread from heaven. God gave you the bread from heaven through Moses.” Jesus the man is saying, “I am not the source of what I can do for you. God in me is doing it. So my power as a human is just like your power as a human. We’re limited. We can’t do that much that we need to do in order to engage in the world in the way it is, a place of growth, change and development.”

So what are we learning? This God, who entered into a man who’s the model of who we are, performed marvelous miracles, and he said we can do the same thing. So what do you do when something happens to you that’s painful and difficult, or worse, what do you do when somebody you love deeply is going through something really painful and difficult, a disease that will take their life, a struggle with addiction? How is it that we’re to imagine this power of God flowing through me like it flowed through Jesus, doing the work that Jesus showed us we can do? Well, the mistake we make is we think that the miracles of Jesus were to always remove suffering. They did remove some suffering, but what are the miracles about? They’re about this mysterious way in which God is saying, “I came into the world to empower human beings to be all that they’re intended to be.” The healings of Jesus were about physical healings. Eyes that couldn’t see can now see. Ears that couldn’t hear can hear. Mouths that couldn’t speak can speak. Arms that couldn’t work now work. Legs couldn’t move. So it’s all about being fully alive and fully human and being open to the truth, seeing what’s real. “Open my eyes, God. Let me see who I am and what I’m here for.” That’s the miracle. He also drove out demons. It’s interesting that in John’s gospel, he never mentions the driving out of demons, because it’s as if he saw that as something a little different, but John wanted us to know, in his gospel, who he is, who God is, who Jesus is, what it’s like for a human to be filled with divinity, because that’s our task. And if — we think that we have this divinity in us to be able then to accomplish something that isn’t really what Jesus did in his miracles, and we think it’s about taking away suffering. And what if suffering is not to be taken away? If we look at the crucifixion of Jesus, then if suffering is to be taken away, the death of Jesus makes no sense at all. If he’d have trusted more in the Father, the Father would have been able to allow him to conquer everything, destroy all those enemies. And Jesus could have. He said God could do that, but that’s not God’s will. God doesn’t want to be in you and in me, empowering us to be the instrument that, when I’m suffering or somebody else is, he gives me the power to take away the suffering. What would happen to us? We wouldn’t grow. We wouldn’t change. We wouldn’t become who we’re intended to be. So when you pray for yourself or for someone else, asking God to be inside of you, giving you the wisdom you need to be able to make this move in a direction that creates life in me and in everyone around us who knows this story, we’re not asking for removal of the pain, that we long for that, but that the pain will do its work. And the work will be finished, and we’ll surrender to it. And when the work is done, the pain stops. So the pain goes away when we’ve learned what the pain is there for. That’s a very different way to deal with these issues of suffering and the miracle of God’s giving us power to be in charge. If God is in charge of the world, that means he can make it all happen a certain way. Well, he is, in that sense, in charge, but he isn’t going to change the way the world is and the way it’s designed because we don’t want to be uncomfortable or we don’t want to be in pain.

It’s almost like saying, and this is naive, but if we just had enough health, enough money, enough talent, then whatever we’d do would be so successful. We’d just soar into fullness and greatness. Do you know anybody that’s ever had a lot of money or just could do anything or have super success in everything? Have you ever spent time with them? They’re obnoxious. They’re self-centered. They’re self-consumed. I want to be with somebody that knows what it’s like to be changed by suffering and has wisdom and truth inside of them, and they look at me, and they say, “I want to be there with you in your suffering, because I know it will bring you to a new place.” And then you wait, trusting, believing that, when you have turned to God and given him the ability to work through you, dealing with yourself or dealing with somebody else, you will be a powerful agent in moving that person to the place the pain is intending them to be, and it will be less pain. So in a sense, you are healing them in a way that means less suffering, but the most important thing you’ve got to have in your heart is this is in God’s hands, and he will make this work. And we’ll look back on this and smile and say, “Without this, I could never be who I am.”

Father, your presence is your greatest gift to us, that you dwell within us, creating a new person, a new self, and in that presence of you within us, we find the most important gifts we receive is wisdom, understanding, compassion, empathy for the plan that you have for the world. And the honor that you’ve given us to be a part of that unfolding is beyond our imagining. So bless us with the kind of faith that truly opens our hearts so that we take on and become your heart, your compassion, your love, and let us share that with the people around us that we love, that we’re called to be there for. And when we feel the power of this grace flowing through us, give us the confidence that it is a gift, never us alone, always with you, always in you, always because of you. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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The 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time
2 Kings 4:42-44 | Ephesians 4:1-6 | John 6:1-15

Almighty, everliving God who govern all things, both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

I mentioned to you that we’re reading scripture from the year of Mark, but as you know, Mark’s gospel is the shortest of all the gospels, and there really isn’t enough in it to fulfill all the Sundays of ordinary time, which is about 33, 34 Sundays. So today we have John’s gospel, and I think it’s worth noting how different John’s gospel is than Mark and Matthew and Luke, because those first three are the ones we call the synoptic gospels, and they’re very similar. And one of the things that’s similar about them is they basically are reflections of those who witnessed the actions of Jesus. So what you find in the synoptic gospel is a great indication and a history of what Jesus did, but John’s gospel is different. It’s not focused so much on what Jesus did but who Jesus is. Who he is in John’s gospel is such a strong, clear message that this Jesus is God incarnate. He’s God.

Now, we know that he was man and God, but if you work from the man position, you learn a lot about what it means to be human and the beauty and the dignity of humanity. But also if you focus, and I don’t really do this that much myself personally, but if you really focus on Jesus as God, then you have a lot to learn about who God is in this figure Jesus. And when the disciples would ask, “Show us the Father. Who’s the Father? What does he do?” And Jesus would look at his disciples with that piercing look that he must have had and say, “Hey, you see me? You’re looking at me; you’re looking at the Father.” So when John starts his gospel, he goes back to the very beginning and says, “At the very beginning of time, Jesus was there. Well, how is that, that Jesus existed for all time? Well, the part of Jesus that existed for all time was his divinity, because Jesus’ divinity is God. So it’s like saying — when John’s gospel says that Jesus was there at the beginning, he’s making another statement subtly that this Jesus is the best reflection we have of who God is. So yes, God was there at the beginning of creation. So that meant Jesus, the divinity in Jesus was there, but there’s this mystery. The divinity of Jesus was so integrated into his humanity that it was one. So let’s just go back to staying with this one image. When we see Jesus recorded in this gospel, we’re looking at God and how he works in the world today in your life and in my life.

One of the other things about John’s gospel that’s interesting is how many different ways in which John records the actions of Jesus, because they’re not the same things that we find in the other synoptics. There’s many miracles that John never mentions. Particularly the one that’s shocking, in a way, is he doesn’t mention the Last Supper in terms of the Eucharist. You remember it’s the Last Supper because of the washing of the feet, and he also has some other things that are left out that seem very important, like driving out demons. John never mentions in his gospel that Jesus drove demons out of people. But what did he stress? Well, the interesting thing is the stressing in this particular gospel, which is so important, is the feeding of the 5,000. I found this out, and I never knew this, never realized it, but the only miracle that’s in every one of the four gospels is this miracle, the feeding of the 5,000. So there must be something in this particular image of God feeding people that is crucial to our understanding the relationship we have with God.

If you look back to the Old Testament, you see the image of God feeding people when he gathered the Israelite people together, took them out of slavery, into freedom, and he was — on this journey, the one thing that was clear that he had to do, as well as direct them, is to feed them. And the one thing that they didn’t like and they complained about the most was the food. “We don’t want this food. We’re tired of this food. We want to go back to slavery where we had the right food.” So interesting, people love food, but he was there feeding them. Then he had, in this first gospel from the book of the prophet Elisha, you’ll see — it’s from 2 Kings, but basically you’re seeing, again, the image is there. The prophet calls upon someone to feed the people, and they say, “There’s not enough,” and “Yes, there’s enough. Stop thinking there’s not enough.”

So what is this miracle all about? Why is it so important? Well, let’s start with an image that I like to focus on, and that’s the image that John uses as to who Jesus is. He’s divinity, but he has terms that he uses, light of the world. He is the bread of life, and over and over in John’s gospel, he keeps talking about what God has come into the world to give to you is life — life. Well, what’s he talking about? What is this light and life? Well, it’s more than existence. It’s enlightenment, I think. It’s living with a more clear consciousness of what’s going on in our relationship with God, and it’s about life. Life is this wonderful gift that God gives us that we let slip through our fingers, because we get caught up in anxiety and worry and needing certain things to be a certain way, and we lose any sense of well-being and of peace. I know you, like me, live in a lot of anxiety. It’s so interesting to me that this anxiety that we have is often based on a kind of fear that is not really very logical. Like for example — this may be a too personal example, but whenever I’m doing something and I fear that I might be making a mistake or saying something that’s offensive to someone or not showing up when I promised I would or making some kind of mistake, I feel it physically in my gut. It’s a dread that’s right there, like, “Oh, my God. I didn’t do what I was supposed to do.” And when I have that feeling that I’m out of sync with what I’m supposed to do, there is this dread, anxiety. And when I think about life, when I think about all the things that you have on your plate and I have on my plate, all the responsibilities we have, and then you add to those the responsibilities that we feel our religion puts on us — that we should have a certain way of being in the world and helping people and being good to people — with all that responsibility, it’s so easy to see that there would be a way at times we would say, “I’m not enough. I can’t do this. I’m always failing.” There it is. “I’m not enough.”

Nothing is more important than you believing, and I need to believe more that I’m not enough to do what it is that God has called me to do in this world. I’m not talking now about keeping appointments or making a mistake. I’m talking about the plan of God, what we’re here to accomplish, and what is that that we’re here to accomplish? I don't know. I have no clear indication of what it means that I am living in God’s will, accomplishing all the things he wants me to do for me and for the people around me and all that. But I do know that it exists. There is a plan, and when I’m in sync with that plan, when I feel like I’m part of it and it’s flowing the way it should, there’s a peaceful feeling. But when I don’t have it, when there’s darkness, when there’s a misstep or things like that, that’s when I feel like I’m not going to make it. All right, if it’s natural and healthy for you to believe that you’re not going to make it, then what do we need? We need someone to be there with us, right?

So what is this image of Jesus, i.e. God, being in your life and in my life to be there to enlighten you, to show you the way and also at the same time to bring you this kind of inner peace and well-being and know that you’re safe and that everything is all right? So if that’s there, then why doesn’t God just give it to us, and then we have it? I’m not ever worried or anything like that. It doesn’t work that way. This is really important that I say this slowly, and I hope that you can follow me. When God in Jesus is present, he is feeding you in the moment — in the moment. He’s not going to give you all the energy, all the sustenance you need before you go into something difficult and you know you’re prepared for it, no matter what happens, you can handle it. No, it’s in the moment — in the moment, and so that’s why in John’s gospel there’s something so unique and so interesting. The way John tells the story is different than the way the story’s told in the synoptics, and there’s a very interesting change. It’s the same except for one crucial moment. Who distributes the food to the people that are hungry in Matthew, Mark and Luke? Jesus gives the food to the disciples and says to the disciples, “Give this to the people.” In John’s gospel, it’s Jesus that gives the food to everyone. Now, 5,000 people and one person is handing out the food — come on. Don’t get caught up in the logistics of that. It’s like there’s this little thing that’s in our minds, little, a few pieces of fish and a little bread, and when it’s in the hands of this life force, this presence of God in our life — Jesus represents that. He is God in that moment. He gives exactly to us what we need at that moment — at that moment, and then there is a kind of well-being in the midst of everything. No matter how dark or how hard or how unwelcome or whatever, there’s a way of feeling that everything is okay. Everything is as it must be. That is the most wonderful feeling, and it’s founded in having faith in who Jesus is and what he does. And what he does is he represents — no, he is the presence of God giving us all that we need in that moment.

So that means that our conviction, our faith is that there’s nothing that we won’t be able to handle. Now, what does that mean? There’s nothing we can’t accomplish or fix or improve upon? No, it means whatever it is, there’s a grace in the moment that you and I have that we can say, “It’s all right. It’s all right.” When I’ve been with people who are close to death and they’re struggling constantly to fight this thing that looks like it’s going to take their life away, even though it’s a new birth coming into their life, but they’re resisting, they’re resisting, they’re resisting. And I can always tell you, if I go to visit that person toward the end of their life, I’ll walk in one day, and all of a sudden they look ten years younger. They have a face that looks like it’s at peace, and I talk to them, and they say something like, “Hey, whatever happens is okay. I’m fine. I’ll be okay.” That’s faith in action when this person has the sense that this grace that is there, called the presence of divinity, resonating life into you at the moment when you need it the most, that key right there is the message of John’s gospel. God is in your life. He knows everything that’s happening to you. He knows what’s coming before you know it. Does he give you all the strength and all the power that you need to handle everything? If he did that, if he gave us all the power and we were going around saying, “No matter what happens, I can handle it,” we’d be monsters, ego monsters, because we’d feel like we don’t need anybody. No, we need divinity like we need food, air, water, and without it, we lose something that’s crucial in terms of engaging in this thing, this beautiful thing he’s given us, his life.

I struggle with that so much, to be able to say, “Whatever happens is fine.” And every time I go into a dread and a feeling of failure and I just taste that awful feeling that is just like, I don't know, shame, anger, fear, because I’m not good enough, he’s smiling at me and saying, “No, you are good enough. You’re good enough in your imperfection and your weakness. You’re good enough, because I’m right here in that moment to give you what you need, and that’s my joy. That’s my passion, to be light and life for you.” So we need to believe in it and trust in it. It’s essential to everything that we long for when it comes to the kingdom of God.

Father, your promise — presence that we learn about in this man, God, Jesus is a constant, steady source of all that we need to endure, engage and be a part of the plan that you’ve given us in this life. So bless us with this confidence and his gifts, and let us trust, when we even feel normally that we can’t do it, that’s fine. But just feed us also with the conviction that, with you, with God, with him, we can do all things. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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The 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jeremiah 23:1-6 | Ephesians 2:13-18 | Mark 6:30-34

Show favor, O Lord, to your servants, and mercifully increase the gifts of your grace that, made fervent in hope, faith and charity, we might be ever watchful in keeping your commands. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

I mentioned two weeks ago that I am recording these programs from Tuscany, and yesterday I had an opportunity to go to a place that I love dearly. It’s the monastery of La Verne, about a 45-minute drive from where I stay. And when I got there, there’s still obviously in Italy, or maybe not so obviously to you, but there’s a lot more restrictions still in place because of COVID. I remember reading a statement on the interests of the church at La Verne where it said tourists are not welcome to join us for the liturgies, and it just was oh, ouch. And then there are different places that I like to go and sit, and often the door would be there. A kneeler would be in front of the door, and you could kneel and look into the room, but you couldn’t go into the room. It was weird, and it just felt very strange that this place I love so much had so many regulations and rules about where you could go.

And then I prayed that, in my walk toward the chapel that I love the most, the chapel that’s built on the very spot where Francis received the stigmata, it was open. Instead of the many choir stalls that are there, they were all roped off, and just six seats were placed in the chapel. So a maximum of six people could be there, and I got in and sat, and maybe one or two other people came in. So I was able to be in that spot, and I remember just sitting there feeling, I don't know, disoriented, I guess, a little bit. And I thought, “Well, I’ll be here, and I’ll hear Francis’ voice, and it’ll be wonderful.” I opened my heart to him, and I believe in his ability to be an instrument of bringing anyone that wants to get closer to God closer to him. But I didn’t feel or sense anything much, so I just sat in silence. And that was yesterday, and now today I’m getting ready to do this homily. And I know that one of the things about Francis is he had almost a fixation with the crucifix. He loved it. He was one that made it famous to — or made it a custom rather to have a crucifix hanging in your house — and so he had this love of the crucifix.

And then I get ready to give this homily, and all of a sudden, this crucifixion is the main theme, it seems to me, of this set of readings. And its powerful effect was to change everything. The crucifixion changed everything, and the way its described in this set of readings is there was, at times, two separate things. There was divinity over here and humanity over here, and there was this long history of struggle between the two and animosity and separation and isolation, mostly because of judgment. And when you look back at the Old Testament, it’s really frightening, in a sense, the way you see God treating people. He’s this all-loving, kind, gentle God, but that’s really not his history in the Old Testament. He’s, in many ways, very aggressive. For example, when he was upset that the Egyptian had made slaves of his people and he was trying to get them to release them and he sent all these horrible plagues to them, but the one that was just so horrific, I thought, was the — imagine, the firstborn of every family in that entire country, or that city rather, was murdered one night by God. And think of the pain and suffering in people because God had killed their prize child, and God did that and said, “Okay, now you’re free to go. Let’s go. We’re not going to kill your children.” What? That’s the God we believe in? Well, it’s the God that revealed himself then. It’s the God that was needed in the Israelite people then, but that’s not the fullness of who he is. We don’t get the fullness of who he is until the New Testament, and so it’s interesting. Always in the Old Testament, even through the lives of the prophets and all, there’s always this tension between what the prophets demand and what the people are willing to do. And finally, if they don’t do it, they get punished, and then they change their patterns. It’s not a harmonious gathering of God and his people and guiding them into a new life. No, he demands, and if you don’t do it, he punishes. And that’s the way God first began to reveal who he is to his people, and what it did, it divided his people, Jew and Gentile. Jews were those who followed God. Gentiles were non-Jews, and so at the height of say, about the time that Jesus was coming into the world, there was a great division because of who God is. He had his people that he loved and the other people that he didn’t love, and the people that loved God and God loved them, they were told basically, by their rules and regulations, they shouldn’t mess with the other people. So this demanding, restrictive God created separation, and it’s true.

Think about it. Anybody that gets in a position of power and decides they’re going to make the rules and regulations for how people are going to act, they’re going to be dividing the group between those who do it and those who don’t, the good guys, the bad guys. So it had to change. It had to change. And how did it change? The crucifixion. That’s what changed it. It’s amazing when you think about it. This one act that happened made a radical change, so radical that we heard in the scriptures today that all of a sudden, at that moment when Christ died on the cross, all things were made one. No more separation, no more good guy/bad guy, person you love/person you hate. All that was to go away, because something was reconciled at that moment. And what was it that was reconciled? What I’m about to tell you I’ve never thought of before, but I want to use the word crucifixion for a moment, and it comes from the same word of crucible. You know what a crucible is. It’s a ceramic bowl of some kind in which two metals are put under extreme heat, and they somehow meld together. They don’t work together well except under this great stress and turmoil of the heat, and when they cool, when the tension is over, there’s this stronger, new material that can do things better than it could before. The two things that become one become stronger because of their union. So what was coming together on the cross? Humanity and divinity. What was the division? The demanding God and the weak, frail humanity, and how are these two going to get together? How are they going to work together? And what it is, it happened in a person, in Jesus. What he had to do, when he was asked to go through this powerful experience of crucifixion, it wasn’t — he wasn’t afraid of it because of the pain that was involved in it, but it must have been horribly painful. No, but the agony in the garden, it was not over the pain that he thought he might be coming — that might be engaged in this action, but no, it was, “Father, this is not the plan. This is not what I want. Why are you asking me to give in to evil? Why are you asking me to turn my life, all my work, everything I’m trying to do to save the world — you’re asking me to give in to all my enemies and let them destroy me? You’re asking me to surrender all my energy and all my work and all my desire for the way it’s written? I can’t. Please, no. My human nature is such I want this, because I want so badly to do what changes the world, and I know I can do it if I could just teach them. Let me teach them. Don’t destroy me at this point. I’m just getting started, three years.” And God said, “No, no. You have to do this. You have to do this. This is the way it’s written. I want you to do this.”

What is God then? What’s his part of this struggle? Well, the part of God’s struggle in this crucifixion, what’s going to have to change in God is his demanding nature where he’s demanding that people do what they’re called to do before he will love them. He’s got to give that up. Now, that sounds weird. It’s not that he has to change, but what he is now ready to do is reveal the part of him that was hidden in the beginning, that he is a lover, and he does not want to punish. And so he, God the Father, is going through this transformation of coming out of this crucifixion with a heart that’s always been there but is finally fully, fully revealed. He is now the lover that does nothing but forgive faults. Nothing that you do, no evil action that you would ever come up with that would break the laws of what God tells you, you must do, none of that will ever separate you from his love. Now, think about that. It wasn’t so much that God had to go through a painful experience. That doesn’t fit, but in this moment, when humanity was surrendering to the way that God has created the world, and the way that God has created the world is now revealed in his loving, forgiving nature, human beings are now capable of living in that kind of relationship. They’ve evolved enough to live in a relationship with God where he never punishes — never punishes. Where’s punishment come from? It’s the result of all our stupid, short-sighted decisions, but God is revealing himself fully as he is. And this is the strongest, most important thing I think you can say, because we hang on to that old image of God. And we who believe in him feel justified when we live in an Old Testament way as God did, and so when somebody does something evil to us, we want to do something evil back to them. And that creates division and separation and isolation, and that’s the antithesis of what the crucifixion was intended to create, no longer any division. All is one. There’s unity. There’s acceptance. There’s forgiveness. There’s compassion. There’s empathy.

I don't know why, when you think of the way religion works — I love that image in the first reading when there was a complaint against the bad shepherds, and one of the symbols that the shepherds weren’t very effective is that everybody was afraid. They were kind of broken. Obviously somehow these were demanding shepherds that didn’t care for their flock at all. They just demanded performance, and that’s a shadow of religion. It’s a shadow of love. If I love you, I want you to be who I want you to be, and if you don’t do what I tell you or become who I want you to be, I will punish you by separating myself from you. I’ll cut you off. That’s all part of that old, old system, and unless we can embrace the new, this incredible thing that you see so beautifully represented in Jesus who, when he sees his flock, even though he’s exhausted in the gospel, he can’t help but help them.

Jesus is God, and he’s revealing God for the first time fully for who he is, and it had to be in this crucible moment when you’d have a sense of these two powerful forces, forces of perfection, of divinity and the weakness of humanity. And Jesus, the thing about Jesus that’s so hard for us to remember, when you look at the life of Jesus, he was not a perfect male figure as a good Jew. He lost his temper with the people in authority. He ranted and raved about things, and most especially he showed his humanity when he didn’t want to do what God had planned for him to do. When you have this image of Jesus as the perfect God demanding perfection of people, that just doesn’t exist in reality. He’s never been a perfect human, performing everything just the way God wanted. In fact, it’s pretty clear that, when finally God said, “This is what I’m going to ask you to do. I want you to give up every shred of pride and self-worth that you have in your work and let me expose you to the world as a failure. Trust me. If you can do that, if you can endure that, you can die, that egocentric part of you. You will do that for all of humanity.” I don't know how that works when one man can do it for everyone, but that’s what happened. He died to his ego. He died to that need to be successful. He died to all of that for all of us, which means we have the capacity to do it. It doesn’t mean we’re going to do it automatically, but we have the capacity to do it. What an incredible moment in history.

No wonder Francis was overwhelmed by it when he could see what was happening in that moment was the end of all the division and separation that rules and regulations and judgment create in the world. And that’s why he was just such a loving, loving figure. In fact, many people say that the theology of Francis is nothing really that new. It’s not unique in some special way. It’s the gospel. It’s just simple gospel truth, good news. We humans, as we are, are 1,000 percent accepted by God just as we are, and this God of ours, who in the past has been so demanding and, in some ways, harsh and cruel on those who don’t do what they’re supposed to do, he’s no longer in that mode anymore. He had to be for that time, but now he’s what Francis became. To the integration of humanity and divinity in that moment, the two becoming one united everything in the world. What an amazing moment. No wonder Francis knelt at the crucifix and just cried over what was done for him, for those that he loved, and I pray what’s been done we too can see what’s been done for us and know that the world that is divided between good and bad, right and wrong, that’s all an illusion. It’s been destroyed by the integration of these two most beautiful, made-for-each-other experiences, to be both living in divinity, God in me, and living in myself fully as I am.

Father, we struggle with our own faults, with the faults of others.We struggle with reconciliation, not holding things against others or not hating ourselves for things we’ve done that are wrong. All of that is the past. You have given us a new grace, a new power, a new strength that, if we believe in it, trust in it, surrender to all that it’s asking us to become, we will find this unity and this peace that is our inheritance. You have taken down the wall that divides the world. In its place, you give us peace, unity, community, love, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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The 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Amos 7:12-15 | Ephesians 1:3-14 or 1:3-10 | Mark 6:7-13

Oh God, who show the light of your truth to those who go astray so that they may return to the right path, give all who, for the faith they profess, are counted Christians the grace to reject whatever is contrary to the name of Christ and to strive after all that does it honor. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

One of the blessings that I have been given as a priest who is called to preach and to teach the wisdom of the scriptures is that, in my generation, I’ve been able to read an Old Testament reading every Sunday. That was not true before I was ordained. It was always an epistle and a gospel, but it’s given me an opportunity that many priests in prior generations did not have of preaching from both Old and New Testament. And it’s so clear to me that you really can’t understand one without understanding the other.

They’re two parts of one message, and the dramatic change that happens from Old Testament to New Testament is the change that I believe happens in every believer who goes through a particular period of time where I would say they move from partial understanding to what I would call the fullness of understanding of what this relationship with God is all about, because for most of us, we begin a relationship with God, in a sense, earning his attention, his blessings, his graces by doing what we’re told and following the rules and regulations. And typical of most everything in human nature is we strive to do something where we’re in charge of the accomplishing of it, and we do well for a while, and then we start to wane and lose our focus. And we’re going in a direction that is not really who we are and what we really want to do or become, and we start experiencing what you might call suffering, pain, isolation, depression, darkness, whatever. And then we go through that dark time, and then somehow someone comes along at the right moment, a prophet voice, and said, “Look, this pain you’re in is caused by these issues that you’re not seeing clearly or these lies that you are following and thinking they’re going to provide what they’re supposed to provide for, but they can’t.” And so you have this moment of awakening, and then you go through a conversion, and then you grow. Over and over and over, though, it comes back to the same thing. The weakness seems to overcome the strength that we normally have as human beings, and that’s the Old Testament. Over and over again God is giving people what they ask for, a land of milk and honey, a journey to freedom, a place where they can finally find the kind of comfort that they want from a system that is created for them, but that system often fails them. And so whatever, they lose their direction, and a prophet voice rises. And so we have, over and over again, the period of time in the Old Testament where they prophet was the key. He was the speaker of truth. He would come along and say, “Whoa, this isn’t working, and you don’t know it’s not working yet. And soon there will be a disaster, and so I’m warning you, you ought to change.” And most of the time people didn’t until they went through the suffering, and then they changed.

That sounds a lot like my early years as a believer. I’ll do what I’m told. I do it, because I don’t want to be punished, but my intention to do it is not really grounded in something that is so rock solid that I can endure the temptations to go off on the wrong path. So called back again and again and again. But then comes the New Testament, underscore the word new, something radically different. Instead of, as it was in the Old Testament, that we’re working very much on improving ourselves, performing well for God and getting his blessing, instead of that being the focus, the thing shifts, and now all of a sudden, instead of we being afraid of the face of God, who might be very justly condemning us, we’re looking at a new face of God in the person of Jesus. And to see his face, see his look, how he sees you, how he sees me, if we follow the set of readings, it’s always going to be a very transformative moment. There’s a phrase that I love, that when the disciples kept being confused about Jesus, who’s talking about God, they didn’t fully realize he was God incarnate. When he was talking about God, they got confused and kept saying, “Well then, show us the Father. We don’t understand this one you’re describing. The God you’re describing seems different than the one that we’ve all been taught.” And it’s so interesting. When they say, “Show us the Father. Show us the Father,” Jesus looks at them with love, compassion, understanding. He said, “This face you’re looking at, this is the Father. This is God looking at you right now, loving you as you are, wanting you to believe in something.” And the thing you need to believe in is who you are in this incredible, miraculous thing that the New Testament issued into the world, and that is redemption, grace, forgiveness. It changes everything, and the way it changes it is by changing the focus from our performance and whether or not we’re good enough to earn God’s merit to God looking at us and saying, “Look, the whole issue is not about you doing something for me, but now I want to do something for you. I, Jesus, the man filled with divinity, knows what humanity needs.” We don’t need to be challenged into becoming well-disciplined machines doing the right thing. No, we’re destined to be loved, to be understood, to be embraced and to be told that something has been given to us. Something amazing has been given to us that was never possible before, and so let’s look at this image that we have of this voice, the voice of God speaking through Jesus, different than the voice of God speaking through a prophet, because this was not just another prophet. He was the Messiah, the one that would come and change everything, and what he changed is a system, turned it completely upside down. And from you no longer being asked to focus on your performance, you’re being asked to focus on your goodness, not a goodness that you accomplished but a goodness that’s been won for you by God incarnate, in Jesus, called redemption. What does it mean? Well, it’s a transformation of who you are and particularly your image of yourself, because what redemption says is that, “There’s not one thing you have done in the past, nor anything you will do in the future, that could limit my love for you.” You are forgiven, made new, and the shame and the fear and the anger that a life of performing creates is transformed into a kind of sense of being valued and being safe and being at peace, because in such a simple way, you’re loved as you are, and you’re seen as beautiful.

I don't know if you’ve ever had the experience of somebody walking into a room, and they look different to you, and you have this insight, and you say to them, “Hey, what’s going on? You look different.” And they sort of look down, maybe a little embarrassed, and then you ask the question. “Are you in love?” It may not be so much that they’re in love, but let’s just say they feel there’s the potential and a reality of being loved. And when you’re loved — I mean loved not for what you do, what you can do, what you will do, what you didn’t do, all that, no, not based on any kind of performance or anything like that. No, you’re loved, because the person who sees you knows you and knows that there’s something in you that is destined by God to be developed into something beautiful, something effective, something that reflects this incredible, creative, loving God.

St. Paul’s reading that we just had is just amazing to me, because it took me hours to just take it phrase-by-phrase and kind of understand what he’s really trying to say. But what he’s saying is so radically new and different that even the way he said it isn’t that clear. It’s almost like he’s saying it because he heard it, not because he’s experienced it yet. But here’s what Paul is revealing about this person Jesus, that he comes into the world and reveals that the Father is calling you by your name and telling you that this thing you are is filled with the potential of a wholeness that was created there by God, and God’s glory, God’s joy, God’s greatest pleasure is doing something for you that enables that thing that you are to become everything it was intended to be and for you to delight in it, because that’s his delight if that makes sense. When God sees what he creates performing, when you look at nature and it’s in its pristine springtime, when you look at a sky when it’s filled with the warmth of a color that means dawn, whenever a creation is performing exactly as it was intended to be and one is perceiving it as it is and sees it as beautiful, you get a glimpse at what does give God pleasure. Yes, I guess he would be pleased, at least I thought he would be pleased if I worked as hard as I could and suffered and went through all kinds of agony forcing myself to be the person he wants me to be. Maybe that would please him, but nothing would please him more than for me to know how much he sees in me that is so beautiful and good and wants it to flourish, and when it flourishes, he sits back and is absolutely delighted. And it’s a gift. It’s not earned. Why is it it’s so much easier for us to earn some kind of attention or affection from someone than to feel that we have it by just our very nature, that they see us, and they’re in awe of who we are, and they honor it by somehow the way they look at us? That look, when you’re loved, it’s incredible, and if that’s what the New Testament is about, and it’s as radically different as it could be from the Old Testament, then that’s where — well, that’s, I guess I’m saying, that’s what I get excited about in my work as a preacher or a teacher, is how can I teach this — and I think it’s the only way I know I can teach it, is by having experienced it, and that’s true of all of us. But when you are called by God, awakened to your own talents and beauty, see them as what they are, a gift, see them as beautiful, knowing that they can be of value to other people, that you want to share them with someone else, and when you’re doing that, that experience is the richest experience we can have as human beings, being blessed by God’s grace to become who we are. And when we do that same kind of blessing to someone else and we see them develop into who they are, then we’re in the kingdom. Then we’re doing the work, and that joy that comes from being loved as completely as God loves us and turning around and loving another human being in a similar way and watching the changes in them that you’ve experienced yourself, being fully accepted, it’s amazing. And I think to myself how much time we spend in working on our appearance or our performance or our possessions as finding a sense of value, and nothing is as valuable than [sic] who we are.

If God created you exactly as you’re intended to be, if you look exactly the way he wanted you to look, if your talents and weaknesses are exactly the balance that he wanted you to have, if all of that is really true, and I do believe it is, then it’s up to us to believe in it and trust in it and not try to compare ourselves to other people or strive to become more than we are, that we’ll only cease if we see the beauty of, I’ll call it, the ordinariness of it all. The ordinary beauty of everything is so spectacular with the right lens on our eyes. We can see it as it is. So the challenge always is different than we thought. We’re not here out of fear of punishment to straighten out our act, force ourselves to be who we’re supposed to be. No, it’s about repentance. Repentance has to do with regret. It’s regretting the doubts we have about who we are, the doubts we have in the beauty the people that God has placed in our life — that we don’t have the right vision, that we don’t know that the grace of God that we’ve received, once it takes root in us and we find ourselves conscious of who we are and the gift that we are, that then we’re empowered to do the same for other people. Again, that’s the kingdom that God came to establish, and it just slips through my fingers when I try to hold on to it. But it comes back in moments, and it feels so good when I can feel that I see someone else that I’ve seen a million times, and I see them, and they just are overwhelmingly beautiful. Or I have somebody that looks at me or says something or whatever, and I feel that same kind of love coming from them. That’s grace, the grace that calls us to wholeness, fullness, joy, everything the kingdom promises, but it’s not what we expected. And that’s what often lies hidden.

Father, you have revealed through your Son the fullness of your plan, that your desire was not to discipline us into being obedient subjects but to be partners with you, in a sense, lovers with you, that you were longing from the beginning to have a role in our life where that which you created would come to its fullness, and you would see the beauty of your creative love. So bless us with the acceptance needed to receive this great gift and to let it do its mysterious, transformative work and make us into not only all that you intend us to be but all that the people around us need us to be. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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The 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ezekiel 2:2-5 | 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 | Mark 6:1-6

Oh God, who in the abasement of your Son have raised up a fallen world, fill your faithful with holy joy. From those you have rescued from slavery to sin, you bestowed eternal gladness. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

One of the most interesting group of people in the Old Testament and New Testament are prophets. Prophets are essential to the way in which it seems that God has intended for people to learn and to grow, and a prophet is never necessarily a popular person among the masses, because generally prophets are there to talk about how things are not the way they should be. They’re there, in a way, to correct errors and illusions and half-truths and bring people back to something that is truthful, that is real, that is effective. And it’s interesting that, when you look at the evolution of human beings, there’s just always been needs for prophets, and there will always be, because what happens, when a system is functioning as a religion does, it brings people to a certain level of consciousness and a certain level of understanding. And then it tends to get caught up in all kinds of egocentric stuff and institutions that are serving themselves rather than the people, and it drifts from the truth. And the combination of drifting from the original truth and also the evolution of human beings changing and having a greater potential perhaps to hear something new and different, that’s exactly the spot where the prophet walks in and does his work.

And Ezekiel was one of the big ones, and the interesting thing that he started with, which is sometimes what prophets do start with — he started with a realization that there was something negative going on. There was a real problem with people losing a sense of who they were, and somehow, if evil was able to destroy the temple, it meant there was some weakness in the temple that God was not pleased with. And so the first part of Ezekiel’s message was doom and gloom. “The temple is going to be destroyed. It’s going to be awful. There’s going to be a really tough time.” It’s like he was just sitting there telling everybody, “Get ready for some dark days.” And those days came, and then in a way, perhaps you would say that the prophet then became more believable. And then his message would come after that that was probably the much more important message, and in Ezekiel’s case it was saying, “All right, the old order was destroyed, but something new is coming, something different, something that wasn’t there before.” And he came up with this really beautiful image. So let’s just imagine the temple was filled with people who weren’t really functioning as they should. They were empty of life that the temple was there to instill in people. They were like dead men’s bones. And so Ezekiel is talking about there’s going to be a renewal, and he’s saying all these figures that are not life-giving are going to end up — I’m going to use the image of the bones, and soon they will have tendons and muscles and flesh and then hearts. It’s like he’s saying a new generation will come about, one that is more attuned to the truth. They will have not just a new way of understanding or knowing things that they’ve heard but a deeper sort of evolution step towards who God really is, and that’s a new heart. And the heart is always the place of compassion and empathy. So though this horrible time of destruction and everything falling apart, Ezekiel is the one that announces, “Something new is now able to come, and you all have been changed, and what you’re now ready for, you weren’t ready for before. But there is a promise that God has been making from the beginning that’s now unfolding in a new direction, and you are going to have a new capacity for understanding and compassion. You’re going to have a new heart.” And Ezekiel was also a prophet that he knew that the Spirit of God was the source of everything for him. He knew that Spirit entered into him and called him to be a prophet, and so what he’s really setting up, without maybe even realizing it, that the fullness of what Jesus reveals is that he himself will come and dwell in our hearts. Ezekiel knew that, maybe, in a sense, but what he was doing was creating a beginning of a way of seeing that would be fulfilled in Jesus. And that is — I think it was in Hebrews that the writing of Hebrews said, “What happens is that God now speaks to your mind, but also he writes on your heart. He writes on your heart. You will know what’s right. You will know what’s true.” It’s a beautiful image. So you see, the role of prophet is going on all the time. It’s the person in the room who sees what’s really been sort of out of balance. He names it in a way, hopefully without a log of judgment but certainly with clarity and then announces that whatever pain we’ve been in because of this is going to be the source of our transformation.

Now look at the next reading. It’s St. Paul. I love Paul. He’s so human, but here’s — he was a persecutor of religion. He was participating in the destruction of those who believed in Jesus. He never met Jesus. He felt him. He felt a vision of him, but he knew his heart had been radically changed. So he too had gone through this radical change, and what he was seeing and what he was understanding was brand new. And the thing about the Old Testament and even — I go back to my beginnings as a Catholic. It seems like years ago, and then certainly centuries ago, there was this image of God is so pure and humans are so impure that the two really have a hard time coming together, that divinity and sin, it’s almost like they’re like — they will not match. They won’t get together, and so anybody that was sinful was considered to be without God. And so here’s a sinner, Paul, who has been called to this wonderful place of being filled with wisdom that he couldn’t have ever figured out. And of course, anybody that’s really speaking the truth, there’s a certain audience for that kind of person, and they hold that prophet in high esteem. And so he was always kind of caught up with himself, I think, Paul was. He would always talk about, “I’ve run the good race. I’ve fought everything. I’ve done a great job.” But here we see Paul in a beautiful, kind of human way of saying, “I have this problem that I can’t get rid of. I have this thorn in my flesh. An angel — a messenger of Satan has put it there.” I love that. “It’s not me, but it’s in me.” But what it is, it’s some weakness, some addiction that he had that, in his own religious, sort of, sense of the division between divinity and our human nature, feels that, “It’s inappropriate for me to have a sin that I can’t control if I’m up here talking about people turning away from sin. It makes me a hypocrite.” And so when he prays and prays and prays that this thing will go away, the most interesting thing is the answer that Jesus gives to his prayer, and he said, “No, no. No, I’m not taking that away. No, my mercy, my grace, my unmerited love will take care of you. You’re not going to be in trouble with me over your sin. But if I take that away, you’re already a little on the proud side, and I don't know what’s going to happen to you, but I really think you’d better stay grounded in your humanity, because that will help you more than anything in being compassionate and understanding to your brothers and sisters.” And it worked for him.

It was beautiful, and the thing that I think it’s teaching us — and let me just say one other thing, because I think it’s interesting. When Paul is saying, “Okay, I have this thorn in the flesh, and I’ve accepted it, and I’m doing it. So I can put up with my sinfulness.” But then he goes off — on to say, “And I can — I have to put up with being mistreated and laughed at and scorned, and I can handle all that.” He’s like me. He’s like you, that part of us that always wants to be better than we are or at least tries to present that sometimes, and that wonderful line from that reading — it’s only when you’re weak, only when you know your humanity, that the real power that God has given to you, which is not you but is coming through you, has a much better chance of coming across as it was intended to be, a truth, an objective truth and not an opinion that, “I’m going to get a lot of reward and compliments and maybe cash.” A lot of people get up there and preach and get a lot of money, but it’s not about that. It’s just about God using a human being who is as ordinary as anyone else to speak a truth, and when it comes through them without their attachment to it, their ego attachment, it works so much better.

And then we get to Jesus in the gospel, and the thing that’s so beautiful about Jesus in this gospel is he’s, in a way, in a similar place that St. Paul was. But here’s the thing, Jesus — I’ve always been fascinated by Jesus in terms of his hometown, where he lived, Nazareth and what did people think of him. And there’s a lot of theories out there that in a small town — someone once wrote that it was probably not bigger than 2[00] or 300 people that lived in Nazareth at the time. And the women would always meet at the well in the morning to get the water for the house, and I’m sure they chatted about things going on in the village. And when this young woman, Mary, was somehow rushed through a marriage and ended up having a baby in record time, I’m sure there were people that thought, well, very likely Jesus is in the class of people that was considered to be one of the lowest classes, an illegitimate child. And so many think that he lived in a kind of culture that looked down upon him, and he was considered to be an outcast, which would make a lot of sense psychologically that he was so compassionate to the outcasts, to those who weren’t understood, to those who were thought to be something they’re not. So we have, in this beautiful passage, Jesus coming back to his hometown, and he is already pretty famous. He’s been preaching and teaching publicly, and the biggest thing about Jesus that made him so incredibly mysterious and wonderful was his power to heal, drive out demons, open eyes so they could see, ears so they could hear, tongues so they could speak, hands so they could do work, legs that would get people to where they needed to be. All of that was happening already, and he goes back to his hometown, and he probably had been preaching in his hometown before. So he gets up, and he starts talking to them, and they don’t like it. They can’t stand it. They are angry, because, “Wait a minute. Anybody that’s being used by God, anybody that’s a prophet has got to be a person who is perfect, has got to be somebody who is flawless and without fault, and we know this guy is anything but flawless, sinless.” And then they kind of say, “He’s just one of us,” at the same time, which is kind of wonderful, saying he’s not that special. But Jesus being a human being was witnessing not that he was God but that he was a human being filled with divinity, and that’s the point, not that he was divine in the full sense of what we now know he was. But he was so receptive and open and capable of allowing the power of God to flow through him that his ability to do the things that God called him to do were so effective, so powerful. And I love the fact that he says to us always — I say to you always, because I think it’s such a great line, that mystical power that Jesus had in his ordinary, middle-class, carpentry, shadowy background life is the same thing people around you and around me have, the same thing, this gift of power flowing through us from God.

I’m talking now about all these very important prophets, Ezekiel, the preaching of Paul, Jesus himself, but one of the things that’s so interesting to me is, when you see Jesus working as this God/man, and yet he came from such an ordinary background, it strikes me that there’s some truth in this that we need to look at. And that is that we might always think that we have to go to the experts, the few super-, super-intelligent, awesome, the educated experts to find the truth, and what I realize more and more in my life is that the issue is not sinlessness that God is calling us to but truthfulness. And truthfulness is different than sinlessness. Sin is to me a weakness that we can’t always control, and it’s based usually on illusion. But it’s not about getting rid of the sin by disciplining yourself, but usually we outgrow a sin when we see through it as if it is really not what we think it is. It’s not going to produce what we hoped it would produce, and so truth is the best way to get out of a place of addicted behavior that’s sinful. So that truth can come, yes, through great experts and great preachers and teachers but also comes consistently through the most ordinary people in your circle of friends, and it’s usually not going to be in some dramatic pronouncement. But there’s always this incredible promise that God, who dwells in the hearts of all people, is going to speak through that heart and do it in a way that’s really effective for those who are destined to hear exactly what they’re saying. And it’s not going to be in some major pronouncement of a truth, but it’s going to be probably more often in a witnessing that they are engaged in, where you’ll watch them do something that is so extraordinarily right on in terms of truth or compassion or understanding. And it really penetrates your heart, your mind, and you see something you didn’t see before. That’s exciting to me, to think that we live in a world — and certainly Vatican Council open our hearts to the fact that the laity is the church, and we’re not always having to turn to experts to find out how to live or what to do. But sometimes the most ordinary relationships, the friendships that we have, the experiences that we have together can be such incredible, prophetic voices to us, and I guess the difference is whether or not we can imagine that God will work through someone who perhaps we don’t even like or perhaps you don’t even trust. But just if you’re open, if your heart, if your mind is open to truth, you’ll receive it wherever it is, but just don’t limit the way in which God is going to plan to use it, because if it’s his plan, if it’s his power flowing through somebody who doesn’t seem worthy to you, it might be the most effective, powerful way you can come into this great gift of truth.

Father, give us patience with our humanity, with our weaknesses, with our sins, but never let us be deluded into thinking that they are not harmful to ourselves or to someone else. So give us patience and understanding as we open our hearts to the many ways in which you will speak to us, awaken us, encourage us, enable us most especially to be the men and women that you are longing for us to be, witnesses, prophets, ordinary people doing extraordinary work that only you, God, can do. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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The 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24 | 2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15 | Mark 5:21-43 or 5:21-24, 35b-43

Oh God, who through the grace of adoption chose us to be children of light, grant, we pray, we may not be wrapped in the darkness of error but always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

EVERY time we gather for worship, we begin by remembering that we have this gift in our midst. God is present to us. Jesus, his Son, the sign, who we are, is present to us. The Holy Spirit is present to us. The truth is that we are never alone. We’re never without God, and the interesting thing about when we begin the liturgy, we begin with the notion of first turning to God and saying, “Please forgive us. Please forgive us. Please give us life. Please give us life.” It’s so interesting, when you think about it, because it’s like a child saying to their parents, “Please feed me. Please nurse me. Please give me water. Please give me shelter.” So does God really need to be convinced that he should be caring for us? No, he wants us to know that we are being cared for by him, and his greatest gift that he manifested ultimately through the full revelation of who he is in the person of Jesus, it makes it clear that his whole notion of how he responds to who we are, when we fail, is nothing other than compassion, empathy, forgiveness. That’s who he is, yet he wasn’t always revealed that way, and that’s a difficulty. He is not always preached to people being that kind of God, but he is forgiveness. He is mercy, unmerited love. That’s his whole, major gift. It’s the truth.

Something happened to me in my spiritual journey, which began in 1947, when I first heard about God and was old enough to start my reasoning process, and I really figured pretty clearly because of what I was told that God was the God who would reward me if I was good, and punish me, if I was bad. It was pretty clear. I didn’t think of God as merciful, or I didn’t even really think about my need for mercy. I just took it in and made it part of my way of understanding God, but it meant that I was going to spend most of my life trying to be good, not to do bad things, to repress anything in me that seemed to be drawn to something that was forbidden. Even in my moral teachings, even in the seminary, it was like how do you avoid the occasion of sin. Just to be thinking about it or near an occasion of it was going to be something that led you into it. It was always your fault. It seemed to be very repressive.

So the idea of the gospel calling you and me to being good and not sinning is a very unfortunate caricature of who God is. He’s not asking you to control your life, your emotions. No, he wants almost the opposite. He wants you to get in touch with what they really are, the truth of who you are, the truth of creation. Listen to that first reading from Wisdom. It’s saying so clearly: God created the world, and it’s so wholesome and so healthy and so good. That means everything about you, your humanity, your longings as a human, your need for food and intimacy and love and all that; it is all so good, very good, and there is something in the world that seems to be working against us, and it’s interesting. It’s too much to go into in this particular homily, but it’s the mystery of evil. It is the mystery of some kind of envy on the part of angels where they just simply refuse to accept this plan of God to be caretakers of these animal-like creatures called humans. Some of them just said, “Absolutely won’t do it.” And they constantly are working against us. So we do have a tension in our life between good and evil, but the basic real issue is between truth and lies. If you look at the nature of sin told in that beautiful story in Genesis, it’s so clear. The problem with Adam and Eve is not that they necessarily chose to do something that they thought was wrong. They chose something they thought was right, because they believed in a lie, that God really wanted them to be in charge and in control and not dependent.

So we look at this life that we’re called to live, and the second reading makes it clear that there’s something in the way God has created the world and all of its harmony and everything that — people have gifts, and other people have other gifts, and some people are further along in the journey of spirituality. Some are just lagging behind, and so we tend to say, “He has more. He has less.” But the truth is, it’s the way it’s designed that people are given gifts and given needs, and the gifts are there to be shared. And the needs create a longing to connect, to touch into someone who has what we need. So you have the heart of what it means to live as a communal being in the world. We need others for what they have, and they need us for what we have. So nobody is really considered to say, “Oh, you don’t have enough, and you have enough.” No, this is just the way it is. We’re full, empty, full, empty, full, empty. And it’s true. That’s the way I see my life. Some days I feel great, and I feel like I’m resonating all kinds of good energy, and other days I feel like I just wish I didn’t have to get up. And is that a terrible thing, that I haven’t developed a skill or an ability to be this perfect resonance of light and truth? No, it’s human. We know things, and we don’t know things. We see things clearly. We see things in a very dark space, and we can’t make them out. I love the image of God as the God who ministers to us, not directly so much but through other people. So the key, it seems, at the very heart of what Jesus is coming to teach us is we have whatever he had that enabled him to do the ministry that he was most noted for, and which got him in the greatest trouble — his power to heal. So here is Jesus the healer. He can heal people. So can you. So can I. Maybe not as dramatically as he does in these stories, but then the stories are there to explain a mystery, a truth. See, the other thing about truth that’s so hard, it’s always when we’re talking about the truth of the gospel, the truth of life, the truth of God, truth of self. It’s always going to lead us into a thing called mystery. There is no simple, clear way of talking about the truth. You can’t fully understand it. You can’t fully explain it, but you know it. You know it. That’s the thing that is so interesting about truth.

So what is the truth then in the gospel? What is it? If we look at the truth that’s being presented in this set of readings, it’s that God has created a world that works, and we should be engaged in it, and we should be open to being full and empty. That’s kind of a basic truth. So what is the gospel then about? All the miracle stories are about this. Well, these two stories put together in Mark’s gospel are interesting, because one is a woman who has been struggling for years and years with a flow of hemorrhaging, of blood, and she is healed. Then there is another person in this set of healings, and that is that a woman, a young woman, 12, is dead. Well, you wonder what’s the connection, and I think it’s maybe the amount of years that the woman has hemorrhaged. What I think is interesting is that the hemorrhaging is something that would keep this woman from being able to be fertile and receive a child. Twelve years old is the time normally when a woman begins to be capable of having a child. So there’s something in this about fertility, I swear, and you know I was using an image last week or the week before of this grace, this truth. It’s like a seed that gets inside of us, and if we have moisture, which is an image of grace, unmerited love. Then we have sunlight, which is the image of enlightenment and truth. We have those two things. This thing grows inside of us. So let’s just think that maybe these two women represent the universal part of all of us that’s able to give birth, and we think of giving birth as giving life and think of giving life as you being a carrier of life-giving energy and strength in the world today. Maybe the next day you’ll be the one that needs it desperately, but we give that to each other.

The other thing that’s interesting in these two stories, they both show an obstacle to believing in this amazing power we have to share with each other life. One is I’m not worthy, the woman, and the other is it’s too late. There is nothing there. I don’t have what I need. It’s dead. I don’t have any life in me. Let’s look at those two things, because it’s interesting. The woman who feels that she is not worthy is clearly — according to the law at the time, being a menstruating woman, she is not able to be near a rabbi, and the rabbi, if he was close to her, would be made unclean. So she doesn’t want to bother him. She doesn’t want to embarrass him, but she has this incredible conviction that, “If I just even touch, not his body but his clothes, he won’t even know I’m touching him.” Then the crowd is bumping up against him. The fascinating thing is that somehow, when we are an instrument of life to someone else, we know it. It’s a little bit of a rush, a little bit of a feeling that we can hardly describe. It’s sometimes unconscious. You’re feeling good during that day. You meet somebody. They walk away seemingly really feeling good, and you just feel good about helping somebody feel good. It’s intuitive. It’s what we’re made for. So you see in that an image of, if you’re looking for this, if you want to be a person that understands the healing power that we all possess, you have to believe it so intensely that even the thought of, “I’m not worthy,” is to be thrown out. No, none of us are necessarily worthy of unmerited love, but when God offers it, when another human being offers it, it feels so good.

The young girl is interesting, because the faith in that case is not I’m not worthy but it’s too late. It’s not going to work. So what is interesting about this image is Jairus, who is a synagogue official, he certainly deserves being helped by God. He works at the temple. He knows his daughter is sick, and then he said, “Alright, I know that this man can heal her.” He believes it, and even when it looks like he might be doubting it, Jesus makes it so clear. “You all don’t understand. She is not really dead. She is asleep,” which means she has within her life, and it’s just not activated. It’s not ignited. It’s not enlightened. So interesting when we say, “Oh, I don’t have it. I don’t have faith.” No, it’s there like a seed that has to be born and given birth. So never feel that — when we talk about not having what we need, we have it. It’s just we’re not connected to it. What a truth to hold onto when it comes to asking God to do something to change me. It’s like, “I’m not that person.” No, you are the person you want to be changed into. You’re just not in touch with it.

Father, we are wonderfully made, and you have made the world in which we live a place of harmony and beauty. Yet we know there’s a way in which we can be confused and in darkness, and we are distorted in our understanding of this plan that you’ve made for us that is live-giving and life-preserving. So bless us with the insight into the truth of who we are and why we’re here, and help us to create this kingdom. It’s what the world is longing for and anxious for, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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The 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Job 38:1, 8-11 | 2 Corinthians 5:14-17 | Mark 4:35-41

Grant, oh Lord, that we may always revere and love your holy name for you never deprive of your guidance those you set firm on the foundation of your love. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

God the Father, Jesus his Son, the two are often confused, or at least the two cause confusion in people as to who is God or what is God. What is God? Is God a man? Is God a god? It’s really interesting how the two often — the way most people settle it in their minds and imagination and say, “Well, God’s the Father, and Jesus is his Son. God’s the angry one and the vengeful one and Jesus the nice one who protects us from the vengeance of the Father.” No. God the Father exists. He created everything. He created with the most loving disposition. Listen to that first reading, how beautiful it is that he created this world as if it’s a living being. When he talks about he created the sea, it was like he gave birth out of a womb. The sea was born, and then he gives it a place. Then he makes a cloud so that it has a blanket and then the darkness so that it can rest, and then he sets limits for it. What a beautiful way of imagining the earth, as a living being. And with this image, what we find is that God created everything out of love, and he gave limits to everything in nature. Trees can only do so much. Water can only do so much. And then he took this chance and created human beings, and human beings, in a sense, are not limited like nature is. They have this one element that is not in any other part of anything that Jesus — that God created, and it’s free will. He gave boundaries to the sea, and he gives — in a sense, he calls us to live within a certain limitation of who we are and what we can do, but if we think we can go beyond that, there we go. We are a little unruly compared to the rest of creation, and so what’s he do with that? Well, he works with it in the most loving, patient and kind way.

I’d like you to look at the gospel now and see that God, who has power over nature, controls it. We see that same power that’s God the Father now in God the Son, because Jesus, the best way to understand Jesus is he is a manifestation of God the Father in a human being, the same God that created the sea is the same God that’s in Jesus calming the sea. His humanity is with that, and the reason God chose to become also human was so that he could explain to us in a clear way that that’s his plan. He always created us longing to have a relationship with us where we work together. So Jesus is the manifestation of the fullness of who God is. He’s not just the God out there in heaven that creates everything, the master over everything. No, he’s also the partner that enters into our life like he did in Jesus’ life. But the thing about the humanity of Jesus that’s different than our humanity, it’s completely sinless. It didn’t come from another human being. God created the man Jesus himself. So he’s human but not as human as we are. He doesn’t have our weaknesses, but he has free will, which is really interesting.

So here is this beautiful manifestation of God in a human being, Jesus. So we see something that goes on in the relationship we have with God always comes up. Somewhere along the line, we’re doing what he calls us to do. We’re living as we’re supposed to be living, and all of a sudden, instead of calm and everything being the way we expect it to be, there’s a squall. We all know what the squall feels like. “What the heck is going on? Why isn’t this working? Why do I have this problem? Why is the person I love dying? Why is the world so filled with tension?” All those things, we get scared, and so what I love about the image of God in a human being creating calm in the midst of a storm, we have the man Jesus on a pillow in a squall in an open boat, which is kind of humorous to me. Talk about being relaxed, but his disciples are terrified. They realize they’re going to die, and so they scream out, “Help us. Help us. Help us.” And he’s sort of half awake, and he gets like, “What? What are you worried about?” It’s obviously the storm, so he just stops the storm, because he’s God. And they’re just amazed. “What? Who is this guy? Who is he?”

Does that mean that God is saying to the disciples that eventually, “If you let my Father live in you as he lives in me that you can do anything you want, and you can calm storms and things like that”? No, that’s not the point. What he’s saying is if you have God living in you and you believe in him, he will never let anything destroy you. That’s the key. Nothing will destroy you. Does that mean that nothing will ever frighten you or nothing will ever go wrong? No, no. It just means that no matter where and what you’re dealing with, he will never destroy you. Can you believe that? Well, the reason that’s so important to believe is because the power to do that is not in a human being. If you really think something is going to destroy you, you are terrified, and you will resist whatever is going on, because it can, in your mind, destroy you. So hold that thought. There is something out there that can be so terrifying that you will resist it, and let’s look at Paul’s insight, because it’s the most important thing, I think, I’ve ever really been focused on, because what we’re hearing in Paul is a mystery, and it goes like this.

Fundamentally, Jesus, the model of who we are, a human filled with divinity, was asked by God at one point in his life to do something that felt like he couldn’t do it, because he, the God/man, basically wanted more than anything else to save the world. He wanted to do his calling. He wanted to fulfill it. He wanted to bring people into a deeper relationship with his Father through what he could show them, and he knew their frailties. He knew their weaknesses, and now God finally reveals to the man Jesus that his calling is going to engage him in looking, in the eyes of his disciples, as a complete failure and allowing evil, which he always tells people he’s going to destroy — allow evil to destroy Jesus. And so he couldn’t — didn’t want to do it, because he was afraid it would be the one thing that would keep him from achieving the goal that he really wanted to do. Now, this is his humanity now, and so he says, “Please Father, I don’t want to do this,” meaning, “I don’t want my disciples to be tested this strongly because — I don't know. It’s too much.” “If I can’t do what I’m called to do, I won’t exist,” is what he’s kind of saying, and I want you to hear that again. “If I’m not able to do what I think I’m supposed to do, that’s my essence, then I will die.” And that’s exactly what Jesus went through in the Garden of Gethsemane. This is like a death, and can I let go of the very thing that is my core, my essence? Can I let go of that for some promise from God that it’ll be alright? He did it. He did it, but here’s what Paul says. Because Jesus did that, because he did die for others, and he no longer was living just for himself but others — he wasn’t living out of the model he had for who he was and how he had to function. He gave that up trusting his Father, and when he did that and he died, everybody died. What? Meaning he did something in reality, in the human race, being a member of the human race — Jesus was — that his surrender to that moment made something shift that reminds us of a mystery that, whenever we go through anything, we don’t do it just ourselves, but we are engaged in something much bigger than ourselves, and whatever we do impacts everybody else. But his act of selflessness and courage in that moment changed our capacity, and now we can do it ourselves. That’s amazing. Since he died for all and no longer for himself, all of us are empowered to die and not focus solely on ourselves. So that’s grace. That’s what it means to be saved.

Let’s go back to how that works in your life and in mine. So let’s say, if you know a lot about personalities, you know that people have a certain focus of their life for where they find value. Some people are teachers, and they have to always explain things to people. Other people are caregivers, and they’re always caring for people. Some people like me are performers, and they have to perform for everybody. Some people are people who have to control everything, and when I mean they have to, it means that, when they are doing that, they feel most alive, and if they can’t do that, they don’t think they exist. Their identity is so tied up in one of their roles — just like you might say the man Jesus was tied up in his role to be absolutely the catalyst, in his own mind, that he felt the disciples had to experience, someone conquering evil. And God said, “No, I’m going to show them that you’ve conquered evil but not by avoiding it but by giving into it and surviving and then becoming even more than you ever were before.” So follow that sequence, because what happens, when you and I are facing something like the Garden of Gethsemane and we don’t want to give into it, the reason we don’t want to give into it is not that we don’t want to, but we can’t. And why can’t we? Because our identity is too tied into something that gives us value. If I’m not caring for somebody, I have no value. I don’t exist. If I’m not up there in front of a crowd performing for people, then I don’t exist. I’ve heard many people say — they’re entertainers. The only time I really feel alive is when I’m onstage. The only thing [sic] I’m really alive is when I’m caring for somebody. The only time I feel alive is when I’m in charge. But that’s not who we are. So what Jesus set up in motion is the reality that we, as human beings, do have the ability to say to that part of us that says, “I will not exist if I don’t perform in a way that I’ve been trained to perform in order to have a sense of my value,” the life of Jesus is saying to us, and the grace is there to say, “No, you do exist even though you don’t do that.”

So funny. I think all the time, “I don’t want to do something. I don’t want to call that person. I don’t want to go there.” Why? Well, when I find — the reason I don’t want to go there is because, when I go there, I’m not going to do something they want me to do. I’m going to do something they don’t. I’m going to tell them something that they don’t want to hear. I’m going to tell them, “I can’t do that,” or I can’t help them. When I say, “I don’t want to,” what I should really be saying is there’s something in me that can’t. It’s not that I don’t want to. I can’t do it. Why not? Well, because when I’m telling somebody something they don’t want to know, or if I tell them I can’t help them in the way they want — and I have grown up in an environment where my own value has always been on performing for somebody, pleasing them, and then I feel alive, and then I exist. When that’s taken away from me, I’m consciously — I feel like, “I just don’t want to do it.” If I’m really honest, I’m saying, “I’m scared. I’m scared if I don’t do it, I won’t exist.” Now here’s the thing about evil that I think is so fascinating. It always hides the core of what’s wrong in us, the evil we’re hanging on to, which is always an illusion. Remember, evil feeds on lies. So if you have a lie inside of you that you’ve been trained — and we all have it on some level — that my value is found in this, and that needs to be chipped away. God needs to say, “Your value is fundamentally in your essence that I created for you. You’re not valuable because you are in the eyes of someone else approved.” And so how you free yourself from that is to go through the experience that feels like, “If I do this, if I can’t perform like I want, I will die,” and then you have to go through the experience of not being able to do it. Not only do you not die, but like Jesus, you rise. And when Jesus did what he did, surrendered to that which he feared the most, he was empowered to come back and do more than he ever did before. Now, that cannot be just a minor way of the whole story ending. No, that’s the essence of what we’re being taught. If you’re willing to die to that thing that you think you really are, you will become so much more of who you really are, and if you can believe that, you won’t say to yourself, “I don’t want to, because I basically can’t.” You’ll say, “I will.” And the way that’s said in Jesus is, “Not my will but your will be done. Not me hanging onto an illusion of what it means to be the Messiah but allowing your will, how it’s written, what reality really is like. I want to enter into that. That’s what I will, the truth.” And the thing about the truth always is it sets you free.

Father, through your Son, you have made all things new. You have given human nature a power we never had before, a power to trust in you more than we trust in our own illusions, our own fears. Bless us with the courage that it takes to live the life you’ve called us to live without the fear and the shame that so often comes from the patterns that we were taught. Your gift is life. Let us engage in it as fully as we can, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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The 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ezekiel 17:22-24 | 2 Corinthians 5:6-10 | Mark 4:26-34

Oh God, strength of those who hope in you, graciously hear our pleas and, since without you mortal frailty can do nothing, grant us always the help of your grace that in following your commands we may please you by our resolve and our deeds. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

We’ve entered ordinary time, the time when we simply reflect upon one of the evangelists’ reflections on what it was like to know this God/man Jesus, and so this is the year that we focus on the Gospel of Mark. So we’re going to look at his view of this experience with this God/man Jesus, and when you think about it, the responsibility that we have to each other as a church, as a believing community is to witness the truth of who God is and who we are and what we’re here to accomplish. If you go to religion for something, you say, “Well, I’m going so I can have a relationship with God,” or, “I go to be forgiven for my sins,” or, “I go to learn more about the mysteries of my faith.” No matter what focus you might have or what you’re looking for, the one thing that the heart longs for more than anything else, as well as the mind, is truth. Healthy religion shares the truth of who we are and why we’re here and who God is, and when you get a number of people living out of that truth, they witness it to one another, and it grows, and it is more and more fruitful and more abundant. So my prayer is, as we go through these many Sundays of ordinary time coming up, we will grow in our understanding from the witness of this one man, Mark, the evangelist, and to enhance whatever is in the gospel, we have these other two readings. You know how it works. They are chosen because of the gospel.

And the first reading is interesting, because I’d like you to put this whole set of readings in a context. What is God’s role in your life? What is it that we’re asked to turn to him and ask for, or what is it we’re asked to have a strong, strong conviction that he will do something for us, He will be someone for us? So this first reading is about, in a way, the work of God in the Old Testament. What does God do for his people? Well, one of the things, he gathers them together, and he wants them to follow his rules and his laws. That’s important, and they were at such a level of consciousness that they had to be told pretty much what to do. The Ten Commandments, the best user manual for human nature, basically says you have a God that is real, that is true. You need to spend time with him, and you have his power dwelling in you. Never use it in vain. Never use it in a way that is destructive, and for goodness sakes, take care of each other. That’s very simple advice, and that’s exactly what God longs to enter into our life to help us to achieve.

So the question is how much of what we do is what we asked for in the opening prayer, the grace, his help to enable us to do what we’re here for, to achieve what we’re here to achieve. And it’s interesting. There are two forms of, I guess you might say, faith or religion. One is called deism, and one is called theism. And theism is a good description of Christianity. Theism is a belief in one God and that this God is very powerful and very much engaged in the work of guiding us through this journey on this plane that we’re living on so that we can accomplish the task that we’re here to accomplish, and we can’t do it without his grace. So theism believes that God exists and that God is intimately engaged in everything going on in the world. And deism is like that, does believe that there is a God, but it doesn’t believe that he has anything to do with what’s happening. He is completely neutral as far as the way the world is going. Whatever it is that you’re engaged in, it’s up to you to figure it out, how to get out of it or how to make it better, and he just is pretty much of an absent landlord, an absent father. And you say, “What’s attractive in that?” Well, the thing that’s attractive in it is you don’t have to believe in something that you can’t explain, that you can’t prove, but it’s impossible to listen to the Christian message without realizing that God has revealed himself as not only someone who cares about how we live but recognizes how impossible it is for us to accomplish the things we’re here to do without his intimate, personal attention and his presence within us.

So this first reading is from the Old Testament, from Ezekiel. It is about the role that God has in the life of the people that’s, you might say, their political life, life on this planet as it is in a way that humans are in charge. And the interesting thing about the image of the cedar is that that’s the different kingdoms, and if a kingdom fails and falls apart, he takes the top of it off and clips it and then plants it somewhere else, on a higher level of consciousness, let’s say, a higher place. And then it grows into a new kingdom, a new political system, and as those systems go through, as they all do, good times, bad times, times when they’re very, very fruitful and very effective and other times when they all fall apart, what God is saying in the Old Testament through this prophet is, “Look, I’m the one that’s in charge of all that. I can make a kingdom flourish, or I can let it fall apart.” If you need to have in your history right now, the human race, you need — this group of people needs to have a calm, protective government, that’s what they need at that time, and that’s what God has prepared for them. And then if somehow they need something more that tests their resilience and their trust, they’re going to go through a horrible experience of abuse and tyranny, and what God is saying in the Old Testament is, “Look, don’t think this is all just happenstance. I am in charge of the way the kingdoms of the world are affecting you, and I’m careful that they are always there for you for what you need. Sometimes you need comfort. Sometimes you need challenge. Sometimes you need to be at ease. Sometimes you need to be in pain. I’m in charge.” Amazing. How does that work? I have no idea. If he’s in charge of everything, then we’re nothing but puppets? No, we’re absolutely free to choose whatever we want, but in some mysterious way beyond our imagining, everything works for the good of each of us. A pandemic, a time of peace, prosperity, a time of horrible war and conflict, all of those, he knows exactly what’s happening. He allows it. He allows it to the point that it’s just perfect for us.

And then you see in the second reading another image of the way God works with his people, and in that old-time system in the Old Testament, one of the things that’s clear is that there is a relationship with God that’s under the law, and you must perform and keep the law in order to have God’s favor. That’s definitely Old Testament stuff, and yet the New Testament it’s radically different. Instead of a law being the core of what — that connects us to God, following his rules and laws, no, it’s now receiving and accepting his forgiveness, his love, his presence, living in us on a daily basis. The New Testament is so new, so different that it’s often never fully embraced, because we hang onto the old, because it makes sense to the mind, not to the heart. The heart loves the image of being loved and being forgiven, but listen to Paul, because Paul did not ever experience the physical presence of Jesus. He had a vision, and he worked with this vision in his heart, and he worked with Jesus working in him. But the interesting thing about what he’s saying there, if you listen to the words carefully, he’s saying, “We live in this world, and when we’re in this world, we’re separated from God. And that’s painful, to be separated from God. So we look forward to dying, but we don’t really want to kill ourselves.” That’s what he’s saying, because we need to stay here. We need to work with whatever it is, but basically it’s clear that what Paul is simply saying is we’re here to perform in a way that pleases God, and when we finish with our performance, we go to heaven. And then we’re going to be judged, and we get rewarded or punished. Now think about that. That is not New Testament. That’s Old Testament, separated from God and being judged at the end. New Testament, God is in us. God is with us, and when it comes to the end, we go, and we present to God our faults, our weaknesses, and he says, “Oh, by the way, someone has already come here ahead of you, and they paid for all your debts. It’s somebody who died in Jerusalem. Do you know him?” Amazing. We live in a world — if we live in the world that God has intended to live in, there is great joy and peace, because we’re not being held to the responsibility of our failures. We’re being held to a relationship that we have to trust in where God is there for us, and one of the things that Jesus did that has always been God plan, he reveals to us that we flourish in an atmosphere where we really, truly believe that we are safe and that we are loved and we are valued. That’s the gift of God’s presence within us.

So we look then to the gospel, because now what I’m trying to do is put you in touch with how it is that God is engaged in your life in an intimate way. We are theists, not deists. We believe that God has a role in our life, and so how would we describe that role? And then Jesus gives us the image, a parable, a parable about how it is that he is engaged daily in your life and in mine. Well, let’s see if I can dig deep into this parable and awaken it for you, because it’s beautiful. What it’s saying is basically in your life, in my life, God has planted a seed inside of you. It is your true self, your authentic self. It comes in the form of an undifferentiated, unconscious form. You’re a baby. You come into the world, and you don’t know anything. But when you’re not fed and you’re not safe, you scream, and you cry. That’s that low level of consciousness where we need definitely to find a place where we’re safe, and then as we grow older, we realize that we need very much someone to be there for us. And if we don’t have someone who loves us — first, people have created a safe place for us, and then we’re loved and honored. And then as that evolves and we grow into maturity, we discover something in us, the seed in us that now is safe and loved and feels like it has value. A creative force is in us all, and then we have this awakening. The Spirit awakens us to our gift. What is it that is in me, that has been there from the beginning, that God wants me to develop? I know that if I develop it and I use it for good, I will find joy and happiness in my life. So the image of this field is — the field is you and me, and the seed is this gift of God, that unique person that he’s created each of us to be. And how it grows you don’t know. How is it that I evolve from this whiny, little baby screaming to an altruistic, loving, giving person who creates something so valuable to other people and gives it away with the simple joy that I’m doing something that brings me joy? Because when I’m loving and saving and healing, I’m the happiest I could ever be. That evolution, how does it happen? Well, through all the weird things that go on in your life, but there is always the promise that it will happen. You will grow and develop this seed that is planted inside of you. It’s not — you didn’t create the seed. You didn’t create that unique thing that’s you, that you need to believe in and trust in and develop and give whatever gift you have away. You didn’t do that. That was a gift from God, but you, your consciousness is in charge. And what a thing that God would give each individual a role in the communities they live in that is integral to the work of saving everyone and bringing everyone into the truth, and he gives us complete freedom whether to use it or not. And what a tragedy when we don’t, and it’s often because we’ve never found a place where we’re safe. We’ve never found a place where we’re loved. We’ve never found a place where someone gave us value. If we count on other people to do that, it’s pretty risky, but if you understand finally and fully, as a full-blown theist, God is engaged in your life, and he wants more than anything else for you to not only survive but develop and grow and become who you are. And he is so dedicated to that that nothing in the world, no absence of love and no other problem is going to keep you from it. That’s the trust in a God who is engaged daily in your life, and that’s what makes life so much different. And there is such a thing as religion that has peace, joy and love instead of shame, fear and anger.

Father, your goodness and the intimacy that you long to have with us is beyond our imagining. It’s so difficult for us to understand this, because there’s a way in which we don’t feel worthy, but in another sense, there is a kind of frightening part of being so close to someone so powerful that somehow we won’t survive or that we’ll lose our individuality. So bless us with the capacity, which would be your grace, enabling us to embrace something that goes beyond our mind but yet feeds and nurtures and awakens our hearts to a life of true service. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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The 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Genesis 3:9-15 | 2 Corinthians 4:13—5:1 | Mark 3:20-35

Oh, God, from whom all good things come, grant that we, who call on you in our need, may at your prompting discern what is right and by your guidance do it. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

WE’RE now in the ordinary time of the church year, which means we’re going to go over the extraordinary life of Jesus. In that life we have a story, a story of a human being who, like us, grew in age and wisdom, ended up living a life different than the ones around him. He never married. He was incredibly interested in scripture and spent 30 years of his life studying and wondering and pondering and meditating. Then at age 30, he stood up in his hometown and stated something that seemed almost completely insane. He somehow had a feeling that he had a message deep in his heart that had been revealed to him by God that he was the one who was to come to open the minds and hearts of human beings to the truth — the truth of who they are and who God is. The ultimate plan that he began, when he called Abraham, the ultimate plan being fulfilled. He was the one who was to proclaim it. He was the one to announce the kingdom. John the Baptist was, in a way, his emcee. He’s the one that announced him to the world. “This is the one. He is the one you have to listen to.”

So what’s his message? What is it that Jesus gave? How can we summarize that message? Well, one of the things he said, when he spoke in his hometown that Sabbath, he said that he knew that the work of God that he was there to perform had something to do with awakening in human beings that which laid dormant. It was awakening in mankind that there was a way out of a world of violence, destruction, shame, fear, anger. There was something that was offered to them, and what was being offered was described by its effect. And it went like this: eyes will be opened. You’ll see what you’ve been blind to. Whatever thing keeps you from being who God intended you to be. The prison that you’re in, that’s going to be broken open. All the burdens you feel about life so that it’s somewhat joyless and not about pleasure but about struggle — that’s going to change dramatically. What you’re going to find is that there is literally a world that God has created for us that is beautiful, and filled with joy, peace and, most especially, freedom — freedom. The United States of America is founded on that, and it’s been an amazing journey to watch a country that was established not on the authority of its leadership solely, but on the rights, needs, wants of individuals. The government was there more to protect the ability of a human being to make decisions about how they live their life, who they worship, what they do — freedom.

So if we see Jesus coming to bring this new freedom of an inner voice that’s deep within us guiding us, then what we have to look at carefully is sin, and I love the Adam and Eve story. Every time I go back to it, I see something I didn’t see before, but I want to draw from that reading you just listened to, something about the nature of sin. You know it’s based in a lie. The serpent lied to them, and what the lie contained was a way of being in the world that created separation, diving the world into good people and bad people, right and wrong, valuable and less valuable. It’s, in a way, a kind of binary world, but it’s more complex than that. It gave to human beings this lie that you have the right to judge, you have the right to control, you have the right to make things happen, and it sounds like every adolescent who beings to leave the comfort of a parental household and goes off and wants to make their own mark. So I really think the story is not about some horrific lie, but about our own story, our own salvation history. We start our independent life by taking charge, deciding who is in and who is out and what is right and what is wrong. It’s all that, and what it creates is separation.

So look at what’s the first words that were spoken to sinful human beings from God. Not, “What did you do,” but, “Where are you? You’re not with me. I don’t feel you’re with me anymore. What is it? Where have you gone? You’ve gone somewhere else. You’re not in harmony anymore.” They say, “Well, it’s not our fault. We were tricked. We were tricked.” Well, I love that, because it makes human beings in the story seem a little less malicious, but the malicious one, the one that divided, division, is going to be punished by receiving what he’s seducing these young creatures into, and that is a divided world. And so what you see the curse implying is — I don't know if serpents walked, but, “From now on, you’re going to crawl on the ground, and human beings are going to smash your heads.” Whenever you see a snake, your first instinct is usually destroy it, not, “Oh, let’s bring it home.” So you crush its head, and yet the serpent, to protect itself, is to go to the lowest part of your body and bite you on the heel if you’re running away. Interesting. So the fascinating part of that is, when you see Adam and Eve choosing this world of division, the first two human beings that lived, Cain and Abel, ended up one killing the other. It’s where there’s division, there is that desire to control or to destroy. That’s the issue that Christianity is seeking to free us from.

I remember — gosh, it’s been 58 years ago that I entered the seminary, and I remember, when I walked into that place and I put on my cassock and walked around, I knew this was the place I wanted to be, but there wasn’t that much interest in being a priest in the classic sense. I thought priests were nice and good, but they didn’t seem to be very, I don't know, influential in my life. I didn’t know any priests personally. They were always ritualizing something on the altar, and there was something in that that was attractive to me. But they didn’t seem real, like real people, and here I was choosing to be one. And yet I said, “The one thing I want to do is find out what is really real. What is true? What is the message of Christianity?” If you peel away all denominations and you look at all the different ways in which denominations create different rules and regulations and one’s better than the other — the world of division shows its head again. I knew there had to be something universal, and so I’ve always tried to find the universal truth of Christianity. I tried not to focus on denominational differences. That’s been the heart of my ministry on this radio program, and it seems to reach a certain group of people that I think are hungry for something more simple, pure, and direct.

So we see in the next set of readings, this image in Paul, like whatever it is you believe, however you see the world, that’s how you’re going to act. He said, “I believed, so I spoke.” What is it you have to believe? You have to believe in what’s unseen, and what’s unseen? Unseen is all the essential things that happen in your spiritual life between you and God, you and other people. Christianity is so much more than being nice. Being polite. It’s more than doing things you’re told by an authority figure. It’s more unseen. It’s more of an inner work of transformation, of a God who said, “I want to dwell inside of you.” The most dramatic thing that Jesus was teaching was the indwelling presence of God in a human being. It was a blasphemy. That’s why the Pharisees saw Jesus, when he started talking about intimacy with God — “You’re blaspheming. You can’t say God is that close to us, that God loves that way, that God forgives. You can’t. We’re in charge of doling out forgiveness. We’re in charge of telling people who God is. Don’t tread on our world, and don’t take away our power, our ability to control.” So it’s the shadow of every institution that’s ever claimed the name of God as their source, because the most exciting thing about the fullness of the message of God is the freedom he gives us to trust in that inner voice in our hearts creating in us a space of goodness and life, that presence of God inside us that, in the teaching of the Catholic Church, on conscience, which is the most beautiful thing — read it in the catechism. It’s all about the dignity and the worth of every individual, because the God who made him is in him, guiding him and making the ultimate decisions as to what is right and wrong. The authority of the church is valuable in keeping order. It’s also valuable in giving us good advice, but I don’t think the church’s authority was ever intended to be in place of you struggling with the issue you’re dealing with. And with God’s help, wisdom and, your own self-knowledge, you come to a decision, and the church says that decision must be followed. Your obligation is to follow your conscience.

So we look at the gospel, and it’s so perfect, because if you look at the experience people had initially of Jesus, it’s the same, I think, reaction we have when you see religion as it was always intended to be, a thing given to each individual person personally so that they can speak the truth, see the truth, live it. So what you see is his family coming, and they were not open to the truth, because they couldn’t fathom the fact that their brother, relative would end up being a voice of God. There was no way they could wrap their mind around that so rather than opening their mind to it, they decided to shut him up, to say he’s nuts, write it off, tie him up, tie the message up. And the leaders of the church are caught in a classic projection of their sin onto Jesus. They are the ones that want to destroy the message of Jesus. They’re the ones who want to silence his message of freedom and hope and life and peace. They want to rob us of the authority that God’s presence in us creates, so that we can be guided by his wisdom, his truth.

Father, your inner voice is your great gift to us, your truth, your life living within us, guiding us, directing us, opening our hearts to everything that we need to become in order to bring the world to the place that you have intended it to be, a place of peace and joy and true freedom. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ
Exodus 24:3-8 | Hebrews 9:11-15 | Mark 14:12-16, 22-26

Oh God, who in this wonderful sacrament have left us a memorial of your passion, grant us, we pray, so as to revere the sacred mysteries of your body and blood that we may always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

In the very beginning of the church, as it became more and more what God intended it to be, there was a time when there was a decision made about how we would gather together to remember the great gift of God’s redemption through Jesus, and there was a way in which we decided very early on that there would be a gathering over and over again where we would celebrate this mysterious thing that happened that we recorded in this feast, that evening where Jesus, with his disciples, initiated what we call the Eucharist. And that has always been the center focus of our worship, but one of the things that had to develop eventually was how are we going to do that. And then there was this thing called the ritual of the church in terms of how we celebrate on a regular weekly basis, and it evolved into a very beautiful process of reliving, reenacting over and over again salvation history through a set of readings. And always when we read the readings and pondered them, we would celebrate and do what Jesus told us to do. Whenever we gather in his name, we should remember him, and to remember him is to engage in the very core of his ministry, his redemption, or maybe I should say, our redemption given to us by him. To be redeemed, what does it mean? Why is it the heart of the whole story of salvation history? Well, I’m praying that in this homily today that focuses on that event that changed the world in terms of a way of relating to God, I want to see if I can get to the heart of what it means and what we’re really celebrating.

So let’s go back, as we did during this liturgical season, and that’s what I’m talking about earlier when is said the church sat down and decided how it would celebrate throughout a year these Sundays. We have what we call the liturgy of the word. It’s the story, told over and over and over again of salvation history. And I’ve said this to you many times, and I believe with all my heart that that is not just the story that happened to people thousands of years ago. It’s our story. It’s the human story, the story of God relating to humans, humans responding to God’s invitation to be a part of his life, to be engaged in something that we were meant to be engaged in. If you go back to the earliest story of God’s encountering human beings, however you want to imagine it, whether it happened over centuries of evolution or whether it happened in a moment, doesn’t matter. But we have the story of when God first encountered human beings, and he invited them into a relationship with him where they would be gathered together with him to tend the garden, to tend the world. And he said, “You may do this with me.” The emphasis is “with me”. “So you’re engaging in this work that I’m inviting you into. I want you to be careful not to fall into a trap that is more egocentric and self-centered, and that is symbolized in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” And what that tree represents is nothing other than the autonomy that every human being feels they need and must have in order to fulfill their longings. That story is not a story about the original sin in so much as disobedience as the original problem, which is human beings prefer to do things on their own. We know the next two stories about human beings in the early days of the whole story of salvation history. We have not only autonomy is a problem but also jealousy and competition, Cain and Abel. We also have that very interesting story of hubris, people gathering together, deciding they can do anything they want. So that’s the dilemma. That’s the beginning, human beings wanting to be on their own, God wanting to engage them in a relationship of cooperation, partnership and doing work.

So we have in the beginning a way that first God decides he’s got to enter into these people, because they’re stiff-necked, to say the least. So he says, “What I’ll do is I’ll establish a relationship with you. I’m going to make you a people that are mine, and so the way I will gather you around me is to give you a law. You’ll be responsible for fulfilling all the things in the law, and then I will be your God, stronger than all the other gods. I’ll protect you, but you must do what I tell you to do. You must do what I ask you to do. That’s the relationship I want with you.” When you think about it, when you have a strong, autonomous kind of streak in you, all right, you might say, “Well, this may be working for me. So if you’re going to take care of me and keep me safe from my enemies, I’ll do whatever you say, but I’m doing it because I want to do it for me. I want to be protected, so yeah, I’ll accept you, God, as the God who protects me and takes care of me. And what I’ll do on my part is I’ll do whatever you say.” And so the law was established, and that’s what we have in the first reading, God proclaiming to the people a relationship based on what they are asked to do. And that’s what’s called the Old Testament or the old covenant. It’s a simple covenant in a sense. “Do what I say, and I’m your God. Don’t do what I say, and I separate from you, and you’re on your own.” So the relationship is based on obedience, doing what you’re told, and that, in a sense, never worked if you look at the story. There is something that humans being have deep inside of them, this autonomous streak or whatever — just to be told what to do by a power greater than themselves and to do it in order to get something back just doesn’t seem to be enough for us human beings. We want more than that, and so this old covenant, Old Testament, was in effect ineffective.

And so there comes a moment when God realizes it’s time to reveal not just that part of his desire, meaning, “I want a people of my own to do what I say.” He goes even further and in a way that’s absolutely unexpected said, “No, what I really want is not a relationship with people where I control their behavior but where I enter into them and I change their behavior. I awaken something in them that is deeper than their autonomous streak, and I open something in there that is intended to be opened eventually as they grow and mature.” And they end up realizing that this invitation, on the part of God, is not just to just do what your told but to become who you were meant to be. You feel the difference? If somebody comes up to you and says, “You must to this in order to keep the relationship,” that makes kind of one relationship. But if you comes up and said, “Look, I would like to enter into you, because my intention is to awaken in you, by my relationship with you, who you are really meant to be. And that thing that you’re meant to be is an intimate relationship with me. So it’s no longer me asking you to do something for me but we doing something together — we doing something together.” That’s the mystery of the New Testament, the new covenant.

Now, the old covenant had the weakness. The biggest weakness of the old covenant was you had to follow the rules and laws, and if you broke them, then you broke the relationship. That’s the first covenant. It was based on obedience, and what the covenant — when you see it established in the Old Testament, it was an interesting covenant, because it was something that was done in blood. And the blood image is this: the relationship you have with God is going to be God taking care of you, and without his care, you will self-destruct. In a sense, you will die. So what God in the Old Testament was promising is, “If you follow my ways and my rules, you’ll find life, but if you don’t, there will be death.” That’s why blood was used as a statement or a way of expressing this covenant. An animal was cut in half. The blood was taken, part of it sprinkled on the victim and part of it on the person, and so that whole image of, if you break the covenant, you have killed something. Then something has to be done to make up for that, and the fascinating thing about the Old Testament is what fixed you, when you had broken the law, what reestablished you with God was the killing of an animal, which seemed strange to me at first. What is that doing? Well, it’s expressing that something had to be sacrificed. Something had to be shown, I would say, by sacrifice, as to what you were doing when you broke the law. You were cutting yourself off from this God in your life, guiding you and taking care of you and protecting you. And so if you offered a sacrifice, if you killed something, it was this — to me it seems like it was a strong reminder of how essential this relationship was if you’re going to continue to live the life that you would like to live, being protected by a greater power than yourself. But again, it had to be done over and over again, and people kept failing and kept being asked to do what they’re told and kept failing. So it never produced anything that made a major difference in the relationship or the capacity, let’s say, of human beings to have a relationship with God.

So something had to change, and then we come to the new covenant. And so it’s interesting to me. This whole review of salvation history that started with Ash Wednesday and ends this Sunday ends with this incredible moment when Jesus does something that changes everything in terms of our relationship with God. No longer does it depend upon human beings offering a sacrifice to make up for their fault to be reestablished with God. Jesus said, “I will be that sacrifice. I will give my life. You will not give just an animal’s life in reparation, but I will give my life for you.” Now, without trying to get too far into understanding exactly how the mechanics of that works, just believe this: there was something that you had to do to fix the relationship that you had broken, when you broke the law, that is no longer necessary. It’s been done for you. So every debt that you’ve ever owed to God or anybody else, in that sense, because of your self-centeredness and your autonomy, your competitive jealousy, all those terrible things we do to one another, they have all been made up for, removed by this one act of Jesus offering his life for the people, for us.

Now, here’s the key, I think, that I want you to feel. There’s a resistance to this gift. There’s a resistance that is still in all of us. It’s part of that autonomy, part of that desire to do everything on our own, but we have to realize that this gift of God’s presence entering into us — and it’s not dependent upon performance? It’s really hard to believe. It’s like having a relationship where it doesn’t matter how horrible you are. The relationship never, in terms of the flow of life coming from the other, never is diminished. That’s the heart of this whole mysterious, Eucharistic gift. You can’t damage your relationship with God, and he’s promising you two things. He’s promising you, “I’m going to enter into you,” because in this mysterious thing called the Last Supper, Eucharist, he said two things. He not only said them, but he acted them out. He said, “I want you to understand that I am giving myself, my body, my strength, my essence. I’m giving that to you, and how I give it to you is not simply by dying for you, but in the act of dying for you, I’m telling you that what I’m doing is entering into you. I’m giving you my body,” he’s saying. “I’m giving you me. I’m giving you my presence in your life, no matter how good you are or bad you are. It doesn’t change my desire to be in you. So please allow me to enter into you.” That’s the essence of, “This is my body. Take it. Eat it. Take it inside.”

It’s funny — not funny but interesting that there’s another feast this week that is kind of connected. Not kind of, it’s really connected to the Eucharistic celebration, and it’s the Feast of the Sacred Heart. And there was a devotion that started in the Middle Ages that was really a wonderful image of this desire on the part of God to enter into us, to be a part of us. It was his heart, his essence that he wanted to say, “I want to come and dwell in your heart.” And there was a very interesting saint, St. Luthgard, and she had a relationship with God. She was a mystic in the 12th century, and she had this experience of God answering her prayers. And so she thought, “Well, gosh, if he can answer my prayers, I could ask for anything.” So she asked if she could be a part of him, if he would come with her and dwell with her in an intimate way, and she has this vision. It’s so powerful. It’s a mystical vision, and Jesus appeared to her, and when he did, when she said, “I want intimacy with you. I want you to be a part of my life,” he took his hand into her chest and took her heart out and then held it and then took his heart and put it in her and put his [sic] heart in himself. How’s that for intimacy, heartfulness, connection, and that was part of that whole devotion to the Sacred Heart, the intense love on the part of God to say, “Look, it’s not enough for me to tell you to do something for me in order to establish a relationship. I realize I want to be more than that to you. I want to be more than a law.”

The whole story of the Old Testament is the failure of the law to produce the relationship that we need with God, and the New Testament, the new covenant is based on something radically different, God entering into you and me in our imperfection, our sinfulness, and wanting to dwell there. And there’s nothing we can do in terms of lack of perfection that will limit his desire. The desire is that intense — it’s like a fire inside of him. “I love human beings. I will offer myself to dwell with them no matter who they are or where they are.” And then the second part of the Eucharist is that beautiful part where he said, “And this is my blood. And this blood is the essence of the new covenant, and it’s poured out for your sins, for all your imperfections, meaning I will absorb all the things that the Old Testament system was geared to perform for you, all those rituals you had to pay for and go through, which reinstated you into a relationship with God. I’m going to do that for you by just shedding my blood.” So the blood of the new covenant is not the blood, your blood, God blood intermingling over a promise that the minute you break that promise you die and you bleed. No, it’s a complete different image. It’s, “I’m making up for every sin you’ll ever commit.”

Father, your new covenant, your new promise of your presence in our lives is hard for us to still grasp. It holds so much power, but yet we’re afraid of the intimacy. So bless us with an open heart, receptive heart, allowing you to dwell there and to do the work that you’ve called us all to do with you. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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The Holy Trinity
Deuteronomy 4:32-34, 39-40 | Romans 8:14-17 | Matthew 28:16-20

God our Father, who by sending into the world the word of truth and the spirit of sanctification made known to the human race your wondrous mystery, grant us, we pray, that in professing the true faith we may acknowledge the Trinity of eternal glory and adore your unity, powerful in majesty. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

This feast is one of the three feasts that we end this incredibly important season that started in Lenten and ends week after this, and the three feasts focus on the Trinity. Last Sunday it was Pentecost when we hear the story of how this mysterious, powerful force entered into human beings who were longing for something more than they could ever achieve on their own, and they found themselves being enlightened and empowered to communicate in a way that was just, in a way, mysteriously effective. It was like whatever they were speaking at that moment was understood by people who didn’t necessarily speak the language. So it was that moment when spirit becomes integrated into our human spirit, divine spirit in human spirit. We have an enormous power, effectiveness in changing hearts, in awakening people to truth. Then today we celebrate the Feast of the Trinity, which is the focus on the notion that we have God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit. So this is the wholeness of God that we want to talk about today, and then the next one is the Feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus. It’s that focus on this incredible gift of being able to take this image of Jesus, who is the fullness of God, and take him into our body and to feel its nourishment and its cleansing power. So we focus on the Trinity. We focused before that on the Holy Spirit, and then we focus on Jesus.

So what I’d like to do today is see if I can’t clarify something that I find often creeping into people’s spirituality, and that is a misunderstanding of the whole notion of Trinity. And the big misconception is that there are three Gods or three very different aspects of God, so different that they remain somewhat separate. So there’s a lot of people who will tell me, “I like God the Father. I don’t like Jesus, because Jesus seems too wishy-washy and too easy on people, and I like things clear and black and white. So I like God the Father.” Other people say, “I don’t like God the Father, because he’s so tough, and he’s angry so often and punishes and is demanding. So I like Jesus better.” And then this Holy Spirit figure, well, we don’t know much about that, but I remember one friend of mine used to describe trying to teach the Trinity to American Indians, and they’d say, ‘Honorable Father I understand. Honorable Son I understand. Honorable bird I don’t understand.’” And the Spirit is hard to understand, because it’s a mysterious event that happens in the person who receives both the gifts of the Father and the gifts of the Son, and those are the same God.

So let me see if I can help you integrate these three, because the way to do it is not to ever imagine that there was a God the Father, then a God the Son, then a God the Spirit. These are three stages of the evolution of who God is. And why does he come in the three different images? Well, it’s because of a mysterious thing called the Law of the Three. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but it’s very important, and it’s pretty simple, and I can explain it. It goes like this. There’s a way to see the world in a black and white, either/or binary world. That’s not the way the world really is. It’s a triune sort of thing, and what I mean by that is, when we are seeking the truth, it’s not a matter of finding all the things that are true and following those, destroy all the things that are wrong, and then we’ll find we live solely in the truth. No, it’s the tension between what is right and what is wrong, and that tension creates a third thing called wisdom.

So if you know anything about literature — and you know we live for stories. Without stories, we would be almost not human. We need a story to work on. I go to Netflix, and I go to Amazon all the time, and I want to check the latest story, the latest episode of a story I’m already into. We grow from stories. They’re sources of all kinds of wonderful, wonderful things that we need to see and understand. So if we look at scripture as a story, and it’s the story, and it’s probably the — well, not probably. It is the most read and pondered story ever in existence. It starts with God creating the world and ends with the Spirit of God entering into people. That’s the basic story, and it’s not a story you would go to — and maybe this is more the Old Testament — where you go and say, “Okay, I’m here in the world to do what is right. So tell me what is right. Tell me what is wrong. I will always choose what is right and always reject what is wrong.” That is an incomplete image of what a story does and what it’s for. No, it’s a story about a protagonist and an antagonist. Every story has those two characters. One is the one who is there to make the point of the story. That’s usually a hero. It’s usually a good person who’s there to bring truth to the world, and then there’s an antagonist, a resistant person who wants to destroy that and not allow it to take its root in people and change them. And the story is always about the tension and the struggle between the protagonist and the antagonist.

Well, what is the protagonist and antagonist in the story of scripture? Well, I could use this: the protagonist is God wanting something, and God’s longing is for human beings to become all that they need to be. And he knows and wants to teach us that there’s only one way that can happen, and that’s when he enters into us and works with us. So he has a goal, and the goodness of his goal is our fullness, which can only take place if we surrender to his strength. And the antagonist is human nature. We see human nature revealed so clearly in the Old Testament in those first books of the Torah when we see that human beings, first of all, when told what to do, they don’t respond very well. So the story of Adam and Eve is human beings who really do like to be on their own. They like autonomy. They’d rather be like God than need God. So we see that part of human nature revealed in the Adam and Eve story. Then the Cain and Abel story, again, shows us there’s a kind of competition and jealousy in human beings. We like not only being autonomous; we like being better than other people. And the Tower of Babel story is about our addiction to success. So there’s a tension: a God who wants us to become like him, who we’re intended to be, and human nature that resists it. And then the third part is watching the story unfold and watching how they work together until there’s some kind of integration, and then there’s an ending. And the integration part is what’s so interesting to me, because the integration part is somehow found in that incredibly interesting figure called Jesus. You have God the Father in resistance to human beings resisting each other because of the dichotomy that they can’t come together in understanding what they’re there for, and then in Jesus, this mysterious creature, we find this work. And that’s the work that we’re all engaged in, how to live in the world filled with the Holy Spirit, with God’s presence, and then somehow, in the struggle, you find in Jesus, suffering.

That’s the image I want to focus on that is the work that you and I engage in as people who listen to that story and try to integrate ourselves into the work that the story reveals to us that is our destiny, integration of humanity and divinity. And how does it work? I don't know. I can’t describe it. All I know is we see in the life of Jesus this struggle that he has at one point in his life, and he realizes that he wants more than anything else to take care of the human beings that he loves so deeply. And yet he realizes that their resistance is so strong that they’re going to keep him from doing that, and then somehow he surrenders to that. He suffers it, and while he sees himself being destroyed by the antagonist, when he gives in to it and forgives the antagonist, then it works. Then the Spirit rushes in. Interesting. That’s the thing that I want you to feel with me when we think about this whole thing called how do we integrate this Trinitarian God into our life. And we do it this way. I can describe it as best I can. We listen to God the Father, who is the giver of all truth, and we look at him and listen to him, and he tells us that there’s a destiny that we have and that we are to choose the thing that is right. He wants us to do that. His intention, the God intention of our Father is, “I created you for a purpose, and I long for you to engage in that purpose, because it is there, designed for you that you will find fulfillment.” That’s the role of the Father, and then we look at our resistance to that. And I know it. You know yours. It’s all different shades of those things I mentioned earlier. It’s the shade of I’d rather do it myself, the sort of part of us that likes to be better than other people, the part that really loves to be successful. All that, that’s ego.

So do we just then integrate that? Well, we allow the story of Jesus, which is the heart of who God is — he is God the Father. He has that part of him that longs desperately to bring us into fullness, and when we have no way of understanding it, he turns it into rules and regulations, knowing that that would be better than just leading us into a place of self-destruction. But then he knows, and he reveals to us through Jesus that there is this third way. And the third way is that this beautiful image of God the Father comes out as a God who is like us. So he moves from master to servant, and when — we understand the servant-hood that we see in Jesus is a part that’s always been in the Father and we’re seeing now both a Father who’s a master and a Father who is a servant, and that servant comes in the form of the Son of the Father, because we are to be reborn as his children. And so humanity working out its tension with divinity in the person of Jesus is a description of what it means to be a son or a daughter of God, and then when we’re in that work, there comes this integration. The integration is: how do I understand my humanity and the divinity that is in me? How do I understand those two working together, and what takes away the resistance? Well, it goes something like this, I think. The first part of God’s revealing himself is the sense that he’s asking us to become someone for him. What he’s asking us to become is who we’re destined to be, but we resist that. So we have this tension, and so what he wants to do is he’s trying to say, “Okay, this is the tension I want you to learn to live with and to be engaged in, and then what I’m going to do is I’m going to integrate my Spirit into you. And when you can feel my Spirit entering into you — and it’s going to awaken in you a wisdom.” And the wisdom is not simply that God needs you to be who he wants you to be by telling you what to do. It’s this mysterious addition that he’s saying, “No, you, your nature — your nature wants me to be a part of you. You need me.” So the integration is God revealing himself as a God who wants us to be in union with him, and then we grow into human beings, through the integration of Jesus and the struggle of Jesus, we grow into people who want God. That’s the way it’s resolved.

The beauty of the Trinity is inviting us into a place where we allow God to use us for whatever he wants, but we also ask God to be the source of what we need to be able to do the things that we need. In other words, we say, “I need you God.” And God said, “I need you.” So when you come to that integration of God needing you and you needing God, both of which is to bring us to the fullness of who we are, instruments of bringing grace and life to the world, we become this mysterious, spiritual power that transforms the world by who we are, human beings receiving God as a source and God delighting in we being the source that he needs to be able to reach people. I never thought that God had created a world in which he depends upon us to bring his world, his truth to other people. That’s the mystery. That’s the beauty of this integration that comes from understanding the Trinity, we living in God, God living in us and both of us benefiting enormously where there’s no competition, and there’s no protagonist and no antagonist anymore. There’s just union and communion. It’s a gift to know the integration of all these different parts that we tend to keep separate, but when they come together, there is truth.

Father, the longing that you have had from the very beginning is union, communion with us, you needing us, we needing you. When we enter into that world, we find ourselves engaged in work that is beyond our imagining. It’s mysterious. It’s mystical. It’s the world of the spirit. So bless us with the courage that enables us to go through whatever process we need to, whatever integration of things that we think are separated bringing into oneness. Help us with this gift so we can truly be living a Trinitarian life, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Pentecost
Genesis 11:1-9 | Romans 8:22-27 | John 7:37-39

God our Father, who by sending into the world the word of truth and the spirit of sanctification made known to the human race your wondrous mystery, grant us, we pray, that in professing the true faith we may acknowledge the Trinity of eternal glory and adore your unity, power and majesty. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

This feast celebrates a very important moment in history, the history of God revealing himself to his people and revealing to them who they are and why they’re here. It’s the fullness of the message. It comes in this form of an event that happened to the disciples, and let’s look at the event to start with so we can be in touch with the symbolism that is so rich in this experience called Pentecost and see if we can apply it to the reality that this feast is trying to put us in touch with. And the reality is God entering into you and entering into me in this mysterious form of his presence, his Spirit, and his transforming power, what it does when it enters into us, but first of all, it’s a gathering after Jesus rose from the dead and then spent 40 days talking to his disciples and teaching. And then he said, “I want you to gather in a place and this gift will be given to you.”

Well, the apostles were there. Mary was there, the mother of Jesus. They consider that maybe 100 followers of Jesus were in this room, and all of a sudden there was this overwhelming sense of a wind, a mysterious, powerful wind, which has been used in scripture as an image of the presence, mysterious, powerful presence of God. You don’t know where it comes from. You don’t know where it goes, but it is so powerful. And then there is this image that, while they’re gathered together, that there appeared as if tongues of fire had descended from the heavens and was above their heads. The image is fire, and fire is used in scripture, throughout scripture as a form of transformation, and it’s two-fold. It purifies. It burns out everything that’s not authentic, not real. It exposes half-truths and lies and removes them, and in its place, it adds enlightenment.

So here are the disciples in this room with all these other disciples and followers, and there’s this noise and this happening thing that’s going on. And what happens is that all of a sudden then there are a bunch of observers. All these other people from all over the world are watching all of this, and then all of a sudden, these disciples, the followers of Christ who have these tongues over their heads, start speaking in language that everyone can hear and everyone can understand. And some say it was speaking in tongues, and speaking in tongues is a very interesting thing. I mentioned it last week in my homily, but it’s the idea that there is this language that often can overtake someone where it isn’t — doesn’t make sense to the mind. It’s not words that you recall having heard before, whatever. No, it’s a sound, and it conveys something, even though it’s not a literal thing that your ear hears and then your mind understands. It’s the kind of language, what I call the language of the heart. It’s like this language that carries with it not an information but a sense or a presence of something that goes directly to the heart.

So those are the images. Well, I left the other one out. The people that were around from all different parts of the world understood exactly what they were saying. Now, that’s just really bizarre, so let’s look at it. This is the final piece of salvation history. God began this whole story in a garden when he created Adam and Eve, and in that moment, he established a relationship with them where he was going to be the God that shared with these creatures the garden. God was saying, “Would you help tend my garden with me? And you have just one thing you shouldn’t do. Be careful of that tree of knowledge of good and evil, and just stay away from that, and you’ll be fine.” And we know the story. That tree is an image of humanity, the desire of humans to be in charge, to know what’s right, to know what’s wrong or to be at least in charge enough to say, “This is what I want to do, and this is how I’ll do it.” It’s an image of the autonomy that was also in these humans that God created. It’s called free will, and it looks like it’s a major obstacle in the beginning, because they don’t follow what God asks. They followed a voice, and the voice came from this creature. We don’t know who the creature was. We know what happened to the creature when he lied to these people and said, “Look, what you really want, and it seems to be something that’s pretty good, you want to be like God, and certainly God is going to be pleased if you want to be like him. So go ahead and eat.” But it’s just a beautiful image to me that there is a part of human nature that would like to be like the God that created us, and that means to be able to accomplish things on our own.

So the rest of the story starts there, and then it evolves over 2,000 years or more with this story of salvation history where the story goes on, and we see human beings struggling with this autonomous part of them and a God who then has to work with them. And sense he can’t reach them, he has to work on them from sort of outside of their psyche, their soul, and so all he can do is control them. And so we have God in the Old Testament revealing himself as a jealous and sometimes angry and vengeful God who wants and has to, I guess, in terms of trying to help the people that he loves so much, he has to control them from being violent to each other and destructive to each other. So he controls them by laws and regulations, and that’s so much of the Old Testament, and it’s not successful. It’s resented on the part of the people who are told they have to do this or be punished. It’s frustrating for God, because he can’t seem to reach their hearts, where he really wants to change them. And so it just goes on that way until finally, even though there were prophets and priests and kings trying to lead them, it came to a point where something had to be done. Something had to be changed in human beings, and so the God then, who was somewhat distant and worked through rules and regulations and rituals, he realizes, “I’ve got to reach these people, and I can’t do it through an institution. I have to do it in a more personal way. I will come into the world so that I can be with them.”

With them — so God becomes a human being and enters into the life of a small gathering of people and starts revealing to them the fullness of God that was hidden in the Old Testament. And what do we find? A lover, not a taskmaster and not a judge but one who forgives, and the forgiveness and the non-judgment and the desire to enable them to feel the love that came from God’s heart to them was finally revealed in this person, Jesus, and it had a profound impact on these people. But the fact that they didn’t fully understand it implied that just being present to them wasn’t enough, because God’s presence had another reason for happening. It had to transform human beings. So you get this long salvation history of God working with human beings, trying to change them, in a sense, from the outside, explaining to them who he was, and even when that was all done, these disciples, who represent all of us, our human nature, were still saying, “Well, we really love that you are there for us, and we can’t wait till you give us the authority and the power to run the world with you. We want to be in charge.” It’s like we couldn’t shake that autonomy until something radically changed, and that’s called Pentecost.

This is the mind-boggling thing that I don’t think I, as a priest, have really faced much in my earlier years of ministry, but in these years of retirement and reflection, I see it clearer and clearer that the only way in which we can be the people that God calls us to be is we allow this mysterious thing to take place. And that is that God’s Spirit enters into us, and we live in God, not instructed by God, not working for God but working with God in us. And when we allow that image to take root in us, that truth that becomes incarnate in us, something has to happen first, and the thing that has to happen is the heart of the New Testament, is this crucifixion thing that Jesus went through, to surrender the way our life, his life was written, give in, surrender. So I don't know if you can feel this, but what I’m trying to say is we had a relationship with God where he was in charge and in control, and he managed us by rules and regulations, and it was a disaster. It never really worked very well. Then he sends his Son, and his Son comes and does his work, and they still didn’t grasp it fully. And the thing that really completely confused them was the death of Jesus, the way he died, what he surrendered to, and it made no sense to them at all, and they were really confused. And then comes the final piece, an example of what they must go through and then the empowering gift of grace that enables them to do it. That’s that fire image coming down into the human beings heart and purifying it of everything that’s self-centered, everything that’s half-true, every lie. It removes that. In its place, it brings enlightenment, and enlightenment is the ability for a human being to be conscious enough to realize what it means that God says, “I want to live in you, with you. That’s what I wanted when I made you in the garden. That’s what I always intended, but I had to tell a story. I had to do this long story, because the story is not simply about what happened in the past. But it’s the story of every single human being.”

We all go through this whole thing as we come into the world, one after another after another. You come into the world. You’re created. You become conscious as a child. You’re obviously engaged in a relationship from the very beginning. That’s what human beings are made for, relationships. That’s what God wanted with human beings. He wanted a relationship with them, so he made them relational. And the first relationships are with our parents, with our family of origin, with our culture and all of that, and that forms us. Along with that whole process, there is this God in your life and in mine who has been engaged in every single event that happened throughout your young years and your formative years that are much like those years in the Old Testament where you feel the obligation of responsibility as a burden, and you have to do these things, and you do them, because you have to. But if you can get away with not doing them, you won’t do them. It’s like that’s our story until maturity and evolution brings us to a point where we’re realizing, “I don’t know. There’s something in me that is made for so much more than just trying to fix my life and get it cleaner and more pure. It’s not satisfying enough.” And fixing yourself is never going to be that satisfying, because that’s not even our job. God is the one that transforms us. We don’t fix ourselves, but what happens when we are transformed, there, that’s the heart of who we are and what we’re here for, partnership with divinity in tending and shepherding the world. And the world is most especially considered human beings, the crown of creation of God, tending them.

So interesting that the world is the context in which we — a place where we live, but the real work is always between us and each other and God. That’s where it all takes place, and if you can imagine, the work is you and I participating in this phenomenal, wonderful task of awakening others to this reality and enabling them to live in it. There’s a satisfaction in that that is beyond anything that has to do with being in some kind of self-improvement work. To work on yourself, to get yourself into a really beautiful person, whether it’s physically or in the eyes of the culture and all that, there’s a longing to do that and a satisfaction in that, but nothing is as satisfying as being engaged in doing something that is actually going to create the kind of fulfillment that the world teaches us perfection and position and power offer us. Those things don’t satisfy, but co-creating a world in which there is peace and love and, I don't know, a sense of wonder versus a world that is filled with envy and jealousy and pain and suffering and abuse, that work of entering into this other world, is the key to being who God has called us to be in this world. And I don't know why it’s taken me so long to realize that it’s a partnership with divinity, is the only way that this can be accomplished, and that partnership can only be accomplished if I die to some egoistic part of me that thinks I’m in charge or focuses too much on me as the thing that I’m supposed to perfect for some kind of reward from God, from the people around me. It’s hard to make that shift, and the other keeps coming back, lingering. And even as close as I feel I’m getting to being, living in this world, where I am an instrument rather than the cause of every good thing that I am asked to be engaged in, even though that’s something I can feel and it works and it feels good, I will find myself slipping back to something so egocentric, and I have to just smile and say, “That’s just part of my human nature.” Because the one thing God doesn’t want us to think is that, when divinity enters into us, we become divinity. No, we are not ever going to become divinity. How do you live in this relationship with so much goodness when it flows through us but it’s not us? It takes amazing humility. It takes a death to our ego but most especially an infusion of truth and grace.

Father, you have created a world for us that is so much more than we ever could imagine on our own. How could we ever believe that we would be asked by you to share in the grace and the power that you are and bring that to the people that we are? Open our hearts, our minds, our imaginations to the beauty and the power of this gift of indwelling presence, and help us to be proclaiming it without words but just with the mysterious power that the Spirit has and how it can affect and change the people we care about. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Ascension
Acts 1:15-17, 20a, 20c-26 | 1 John 4:11-16 | John 17:11b-19

Gladden us with holy joys, almighty God, and make us rejoice with devout thanksgiving for the ascension of Christ your Son is our exaltation, and where the head has gone before in glory, the body is called to follow in hope. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Today we’re celebrating the Feast of the Ascension. It’s the end, in a sense, of the physical presence of God in Jesus in this world, and the thing about it that I like so much is it focuses on that period of time after Jesus died. So often we think that’s the end of the story. Jesus died. The disciples went off and preached this great teaching of forgiveness and love. But it’s really a story about a group of human beings who lived in this world with Jesus for three years, and let’s focus primarily on the disciples, the apostles, rather, I guess. But they were men, just like you and me and like all women, and they really had a hard time grasping the fullness of this mysterious thing called the kingdom of God that Jesus came to establish. And the thing that’s so fascinating to me about the initial beginnings of this experience of this kingdom finding its beginnings, its seed form in the world came through the gospels and the story of Jesus making clear to us who God really is, the compassionate, loving, forgiving, healing God that we believe in.

Never have you seen God so clearly represented than in this person, Jesus, but the issue was they didn’t understand it. They didn’t get it. It’s so clear that, when he went through the final stage of his life before his resurrection, it left these men just completely bewildered, frightened, locked in a room, not understanding much, and in a way, they must have doubted that Jesus was who he said he was, the one who would restore Jerusalem, bring everything back to making it what it should be. And then he appears, and the thing about those post-resurrection appearances for 40 days, they were such a clear confirmation that Jesus was who he said he was. They believed he was the Son of God, the one who speaks the truth. Now, think about that. It’s interesting. In the first reading, we learn something about this whole issue. If you’re going to enter into the kingdom of God, as he invites us to come into it, he’s going to explain what it is. Unless you believe in Jesus being the one whose explanation is really the truth, unless you believe that, you’ll be condemned to a life that is not as full or rich. I love that image in the reading, because when I first read it in the first reading, it’s like, oh, it means if you’re not belonging to a Christian religion or something, you’re going to be condemned. No, it’s not that. It’s simply saying that, if you believe in Jesus and he is the one who reveals the truth of who you are and who God is and what we’re here to do together — if you don’t believe in that, you will be condemned to a life that is less joyous, less full, less wonderful and less effective in terms of why we’re here.

So we see this moment in the disciples’ life, the moment in the church where we have human beings absolutely certain that this is the truth that is coming through this God/man Jesus, and we’re going to listen to it, and we’re going to see what it is and understand it. And he presents it as a promise. “This is what I promise you. God, as he is in me —,” Jesus is saying this. “God, as he is in me — you are going to be able to be like I am, a human being fully human, also filled with divinity.” Now, I’m not saying we become gods as Jesus was God, but that union between divinity and humanity in Jesus was so intense, so complete that we’re not going to have that, but we have something so like it, as effective, in some ways, as it was. This promise of the kingdom is based on an event that was going to happen after Jesus returned to the Father after 40 days of making clear what the kingdom of God is. He’s saying, “You’re going to be filled in a moment. Call it baptism. Call it Pentecost. You’re going to be filled with this incredible gift called God’s presence.” That’s the promise, and that is given to every believer, every human being. So we’re in this world, challenged to be witnesses of the same thing that Jesus came to witness.

Now, what it seems to me that happened in my life and maybe in yours, I transferred all that responsibility over to the church. The church does that work. The church is commissioned by being the teacher, the preacher. So the teaching and preaching is where — you go to church to get it, and then you get it, and then you try to live it. And the shadow of that system also has another kind of side to it that’s a temptation of all religion where, if you’re in a position of great authority, you can start telling people what to do, and so control is always going to be the shadow of the institutional church. But she, the church, is not the sole presenter to the world of the in-dwelling presence of God. It is every single person who understands it and believes it, and we become the witnesses. We become the ones that make the work happen, the laity. That’s one thing interesting about Vatican II that happened, gosh, over 50 years ago, and it said so clearly the church is not the hierarchy. The hierarchy is there to teach, to serve, to awaken in laity the role that the church has, and the laity is going to carry it out. The laity is going to be living this truth in the midst of other people, and that’s how the kingdom is going to happen. That’s what’s going to change the world. And what is going to change? How’s it going to change?

Well, something really dawned on me when I was working on this feast this year. It’s like, okay, we’re here to establish the kingdom of God. It’s joyous. It’s wonderful. It’s filled with wonder and awe and fullness. And then I look at the world, and the world seems to not be so wonderful and not so full of goodness and corrupt and a mess. And so I’m thinking, “Wait a minute. If the kingdom of God is going, as a goal, to create a world that is perfect, then it’s not doing very well.” So if it’s not here to create a better world, what’s it here to create? What’s the kingdom for? What’s it doing? Well, the kingdom, it seems to me, is not about saving the world and making it a perfect place but saving human beings from the illusions that keep them from being who they’re intended to be. The world is not the concern of God, but the concern of God is the humans who live for a period of time in their existence in this world and how they deal with it and how it deals with them. That’s the context of this thing called the kingdom of God. That shifts a lot for me, especially when it talks about what it is when Jesus is describing it to his disciples. What’s it going to be like when you live in the kingdom of God? How will you act? How will you function? Well, it’s kind of scary and kind of weird. It says, “Well, this is what’s going to happen. You’re going to be strong, and you’re going to be able to drive out demons. And you’ll speak new languages, and you can pick up serpents with your hands. And if you drink anything deadly, it’s not going to harm you, and wherever you lay your hands, when you lay your hands on the sick, they will recover.” And so how do we interpret that? If that’s the job that you and I have as a believer, God living in you, you living in him, and he’s going to be able to make these things happen, how do we discover what that really means?

Well, let me start with the idea of driving out demons. If we’re here in the world to drive out demons, why are demons still here? What does it mean to drive out a demon? Does it mean to destroy it, get rid of demons? No. Demons are supposed to be here. It’s pretty clear. If God wanted no demons, there would be no demons. Demons have a role, but they’re dangerous. What’s their danger? Demons pose as non-demons. Demons become, in people’s minds, something that’s logical, practical and beneficial, and they use people and abuse people, and they think this is a good thing. So when you drive out demons, you’re not driving evil out of the world. What you’re doing is exposing demons for what they are. That’s different. Think about it. Being in the world as a witness to this truth that is God living in you, living in me and exercising this power and knowing that demons can destroy people, most especially when they pose as something else. What a great job or what a great occupation it is or privilege it is to be able to expose that, and you have the power to do that.

Y’all can speak new languages. What does that mean? There’s a way to speak to the mind, and it’s logical. And that’s the way most people speak, but there’s another way to speak. It’s speaking to the heart, and it’s speaking a world that is mystical and mysterious. And somehow we lose a sense of that. The world of angels, the world of the dead, the world of all these spiritual creatures floating around, we need to talk about that. We need to be able to express that with people, and so there’s something about being a witness to this incredible gift of a new kingdom that God has established for us, a kingdom that transforms us. Then we’re able to speak about it, talk about it.

And we’ll be able to pick up serpents. Well, serpents are evil, aren’t they? Well, not really. If you look at the image of serpents throughout history, and it’s even true in the Bible, you’ll see that the serpent is often a sign of healing. Remember when the serpent was held up by Moses on a stick to heal everybody of the poison that they had. So if you look at a serpent as the archetypal sign it carries throughout history of human beings, it’s an image of awakening, of new life. You’ll be able to deal with that. You’ll be able to be in the business of awakening people to something that was hidden. It’s another way of talking about the healing, but in the sense when you lay hands — whoever you touch and you lay hands on them and they’ll be healed, that’s a different kind of transfer of power from you, the divine power of you going into someone. One is a direct way of touching them, and the resonance moves from you to them. But the other one is more interesting. It’s more etheric. It’s somehow witnessing a reality by what you’re doing, the work you’re doing, that’s based on something that is way beyond our own human power. So to be able to be one who enlightens others, you are sharing the enlightenment that you’ve already accepted.

I don’t think you can share anything that God is creating you to share unless you are engaged in it, and the witnessing is not talking about it but being somebody that is doing it. When people see you doing the work of healing, awakening people, of speaking to the heart, of exposing demons, you’re the church. You’re everything religion needs to be, wants to be by just being that in the world, and the world is not going to be ever perfect. Sometimes isn’t it a shame? We think, “Oh, if our family is not just the healthiest family, then it’s valueless.” No, the unhealthy part of every family is there for the people in the family so that they can grow and change. The church is imperfect. It’s filled with corruption, all that stuff. Well, maybe it is at times. It’s there, but maybe that’s because dealing with that kind of imperfection in humanity, in all of its positions and places where authority is, to see it as not perfect is a real powerful image of what it means to be in this kingdom. Why is the kingdom based on this thing about healing, exposing demons, and bringing somehow light into darkness? That’s the work that we go through in order to be transformed. The earth, the world is always going to have that kind of evil in it, until the end of time, but what a shame. We worry about our own interior life. We’re not yet whole. We’re not full. No, we’re never going to be whole and full and perfect. We’re always going to be struggling against the inner demon, the inner problems, and if we expect that in ourselves, which we do, we’re going to end up with shame. If we expect it in the church, we’re going to end up with alienation and rejection of something it has within its great powers. We’re going to lose the kingdom, and that’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to witness it, engage in it, be it, and witness it by being someone who sees and understands the beauty of the ordinariness and even the imperfection of it all What a gift. What a promise. What a life.

Father, your power, your ability to transform us into the wholeness that you’ve intended us to have is beyond our imagining, and yet you share it with us. You tell us that we can participate in it, not being the cause of it but by being someone who brings it through our own intention, our own transformation work. We witness it to one another. Bless us in this work. Build in us confidence into being able to accomplish it and the joy that comes from knowing that we are bringing life to those we love, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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6th Sunday of Easter
Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48 | 1 John 4:7-10 | John 15:9-17

Grant, almighty God, that we may celebrate with heartfelt devotion these days of joy, which we keep in honor of the risen Lord and that what we believe in remembrance we may always hold to in what we do through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

Nothing is clearer in the scriptures than the focus on love. Love, what is it? It’s interesting that the Greeks had different words for love: eros, agape, philia. When I listen to those descriptions of love, it doesn’t sound like it describes love as much as it describes what love might be drawn to, what its function is. It’s there to give life to friends, to the world, love of God, and it has also that image of — there’s a love that is eros, which is drawn to physical connection and intimacy and celebration of that. What I’m saying is those don’t give me much of an insight into what love is, but I want to see if I can try to touch into this mystery, because I want you to think of love as the life force — the life force, that thing that we’re here to engage in, to be a part of, to allow it to flow from us to another, to allow another to be filling us with this life force. So it’s this dynamic thing that we call life, and it’s clear that, in this world that God has created, it’s intimately tied into relationships. In fact, it’s the one thing we take with us when we leave this world: relationships. And what are relationships? Those connections that we have with people in our life, and everyone has a certain circle of relationships. Some of them are with family, and some of them are with the people that we choose to be with. Some are created for us by where we work or where we live or who lives next to us. But whatever the context is, there is this sense there is something we are called to do in this world if we are believers in the God who created us, and we want to be who he’s calling us to be, like him. Then we have to enter into, seriously into this work of love, and it’s so much more than just liking something. I love it, because I like it. I enjoy it. No, it’s deeper. It’s more powerful. It’s more mysterious.

So let’s imagine it as the thing that God shares with us that is best described as his presence in the world, because God is love, and we have the option of choosing to be engaged in this gift called love or not. So that’s our responsibility whether we are lovers or not, and the lover we’re called to be is this figure that is engaged in this powerful thing that is called the life force, that’s called God. So it’s — the incarnation is at the heart of our whole understanding of what it means to be a follower of this God. So what we have to understand is that we have been empowered with this love force inside of us, and we call it God, God dwelling in us. And we have been focusing on that in the scriptures these last couple of weeks since Easter, God remaining in us, God living in us, God wanting to marry us, wanting to be a part of us. And that desire that he has to be a part of us is not just for us, but it’s for our role in the world, which is to give this gift that has been given us to others.

We receive it first inside of us, and then once it becomes a part of us, we’re able to give it to someone else. And it’s all wrapped around this mysterious thing as presence, God’s presence in you. So how do you receive God’s presence? Allow him to love you. What does that mean? It means to let go of all those things that we might create inside of us to think of what makes us lovable, what makes us pleasing to God. We should earn it, right? We should work for it. We’re told that indirectly by a lot of religious figures in our life. God doesn’t want to be a part of somebody who isn’t pure, isn’t perfect. What a misconception, as if love is something we earn, love is something we create a space within us by our own energy so that God will come into us. There’s nothing that’s further from the truth. God comes into us in our messiness. He wants to have an impact on us. And what does love do to someone who receives it? It changes them. How does it change them? Well, it changes them in the sense that there is a way in which we are made up of — as our humanity, we have this thing called our ego, our sense of self, and then we have this God that comes along and tells us, “Listen, I created this thing called you. It has a dimension to autonomy.” We find that in the story of Adam and Eve. Human beings like to be on their own. They have a sense of themselves, and then God created a way in which he said, “I want you to allow me to get into you by allowing me to enter into you by loving you.”

So how do we work with that? Well, it takes this, I guess you might call it, a disposition of neediness. When we’re in our egos, when we’re in that autonomous state and we’re doing well, nobody needs to be told that they need some support from something outside of themselves. They’re filled with themselves. That’s one of the great weaknesses of human beings. We tend to be too closely identified with our effectiveness by saying we are the ones that create this person that we present to someone else. We’re responsible for it. We’re responsible. If it’s received well, that means we deserve some kind of honor for that. That egocentric world is the hook that we’ve got to be careful of, because it blocks this one mysterious process, God loving us, entering into us, being the source of life in us that he’s asking us to share with other people. And you know what? When you’re in that role of being a lover because you’ve been loved by God, you are giving something to them that you’re not responsible for. You’re not the cause of it. You can’t take credit for it, and you can’t take blame if it doesn’t work.

Think of it. A life force is given to you and to me to dwell inside of us. How do we allow it in? We allow it in by allowing God to be a source of that which we know we need that we can’t create on our own, and if you have a desire to be effective in the world, which is a gift from God, we need a powerful source to be able to do it. And we tend to go to our ego. We tend to say, “I will make this person in my life a better person. I will decide for them what they need. I will make sure they do it. I will manipulate them.” That’s working out of the ego. You become the work. But the real work is this mysterious thing called love, and it comes into us by our allowing it to come in by simply saying to God, “I’m not enough. I can’t do this work. I need something to affirm me so that I can be more than my ego, more than this controlling factor that I have inside of me that, when I use it on people, they resent it. They feel used or abused.” But love never abuses. It has this deep powerful respect for the work, and what is the work? A lover works with a power that is not their ego but something that God gives them, and they know that, when they use it, it is effective. It changes people.

Look at Peter in the first reading. Look at what he was doing. Well, it doesn’t really talk about it in that reading, but if you look at the life of Peter — most people don’t realize that Peter raised a person from the dead. Peter would heal crippled people, just like Jesus. So you’re seeing in Peter a powerful force that changes people, radically changes them. Dorcas, a woman who was a follower and caretaker for the early church and, with Jesus, she was one of those women that always cared for him in a sense. And one of the things that happened when she died, they called Peter, and Peter uses a similar two-word statement. He says to her, “Get up.” And she rises from the dead. Just like Jesus said to Lazarus, “Come out.” Here’s a human being bringing people back to life. Well, wow, well done, Peter. How did you do that?” That’s why Cornelius falls at his feet and says, “You’re this divine, powerful force.” No, he said, “No, I’m just a human being,” Peter says. “Get up. I’m just a human being. Please don’t act as if I am the source of that tremendous power that is called love that gives life where there is no life.” Allow it to flow through you. That’s Peter’s major statement to those he was preaching to, and those disciples were so unique, because they had failed so miserably in what they thought they should be. They knew they were forgiven. At the same time, they knew they had this power in them that they could affect these radical changes, and they didn’t let their ego get in the way and imagine that they were the source.

So how do you work with love as a gift that comes into you that is not you? And if you use it as if it’s you, it becomes manipulative and demanding of someone else, and they don’t feel love. They feel like they have to perform whatever you want them to do. When real love, when it flows through you, it’s not you. It’s the power that only God knows that a person needs, the healing that they need, and as long as you stay detached from the work of what love does, you’ll be an instrument of it. You’ll be an instrument of it. You’ll do miracles, because you’re not the source of the miracle, but the work is. And what is the work? The work is this mysterious thing that God said, “If you allow me to be in your, loving you just for who you are, and you haven’t done a thing to perform to get it, then you’re in the beginning of the right stands of being able to be a vehicle for this great life force that God puts inside of you that you have to learn how to keep your ego out of it.”

Sometimes I want people to tell me that my work is effective. I love when people stop me and say, “Oh, last week, what you said on the homily really helped.” My ego gets instantly engaged in that and says, “Yeah, well, I’m pretty — I am amazing. I am really good. I’m better than the others that don’t do that.” What? Did I do it? When I sit here and preach to you in this context of a radio station, I have earphones on, and a microphone is picking up my words. If I’m sitting here thinking that I am the source of whatever is coming through to you, that I, Don Fischer, I’m responsible for it, which leads me to two deadly dead-ends — one is, if it’s not working, then there’s something wrong with me, and if it is working, then it’s all about me. How do you get out of that and stay in the reality of this work? This dwelling, in-dwelling power of God called love operates through us and not — it’s not us. That’s so hard for me. I get so caught up in my own performance, and it’s deadly. If I can give this gift away to people without feeling responsible, then I can be a vehicle, I think, of what love really means, because love is the life force that dwells in anyone who receives it, and it can flow out of them so perfectly and so beautifully, as long as they don’t get it confused with their own egocentricity, their need to be great, their need to be wonderful and need feedback.

So that’s why I think Peter could be a person who lifted people from the dead and healed cripples and still walk around and not feel that he was special. “I’m just like you. I’m just a human being.” What a gift. What a gift to be able to do that, and what does it bring? This mysterious thing called joy. Jesus said, “If you will allow me to love you and be in you and love others through you, let me use you as my conduit for my love of another person, you’re going to feel so exalted at your position. You’re going to be filled with joy, and nothing will rob you of this feeling that all is well and all will be well. And that my value is grounded in a work that’s not me means that you don’t have to go and work to make something to bring it to someone to say, “Here, this is what you need.” That’s a lot of work, and that’s a lot of responsibility, and then you’re well-being might depend on whether they like it or not. Think of it as being able to know exactly what someone needs, not because you’ve figured it out but because God knows it, and you’re offering it to people without any sense of responsibility for them to respond to it, because it’s not about their response to God’s power. It’s their allowing it to be there, allowing it. If you allow God’s love to pass through you to another person and that person allows that love there, it’s the life force that does the healing, that strengthens your crippled body, that brings you out of a place of death into life. What a joy to be able to do that when it’s nothing more than receiving a gift and giving it away. Other than working really hard to make it happen and you’re the source of it, and they’d better like it, because if they don’t, your value is at stake. That just ruins everything, and I know what it’s like to be ruined that way, and I don’t want to be anymore.

Father, your gift to us is you, you living in us, remaining in us, and you are love, this mysterious life force that, when it touches the hearts of those who are capable of receiving it, free enough to receive it, resistant to all of those things that keep it away, we become this life source. Thank you. What a gift it is and what a privilege it is to be an instrument of your work, not our work, your work, saving and healing and transforming the world, and we ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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5th Sunday of Easter
Acts 9:26-31 | 1 John 3:18-24 | John 15:1-8

Almighty, everliving God, constantly accomplish the Paschal mystery within us that those you are pleased to make new in holy baptism may, under your protective care, bear much fruit and come to the joys of life eternal. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

Nothing is clearer to me, after I’ve been doing this work of preaching and teaching from this one source, scripture, that the ultimate goal of this entire story of God working with human beings has the motive, has the intention of moving us to a place where we never would have imagined that god is calling us into, and that’s intimacy with him. This whole story of God revealing himself throughout history is more than just God showing us who he is in scripture, but we also learn a great deal about who we are. So imagine that this story that I’ve been working from for 53 years as a priest is so clearly destined for a purpose. It has a focus, and the focus is to bring into reality a relationship with God that he has planned from the very beginning but something that human beings have had a hard time accepting, surrendering to. How do you learn to move from simply somebody who is told what to do by an authority greater than them to an experience of a God who says, “I want to live inside of you. I want to be a part of you”? It’s not easy, but I want to see maybe if I can give you an image of this whole story.

It’s like we have this incredible gift of wisdom in this recorded story of salvation history, started 4,000-plus years ago. And let’s look at it from a kind of objective perspective, like we’ve never, ever heard it before, and here’s a story about this God. And so if you were going to write a review, say, of scripture, what might you say to somebody who has never read it, never heard of it? Well, one way you could do it is to start with focusing on how it began and how it ended. What’s fascinating about the beginning of the story, it’s a story of creation. God, this mystical figure that exists for all time, decided in some mysterious way to create a world. He existed before the world, and so when he created this, we have a story of seven days when he created all the elements of this universe that we live in. At the special moment that is so crucial to the whole story, he decided, “I am also going to create human beings.” So he created the universe, all the animals, all the insects, everything, and then finally the crown of his creation is human beings.

And you might say, “Well, why did he create human beings?” Well, it strikes me, and this is something I’ve played with for a long time, and it’s also rooted in St. Bonaventure, who is one of the great doctors of the church that lived in the 13th century. In his mind — Bonaventure was a mystic and a doctor of the church, but he had this sense that, in God, there was some longing for something more than just the creation that he made. He wanted something more like him, something he could connect with and be in love with and have a relationship with. So he created these beings that were actually part of the whole evolution of creation, and they evolved. Of course you could say, “Isn’t there a story in the scriptures where he just, puff, made them out of just — I don't know — breathing into some mud figure?” Yes, there’s that story, but the story is not so much about how it happened but what happened. And what happened is God created creatures that were different than everything else he created, and the most interesting thing about them that was different is that they had freedom to make choices, to choose. He gave them a gift he didn’t give to the rest of creation, freedom, freedom to choose. So it’s obvious that he’s going to have a different relationship with these creatures called humans than with the rest of creation. So the story begins with that relationship. God created human beings. He found them very, very good, and he created a garden for them. And he revealed to human beings for the first time who he was and who they were.

So imagine that, if you can follow this, let’s say, in the evolution of human beings, growing naturally through a process that I think is more complex and more amazing than just poof, if he made them in seven — just in one day. But no, his plan was everything evolves in a natural way. So human beings are the crown of his creation, and they are constantly in a state of evolution, changing, growing, becoming more conscious, becoming more of who God intended them to be. So imagine — the story of scripture is primarily both theological and anthropological. It’s a story where we learn who God is and how he reveals himself to us, and we also learn who we are and how we are here to develop and grow. So we learn about God; we learn about humans.

So in this first story — it’s very interesting. The first story reveals the nature of both. God is a lover. He created this beautiful world. He loves these human beings. He created a garden for them. It’s an almost idyllic life. It was an idyllic life. They didn’t have to work. They didn’t have to do anything. They could just sit back and enjoy the garden, as if that’s who human beings are. They’re not creatures that want to be simply cared for in a garden like children for the rest of eternity. The story of Adam and Eve reveals not only a God who creates these creatures and wants to please them. It’s also about human beings who have their own desires and their own longings, and the thing that’s so fascinating about this story is it’s often been, I think, somewhat limited in its interpretation by focusing on it as if this action of disobedience on the part of Adam and Eve determines the fact that the human beings that God created are somehow evil. And I don't know that that’s really the heart of the story. It seems to me the heart of the story is human beings reveal in this story who they are, and they aren’t people who want to just lay around and be served. Human beings like to do things, to make things, to be engaged in things. It’s almost like, if you can imagine the story of Adam and Eve being two children of the richest man in the world and they say, “You don’t have to work. You don’t have to do anything. Just enjoy the house. Here’s the gym. Here’s the pool. Invite your friends over.” And they’d say, “I want to do more than that. I want to be more than that. I want to create. I want to do something, make something.” That’s just a part of human nature. But the scary part of human nature is also what’s revealed in this story, and that is they do like to do things on their own. So I want you to imagine that the story of Adam and Eve in the garden is a story about human beings revealing to all of us that we have something in us that I would say is a longing for autonomy. We like to do things on our own. We like to achieve things. “I’ll do it. Let me make it.” It’s like the people in the world like me who want read instructions when they get something, or when they go to the store, they can’t find something. They’re not going to ask somebody. They’re going to find it on their own. There’s something in us that has that longing for autonomy, and there’s something in God that is a longing for unity. And that’s the way the story starts: a God who wants a relationship and human beings who want to prove to themselves, and maybe indirectly to God in their mind, that they can handle things on their own. And that’s the beginning of the relationship, human beings off on their own and God longing for a relationship with them.

Now, what’s interesting is, if you look at the story as it continues from that point on, we see in the story of Adam and Eve that they are wanting autonomy. And then the next story in scripture is about Cain and Abel, and there’s a story about this figure, Cain, the oldest son, wanting to be the best, so autonomy, wanting to be the best. Now, there’s the story of the Tower of Babel where these human beings decided they could do anything they wanted. They could build anything they want, and that hubris in human beings that we can accomplish anything — those three things set the stage for what God has an agenda to wean human beings off of that disposition and to get them into a position where they are ready to surrender and open themselves to an extraordinary mystery. That’s the mystery of the incarnation.

So go back to the story at the beginning. Adam and Eve reveal to us that part of human nature. When God sent them out of the garden, was he punishing them and kicking them out, or was he saying, “Okay, I understand. You want to make it on your own. Tell you what. You go down. It’s going to be hard. You’re going to have this difficulty. It’s going to be not an easy life, but if that’s what you want to do. Let’s go do it. You go do it, and I’ll make some clothes for you in the meantime and send you off.” So it’s hard for me to imagine in that story that God is condemning Adam and Eve for being human. No, he’s giving them an opportunity to experience humanity and to recognize that humanity was never made to be autonomous. It was made to be in union and communion with divinity, and that’s the way the story ends.

The story ends with this incredible revelation finally, after 4,000 years, of who God really is, a God who longs for intimacy with his people. And then we see the story of human beings evolving over this long period of time where they finally see something, and they’re converted to a new understanding, radically different than what was in Adam and Eve at the beginning. It’s in a way summarized in the story of Paul. In Paul’s experience, what he’s done is he’s moved from an image of religion, let’s say, that is based in law, performance, reward, punishment, the temple, and then the fullness of the revelation of who God is, is in Jesus, and Jesus is God fully revealed. And who he is, is the same God that was in the Garden of Eden, and basically he still wants and now can achieve the thing he wanted then. It was union and communion with humans, and so we see then, in Paul, an image of the conversion that is to happen to the human race. Instead of religion being something that’s an obligation to fulfill, it’s an experience to have, and what Paul experienced is the presence of God, in the form of Jesus, coming to him and saying, “Hey, I need you. I want you. I will enable you to be the best preacher in the world, and I don’t have any judgment against you for the fact that you were really trying to destroy my people. I love you as you are. I see gifts in you. They exist, and I want you to allow me to remain in you, and you remain in me, and together we’ll do this incredible work.” And that’s the end of the story.

From isolation and separation from God to complete intimacy and union with God, that’s the goal, and so what we see then in the life of Jesus is this incredible, full unfolding of the plan of God. And then you listen to Jesus talking to his disciples after his resurrection, and he’s saying so clearly the same thing. “Look, from the beginning — from the beginning, God has always had this intention that you would realize you were never made to operate on your own. You were always made to create and to do and to accomplish but never on your own. I have to be in you for you to achieve the goal that I’ve placed in your hearts, but you thought I was placing it there with you in control of it. And it’s not that.” Human beings in their core nature have this big issue of autonomy and wanting to use and abuse and be in control and all those things. Well, yes, in a way we’re in control but not fully, and what we need to recognize is this incredible image that Jesus is working with that we are branches of this incredible core vine that is God. The branch can’t exist without the vine. The vine can exist without the branch, but the vine that is God desires not just to be the vine but to be fruitful in the world. And the fruitfulness is to transform human beings, and so we connected finally to the core of who we are, knowing we have this longing and this deep connection with God that was won for us in some mysterious way by the new Adam and that what we’re experiencing is this new potential union that creates the most effective way in which human beings have been destined to live. And we can ask for anything, and we get it. That’s a weird, wonderful thing to think about, but what it means is, when you have God in you, living in you, your desire is to love, and you believe in love. And you believe in the power of that. So when you’re asking God, “Help me to be a more interesting and powerful of bringing life to the world,” he will do it, and that’s what I count on every time I walk into this station.

God, the plan that you’ve had from the very beginning has unfolded, and it’s important that we grasp the fullness of this revelation that is our gift from you. Bless us with readiness to receive the truth and to surrender to the things that we have to let go of so that we can enter into this incredible indwelling presence with you, you remaining in us, we remain in you. It’s hard for us to do this work without the grace that is our inheritance. So awaken us to the power that is within us that sometimes lays unawakened and awaken it and bring us to the peace and the joy of the kingdom where we know we are cared for and have the capacity to give life and care for each other. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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4th Sunday of Easter
Acts 4:8-12 | 1 John 3:1-2 | John 10:11-18

Almighty, everliving God, lead us to share in the joys of heaven so that the humble flock may reach where the brave shepherd has gone before, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

This Sunday focuses on the ministry that we all participate in, the ministry of caring for one another, shepherding one another, and one of the things that strikes me about this set of readings is in a way, the first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, describes what was happening to the people who were believers, that had never happened before, because of this mysterious thing called redemption, God coming into the world and revealing something that was beyond our imagining. He was revealing the fact that we, we, all of us, are called to be like Christ, to be other Christs. It means our destiny is to be doing the same work that Jesus came into the world to do, and there are two things that Jesus did so powerfully and so clearly.

One of the things he was doing was revealing the heart of who God is. The Old Testament, as we know, is a long history of God slowing revealing himself to be the God who is. He begins with an image of the gods that are, revengeful, angry, demanding, and slowly he becomes more and more into the God who he is, slowly revealing to us a God that’s beyond our imagining, a God who is there because of his desire to be there for us. And the being for us is to engage us in the same work that he has come into the world to accomplish, and the role of God in the world is to save, to save us, bring salvation. And the shocking thing in the way it unfolds is that not only is he revealing to us his role in this incredible work of drawing us, not into a place of shame or fear or anger, but a place of peace, knowing that we’re being saved, we’re being lifted up, we’re being given everything we need in order to grow into who we are intended to be. That’s a powerful way of imagining salvation. Salvation is entering into the life that God has called you to live with the energy and with the strength that he has given to you to accomplish it. What are we being saved from? All those difficult tasks of trying to be worthy of a God who is not in need of our performing for him so that we are then worthy of his love. No, he reveals himself as the lover, the one who created us with a destiny, and all he longs for us to do is to enable him to reveal to us the fullness of who we are, and we are other Christs. We are those that are called into the world, like Christ was called into the world, to heal the world because of the divinity that Christ was participating in. He was also fully human, and so he’s inviting us to move from simply being solely human to also adding divinity into our essence.

We are children, as the second reading says, of God, children of the Father. Why would it be important to be told that? In the Old Testament, you might say that the gods of the Old Testament, particularly the last thing that they were saying. Is that, “You are equal to me, or you are a part of me, or you will be like me”? No, no. They were always demanding something from them so that the god of the — the old, pagan gods could dole out some kind of favor. No, we have this amazing new image of divinity, and divinity is not something that is lording something over us, demanding something from us but a divinity that enters into us and empowers us. And the fact that we are children of God means that, as we evolve, as we develop, we become more like God, like the Christ. To be like God does not mean in our humanity we shed humanity and become divine. No, it means we have this incredibly complex and wonderful communion of two dimensions that have always been, in God’s plan, to be united, and that is divinity and humanity in one person. That’s what it means to be a child of God, to have this dignity in us that we are participants in this mysterious thing called incarnation, and when it’s in us, we do the most extraordinary things. And the extraordinary things we do are symbols of what it means to be saved.

So you look at this first reading when the disciples are being hauled into the authority figures of the temple and saying, “What are you doing? You can’t do this sort of stuff. Stop it.” And they’re looking at them and saying, “We’re sorry. What we’re doing is simply what we’ve been called to do.” If you don’t understand salvation, salvation is the promise in God for us that we will become who he intends us to be. So salvation has something to do with being holy ourselves, whole, healthy. Notice always the miracles of Jesus were healing people of blindness and deafness and being mute and not being able to walk and not being able to do something with their hands, not be able to make something. It’s so clear to me that this dynamic force in the world, divinity in us, is there because we’re called to be instruments of giving life, wholeness to another.

So then we get to the image that Jesus loves about his role as one who is mirroring who the Father truly is. Instead of having a revengeful master God, we have a servant God, but this servant God then is described in a way that people of the time would understand, because they knew crops. They knew how to raise animals. So they had this image easily that makes sense, that there are people who give their life, their time, their energy to caring for a flock of sheep, and there’s a wonderful relationship in that whole dynamic of sheep and shepherd where the sheep know, somehow, who their shepherd is, that intuition in an animal who knows who their master is. It’s a beautiful image of the potential in a human being to intuitively know who is the one we turn to for true care, for true protection, and so we have in this image of the Good Shepherd a beautiful image of the ministry that we are called to have as people empowered by grace, by presence of God.

So let’s look at that a little more in depth, because there’s something in this way that Jesus describes a Good Shepherd that we need to understand is a description of how we are to take on this role as we evolve and become more like the God who is revealed in Jesus. Jesus is the perfect representative of who God is. We are told that our destiny is to be like that God, to be like him, not by being him but by participating in him, by him being in us. And how do you, as a human being, deal with divinity inside of you without getting caught up and thinking, “I am that source that is in me”? One direction would be, I guess, egocentric and self-centered, and the other would be, I'm not worthy. What am I? I can’t do anything. I’m just a lowly human being with a zillion problems and all kinds of failures and sins. So there’s no hope for me to be able to be used by God.” That tension between divinity and humanity is something that, I believe, Jesus is trying to describe in this very well-known passage of the Good Shepherd, because he’s describing your work, my work as we participate in the role that God has given to us as partners with him in this incredibly fascinating story of bringing the world to its full potential. God has planned for us to be his partners in this work, and we have extraordinary dignity in that role, but at the same time, we have another role in that that is describe in the heart of the Good Shepherd. That is the idea that he will lay down his life for the sheep. What does that mean? It means, if it comes to someone destroying my sheep or destroying me, I would let them destroy me before I ever let them destroy my sheep. Now, that’s — how would you say? That would be a very, very clear understanding that, in a role that God has as our God, our Father helping us grow into who we are intended to be, like him, he is willing to do anything for this to make it happen.

So what is it that he did that made it happen? Well, he became incarnate and laid down his life and allowed himself to be destroyed in the eyes of the world and suffered death, and then he rose up again. He took his life. His life came back to him. So there’s something in that image that is connected to what I think is the heart of this set of readings, is how do we understand being engaged in this mysterious union of humanity and divinity? How do we understand the role of those two things? Because in one sense, we know that there is this divine power in us that gives us an enormous, enormous dignity and value and worth. It needs to be honored. There’s something about human nature that is sacred and beautiful, and we’re told that we should honor and respect everyone for who they are. They have dignity. They have value. They have worth. At the same time that we’re told that we have all this dignity and worth, we’re told that there’s something else about us that’s so important for us to develop and understand is the capacity we have to put all of that aside and not to claim any part of that dignity and value we have and to become absolutely in service to something bigger than ourselves in that moment but with a kind of diminishing of our value in the eyes of ourselves and others. To be the fool, to be the one who is seen as without value or dignity in all the ways of the world as we enter into another world, the world of the spirit, is so radically different than the world as we know that God says is not part of us. It’s that egocentric, power-centered world.

So how do you understand this mysterious thing that Jesus is trying to say, that if you are going to enter into the world that he’s inviting you into, you’ll be like him? What he has as his greatest capacity is the ability to lay down his life and also to pick it up again, to lay it down and pick it up again. How does he lay down his life? When he was on the cross, he gave up all of his power, in the sense of his divinity and even said out loud, “If I wanted to, I could call upon all these angels, and I would be the most powerful person in this situation. I would have everybody terrified. I could have them destroyed. I could call upon that power if I wanted to, that life that I am that’s divine, but I lay it down. I set it aside. Instead of that, I’m seen in the eyes of the world as a victim, as valueless, as a nobody.” And yet in that moment of surrender of his need to be exalted or honored, he takes that role of a servant, of a shepherd, and he is so powerful in terms of changing the world. And what changes the world? Hearts that understand this mystery of what love really is. To be a loving individual in the world, a life-giving individual in the world is to be held in high esteem in terms of the way we understand truth. Nothing is more valuable in the world than a loving, giving, serving human being that cares more about others than themselves. That’s the goal, and yet the world would want us to be in this position of authority and power over things. And the power that God wants us to see, that is most essential, is that power that a human being has to put themselves second and to put somebody else first. That’s real power. That’s the power of divinity in humanity. What a gift, to be in a position of wanting to serve someone else no matter what the cost is to us, because all we care about, with every ounce of energy and desire inside of us, is to give life to someone else. And when you do that and you understand you’ve done that, you’ve emptied yourself. You’ve laid down your life, but when you realize what you’ve done, you’re lifted up again, and you are awesome. What a mystery. What a beautiful image to work on when we work on becoming who God’s called us to be.

Father, your plan to live within us and to empower us to be like you and to heal and to bring life, at the same time to embrace our humanity, our weaknesses, our sinfulness, this is a gift that can only be understood by your wisdom, not our understanding, not our minds. So bless us with the wisdom of understanding our dignity, our worth, our role and how it is that you call us, through this work of service, to be served and to be filled and to be all that you intend us to be. So bless us with this wisdom, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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3rd Sunday of Easter
Acts 3:13-15, 17-19 | 1 John 2:1-5a | Luke 24:35-48

May your people exalt forever, oh God, in renewed youthfulness of spirit so that rejoicing now in the restored glory of our adoption we may look forward in confident hope to the rejoicing of the day of resurrection. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

We continue to reflect upon the experience of the early church, the experience that must have been so incredulous, where this figure, this wisdom teacher that they spent time with, who surrendered himself to evil, was destroyed seemingly by that evil, his life taken away, comes back and is so full of life and full of wisdom and longing to open people’s eyes to what they had not seen before. And so we see story after story in this time in the church year, where we see this Christ coming back, and I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have a teacher that you saw seemingly destroyed by evil, and you thought the whole thing was now over, and you were distraught and frightened and confused, and all of a sudden, there he is, looking at you, talking to you. And what is it that he’s there for? Why did Jesus rise from the dead? Well, multiple reasons perhaps, to prove that he was who he says he was, but the thing that’s more interesting to me is what happened to the people that were living at that time when they encountered a risen Christ, and what was his response to them, at least the disciples in particular?

They had failed him, and they were filled with fear and shame and confusion. And all he does is he comes back, and he said, “Look, I understand. I understand your condition. I understand that you made this decision. You were frightened, and you fled. And I understand, because you were caught in confusion and sin and ignorance, but I want you to know who I am. I want you to believe in everything that has been said about me. And what’s so interesting to me about these post-resurrection experiences as we have in these stories of today’s liturgy of the word, it’s like he comes, and he said, “Look, I know what you did. I know your weaknesses, and you acted out of ignorance when you weren’t there for me. And I want you to know me, and the thing about me is, if you could just understand that everything that happened to me,” Jesus is saying to his disciples, “It was all planned that way. There was nothing about this that was a mistake.” And he keeps going back to them, as he did in the scriptures today, and he said, “Go look and listen again to everything that was spoken about me in the Old Testament. It’s all there. You can see exactly that I was living out the way God intended me to live. It was intended that I be seemingly, in the eyes of the world, cut short — my life would be cut short because of sin, because of evil, like evil destroyed me. No, no. Evil has no power over me. What I’m trying to do for you is expose evil for what it is. I want you to see how this world that God has created for you really works.”

And what Jesus is saying to people over and over again, and the church continues to say it to us today, and every religious person, every spiritual person hopefully is saying something like this to us, the challenge of being a believer in God is to believe in the world that he created, the world as it is. And sin is that weakness we all have to create a world of our own, the world that we want to be there, the world that we think is there, the world that we were taught is there, and if it’s not the world that is, we’re somehow at an enormous disadvantage. And so I want you to just imagine with me that a spiritual person, a person who believes in God, who is open therefore to the truth is open primarily to the way the world works. A spiritual human being is the most realistic person in the room. They’re the ones that embrace the world as it is and surrender to it, and the thing that’s so fascinating about the world that is, is the ingredient called sin, evil. Why is it there?

I don't know if you’re like me, but you sometimes pick up the paper, and now you listen to the news, and it seems like one thing after another, you’re hearing story after story about people who are either abusing each other, murdering each other, institutions that are found over and over again completely filled with corruption. And we constantly see evil and sin and destruction all around us. I don't know if you get the feeling sometimes. You’re saying, “Well, things are just getting worse.” Things are getting worse? What if this is the way the world is? What if a world of sin and goodness is the world God created, and what if we stop trying to destroy evil? Because the one thing you can say about evil is it has an intention. Its intention is primarily to separate things, to isolate things, to break them up into parts and to call some good and to call some evil and to set up this binary world and to somehow convince us that there’s a way to deal with everything in the world that we don’t want to be there, and that is to do exactly what evil does, to try to destroy it. Evil seeks destruction. Grace seeks healing.

So the unconscious thing that we get caught up in is that we end up trying to destroy evil by using evil, and that’s the great illusion. That’s the great lie that we get caught up in, and religion sometimes has a way of increasing that by giving us this false notion that the world that God wants us to have, the world that he created for us is a world of union, communion, perfection. If you look at the world at times and say, “This is so frustrating. It’s still so corrupt,” well, that’s the nature of the world. It will always be corrupt. And why would God allow corruption unless it had a purpose, a reason for being here? I know this might sound strange, but what I’m trying to say to you is evil is a part of the way the world is, and unless you embrace it and understand it and refuse to get caught up in its ways, you can’t really live and grow in this world as God intended you to grow and live. We’re here not to stop sinning so much as to stop being caught in lies and illusions. We’re here to grow, to evolve into full, conscious human beings aware of reality, the way God created the world to be, and the world that God created will always have — while we’re in this state of human beings living on this planet, there will always be evil. And to try to destroy it is to get caught up in the very thing that it wants us to get caught up in.

Think about it. When you listen to a story, the story about somebody doing something wrong, what’s your reaction? When you do something wrong? What’s your reaction? Forgiveness is what God teaches us to have, but what’s the opposite of that? Judgment, condemnation, a desire to punish, but even more deadly, to destroy. Even if you’re looking at the world today and reading the paper and listening to the news and saying, “I want this all to stop. I want to destroy all these people that are destroying other people. I want to destroy all those elements out there that are negative. Let’s get rid of them.” Think of the illusion that people get caught up in when they try to create a loving, Christian community separate from the evil of the world. You end up with a cult. Now, evil has got to be embraced for what it is for it has a purpose, and what is that purpose? The purpose is it’s part of the way in which God is inviting us to go through a process in this world where we are becoming more and more conscious of what is, what is true, what is real.

Can you imagine growing in your wisdom as to what is right and wrong without making mistakes? Can you imagine what it’s like to simply be told what you’re supposed to do and then blindly say, “Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll do exactly what you tell me to do.” That’s not what God wants. He doesn’t want us to be people who are blindly obedient to a higher power. He doesn’t want us to follow him because he tells us to follow him. He wants us to discovery why, what he’s calling us into, the life that he wants us to live. He wants us to know why it is so important and why we should be motivated to do it. It’s not because we’re told to. It’s because something inside of us knows. We know what it’s like to be the person that God created us to be. It’s called wholeness, holiness, consciousness. Can you become fully aware and conscious of what evil is and what your choices are unless you experience them? And could it be that the reason evil is in the world is because it’s there so that we can experience what it is that it really does, what it really does to us, our human nature? It flies in the face of everything that we are.

I sometimes hate myself for being the person that I am when I see myself not being who I think I should be. Now think about that. I hate myself for being who I think I am. God knows who I am. He knows my goodness. He created it. So when I hate that which he creates, I’m caught in what? Evil. I’m doing the very thing that evil longs to do. It longs to enter into us and to make us into people that are like evil, and again, evil separates, isolates, wants to destroy. You can’t destroy evil using the tactics of evil. You can only destroy evil by taking away its power, and what is its power? Its desire to destroy, to punish. That’s why, from the beginning, it’s so clear what Jesus came into the world to do is to radically change our response to evil. So he does it in a way that seems absolutely incredulous to everyone watching it. He gives in and allows evil to do all of its negative stuff to him, to isolate him, just separate him, to make him into something evil, to incite people to want to destroy goodness. And then when he’s in the middle of all that, he just drops this explosive bomb, which is forgiveness. He said, “Look, I’m not going to be what you are to me in this moment, this destructive force. I will not turn around and seek to destroy you. I will allow you to be who you are, because I believe that, if you are a human being and you can experience the impact, if you can experience consciously what sin actually is, what it feels like to want to destroy, to want to kill, to want to remove, isolate someone, if you experience that and you feel it in your gut that it’s somehow wrong, then you’ve grown up. Then you’ve become more conscious.” It’s essential that you taste evil in order to get past it, because the taste is bitter. It’s awful, but somehow we live in a mild form of it, my prejudice, my way of denying people rights and — All the stuff we do that is negative toward ourselves and others is somehow participating in evil, yet we do it with the sense that this is what God calls us to. We need to hate sinners and get rid of them, hate sin and get rid of it. I guess we can say, “Well, Jesus said don’t hate the sinner, but he does say hate the sin.” And you’ve got to be careful of that, because do you hate the fact that we’re given a world in which our experiences are the best teachers? Are we supposed to hate the fact that the world is imperfect? Are we supposed to deal with it as an imperfect world that is trying to awaken us to something that’s so wonderfully freeing and mysterious, surrendering to evil, not buying into it, not becoming it but becoming something radically different? Evil’s role is always to be hidden and to pose as something else, but to taste it, to know it, to experience it through sin is sometimes the best teacher, because to be told what to do is one thing. To know in your heart what is the only real thing you really want to do, that’s transformation. That’s holiness. That’s the goal of spirituality.

Father, you tell us that we need to know you in Jesus. We need to pay attention to all that he is and all that he longs to open our minds to and give us the freedom to let go of misconceptions, lies, illusions and enter into the world of truth. The truth is that you have come in the world to save us all from the kind of world that we tend to create that is never going to fulfill our longings and our desires. Make us open to your wisdom, your truth, your life, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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2nd Sunday of Easter
Acts 4:32-35 | 1 John 5:1-6 | John 20:19-31

God of everlasting mercy, who in the very recurrence of the Paschal feast kindle the faith of the people you have made your own, increase, we pray, the grace you have bestowed that all may grasp and rightly understand in what fount they have been washed, by whose spirit they have been reborn, by whose blood they have been redeemed. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

It’s fascinating to me that, after the great feast of Easter, the celebration of a new way of understanding God and understanding who we are and why we’re here, focuses on this one key element that Christ won for us and changed the relationship we have with him. When he died for our sins, he offered us redemption, the blood that removes completely the separation that sin was causing always with our relationship with God.

So this shift from the Old Testament to New Testament is so dramatic and so powerful that it’s often missed, and the reason it’s so different is because human beings became different from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Let’s just say the Old Testament lasted for close to — over 2,000 years of God working with people, trying to get them to understand who he is and what he wants from them, and he was desperate to help them realize that they were caught in a way of life that was so self-centered and that they were often at-odds with their brothers and sisters, and when they were, they were filled with anger and resentment and destructive behavior. It was their nature, lower nature. It’s all focused on self. You harm me; I’ll harm you even worse. You do something negative to me; I will make sure you’re punished, because you have damaged me. You have hurt me. The evolution of human beings is a constant, slow movement from a self-centered life to an other-centered life, and when we’re focused on self, the one thing that can be used against us or with us is the idea that, if you don’t do what you are asked to do, you will be punished. So if you don’t want to see yourself in pain, then you’d better pay attention to what I’m telling you. So the whole Old Testament is based on the fear of punishment, which is all focused on self. I don’t want to be punished. I don’t want to be in pain. I don’t want to go to hell, so all right, I’ll do what you say. But I really don’t like doing what you say, because I don’t want to do it. I want to do what serves me. And what God is slowly revealing to human beings is, “Look, the reason I created you, the reason you’re here is I want you to connect with one another and allow me to be the source of a life flow that comes from one person to another. If you allow me to dwell inside of you,” which is the promise of the New Testament, “I will come and dwell in your hearts. If you let me in there, I will do the most extraordinary things through you. I can reach other people. You can join me in serving people. No longer focus on being served yourself. There really isn’t much joy in being self-serving, but what you’re made for, what excites you, what gives you joy is to be there for another person. And you are slowly, slowly evolving into that kind of a person that I intended you to be, and so you’re now, in the New Testament, you are ready.” Two thousand years ago, you were ready to hear something that was shocking, and that is that God no longer feels separated from us, nor should we feel separated from God when we sin.

Listen to the way Jesus first appears to his disciples after they had failed so miserably in being there with him and for him, except for John. They were scared. They were locked in a room out of fear. So when we sin, we’re afraid. We’re afraid of God’s punishment, afraid of disappointing God, afraid of his anger. Sin always separates us. That’s the nature of sin. So when we sin and God looks at us as a sinner, then we have the sense from the Old Testament that he is now angry, and he will punish us, and we no longer have his favor. And so in the New Testament, Jesus does this mysterious thing called redemption, and in that moment, what he did is he took away any sense of anybody who feels that, “I owe God something, because I sinned. I must make up for it. I must repair the relationship.” He’s saying, “No, it’s been repaired. Your sins no longer separate me from you. I am there for you.” That’s what it means he forgives sin, all sin, and yet many people hear that, and they say, “Well, it can’t be true, because if he forgives all sins, then sin doesn’t matter. If he’s not going to send you to hell because you do something wrong, why do something right?” Taking away the fear of God and replacing it with love is the core of this whole Judeo-Christian tradition. Until we understand how loved we are by God, we cannot become who we’re called to be, and if facing our sinfulness, looking at the times in which we failed to be who we’re called to be, if that is the task of being a more mature, more conscious human being, then we’re going to always be confronting our sinfulness. Sins are there for a purpose, for helping us grow, and when we see sin for what it is and we see the emptiness that it creates and the separation and isolation that it creates, we want to turn away from it, because that’s not who we are, and that’s not what we want.

And so it’s essential that we understand that, during this period of time that we’re struggling with our self-centeredness and longing to be more service-oriented, we have to feel that we are loved. Love is the power of the New Testament, and if you’re told that nothing that you do will ever separate you from the love of God, you’re understanding something that is very hard for the mind to grasp, because the mind works in justice. And justice says, “If you do something wrong, you’re going to pay for it.” Well, don’t worry. You will pay for it. Sin always creates separation and isolation from yourself. It creates shame, a sense there’s something wrong with me, a sense of uncomfortableness with who we are. Sin separates us from self, and then the sins that we commit against another or that are committed against us by another separate us from them, and we get caught up in things like anger and revenge and paying them back.

All of that has to be destroyed, removed, and how is it done? First of all, it seems that, if we’re ever going to enter into the place where God intends us to be, the person that God has always had in mind that we will become, we have to believe in that promise that God is there to help us grow into who we ultimately truly are, leaving lies and half-truths behind and living in truth. How do you believe that God will do that for you, since it’s a gift that he and only he can give to you, if he hates you and if he’s angry at you? The most devastating thing, a misunderstanding that we have of our relationship with God, is that sins separate us from him. And that was needed in the Old Testament, but now it isn’t. We need to believe that he loves us, because he has the sense that, within each one of us, there is this kernel, this beautiful thing called our essence, and if it’s loved, if you believe that it’s there, if you can be touching that, that’s — the image of doubting Thomas in this gospel is so interesting, because these men are locked in a room because of fear that they’ve failed and that God is angry with them, and he comes, and he offers them nothing but peace. And he said, “I want you to understand. Your actions did not separate me from you. I’m there for you in your brokenness.” Can you feel that? Can you touch it? Isn’t it interesting that the thing that Thomas had to touch were the wounds? The wounds are the image of God shedding blood for us. I don’t have any way of explaining how it all works, how God’s act of self-sacrificing his Son — how did that work? Don’t get caught in that. Just get caught in the impact of it. The impact is nothing can separate us from God’s attention, his desire that we grow, his desire that we learn, that he will show us things, make us more conscious of the choices that we make and give us a better insight into what those choices produce. I guarantee you, if your choices are based in a life or in a half-truth, they will never produce what you hope they will produce for you, and you’re going to end up empty. And so he said, “If you can believe in me, my love for you in that state, then you have a chance to be connected to me while you’re in this world sinning, causing pain and separation from self and others. I’m in there with you. I’m fighting this fight with you. I’m empowering you to see, most especially, the impact you’re having on people and its result.”

Isn’t it funny how we would — we want so much for the peace of the kingdom, and we’re using all kinds of means to find that fullness when the truth is right here, kind of in our hearts. Believe that God can dwell inside of you and affirm you every second of every day and give you insight into who you are and why you’re here. And if you know that the reason you’re here is to offer a connection with other human beings through longing for them to not be caught in their sin and to not be caught in the isolation it’s creating — think about that. God has a plan where he can live inside of you, and if you see the plan and see the value of it, you will resonate the same thing that he’s resonating to you. The same love that you feel from God in your brokenness, you can give that to someone else, and then they become more conscious of this God event in the world that is the healing power of love. We think so much about our actions, how we treat each other. Yeah, that’s important, and sins can be a way of seeing that negativity that we’re laying on self and others. But it’s more subtle than that. The core reason that we’re here is to be an instrument of giving a power to other human beings just as God has given it to all of us who open our hearts to it. We can share that to give it to another person. That’s what you’re called to be, instruments of this kind of grace, and that would mean that you are a person filled with forgiveness, with mercy. Mercy is another word for favor. Favor is a kind of love that’s given to people that isn’t merited. Do you know how good that feels, when you can have that sense inside of you of self-acceptance in your brokenness and want another person to feel the same kind of self-acceptance for the brokenness that is just our destiny? That brokenness is the essential tool that we use to grow up and to change and to evolve.

If sin — if the goal of the church, if the goal of religion is to get rid of sin, well then, baby, it has failed miserably. In fact, the more conscious one becomes of their sins, the more aware they are of them, and that’s the process of growing in the direction that brings you freedom from sin, to see it for what it is. So if you’re always trying to avoid it, if you never want to think of yourself as sinning, what you’re going to do is repress so many emotions and feelings that come up that are like shame and guilt and fear and anger and revenge. We just repress them. “I’m not supposed to have those feelings.” No, those feelings reveal to you who you are in your conscious state, and if you’re filled with those feelings, you know that there’s something missing, something that you’re needing and longing for. And it comes first from your understanding of the way God looks at you as a sinner, and then you can look at yourself that way and look at another person that way. And then sin no longer has any power. It will not separate you. It will not create enmity between you.

Look at the opening reading, from the Acts one. What was the impact on the community of people who understood who Jesus is and what he was offering? All of a sudden, they all are of one mind and one heart, and they don’t see anything that one of them has as a possession of theirs, but it belongs to everyone. That is the most amazing consciousness state that you could be in. We’re all in this together. We all have something we can offer to each other. Nobody owns holiness. Nobody is a slave to sin. All of it we share, and when we share in the work, in the very essence of what it means to be alive and to be full of this gift called love and we feel it flowing all over the place between everybody, there’s no jealousy, no envy, no competition. That’s the kingdom. The world runs on fear, shame, anger, and the kingdom runs on forgiveness, love, patience, unity, communion. It’s a choice. We have a choice to imagine the world as it is or to imagine it as something it’s not, and the world you imagine is the world you live in.

Father, your Son revealed fully who you are. You are the Son incarnate. He was God and made man, and we see, in this new image of who you are, the lover, the servant, you always have intended yourself to be seen as. For that we give you thanks and praise, but open our hearts to it. We resist it. We’re more used to a system of fear and punishment. Instead you’re inviting us into the mystical world of your life living in us, flowing between us and the people around us, and it’s a world that we’re not familiar with, a world that seems strange to us at first. So please bless us with patience, openness, and surrendering to the truth that you reveal in your very person. Bless us with mercy, and we ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Easter
Acts 10:34a, 37-43 | Colossians 3:1-4 | John 20:1-9

Oh God, who on this day, through your Only Begotten Son, have conquered death and unlocked for us the path to eternity, grant, we pray, that we who keep the solemnity of the Lord’s resurrection may, through the renewal brought by your Spirit, rise up in the light of life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

The way the church celebrates this great feast of Easter is more than just Easter Sunday morning. After Vatican Council, we renewed so many of the traditions that had somehow gotten lost over centuries, and one of the things that we recovered after Vatican II was the fullness of the celebration of Easter, where we focused primarily on the three days, not just Easter Sunday but Thursday night, when Christ instituted the Eucharist and revealed the heart of his ministry to his disciples and then his death on Friday and then his resurrection on Sunday. It’s one story. It’s a beautiful full revelation of what we believe in as Christians, as believers of this mysterious creature that came into the world, this God/man who is just like us but also God and that he did this thing for us out of his humanity. It just revealed his divinity that was hidden inside of him.

And I love that phrase from the opening prayer when it said that Easter is this celebration that brings us into the light of life, and to me, light of life sounds so much like entering into enlightenment, full consciousness. So my intention then in this homily this morning, on Easter, is to give you a perspective on who this figure is and what he was really leaving us with and what he’s inviting us into now, a life in him, he in us, we in him, this oneness, this commingling of two spirits, divinity, humanity. Jesus lived that life, and he is the example of how we’re to live the same kind of life, even though we’re not — in terms of intensity, we’re not divine, but we are infused with the light, the enlightenment of what it means to be in touch with the divine. We can use all kinds of images for what the divine is, but the one I love the most is when we think of divinity and who God is, he’s also, as John says in his opening gospel, that this Jesus that came into the world is the incarnation of truth, reality.

I’ve spent so much of my life looking and struggling for perfection, no mistakes, no sins. And that may not be necessarily a bad goal, but it’s incomplete when you realize that we’re not here to stop sinning as much as we are to be shown by God, by divinity inside of us the illusion that sins carry and the lack of their ability to give us what they promise. And it’s like the gift of divinity is to expose all that isn’t real, isn’t true. And isn’t it interesting? When you look at the world today, it seems like almost every institution, whether it’s politics or medicine or the church or religion, whatever, it’s all — we’re aware so much of what is in those institutions and those kind of ministries that is impure, that is not what it should be. And that can be a depressing time, in one sense, but in truth, it’s the way people enter into the light of life to see the darkness and to name it and to not be afraid of it and to not be ashamed of how we participated in it, because the greatest goal of this God/man Jesus was to come into the world to convince us of a couple of things that are very simple and very direct. One is that God is living with us and guiding us. He’s our mentor, our teacher, our friend, our advocate, and also he forgives us of everything we’ve ever done.

So I want to take you back then to Thursday night, because I believe that night is so essential to understand the person of Jesus. He’s with his disciples. He wants to spend the last meal with them, and during that meal, he did two things that seemed completely confusing to his disciples, which means they hadn’t grown enough in consciousness and awareness of who Jesus is. If you see Jesus, as we do now, and we know who he is, the things that he did make total sense. But to them, it must have been strange, because when they went through the Passover celebration that was a part of their tradition and Jesus did the ritual, as it was always done, and there was a cup of blessing, and there was bread that was always there, and these were blessed. But Jesus said the most bizarre thing, in a way, to them. He said, “This blood — this wine, it’s not just wine. It’s not just blessed wine. I want you to realize this is my blood — my blood. This is part of me. It’s the life force in me, and what it does for you, if you let it course through your veins, if you let this life-giving red liquid that brings oxygen and cleans all our cells constantly, 24/7, if you let it into you, my blood, it is going to do something for you. And the blood of the chalice is for forgiveness.” So Jesus makes a profound statement by asking them to drink of the cup, when he said, “If you don’t drink this cup, you have nothing, none of my inheritance. You have to believe you’re forgiven. You have to believe that.” And I don’t know why forgiveness is a very difficult thing for us. Because of our minds and the way our brains work, we can understand justice. It makes sense. You do a good thing; you get rewarded. You do a bad thing; you get punished. That’s clear, but it’s only the heart that can understand what it means — this God/man wants us to believe that, no matter what we do, no matter how far we drift from him and from the truth and from reality, no matter how much damage we do, it never, ever changes the intention in his heart that he wants to be there for us and lift us into the light of life. That’s hard for us to understand, but that’s what Jesus was establishing that night. And then the bread, the bread is his body, he said. Take it and eat of it, and what he’s saying is that this bread, which is a nurturing element in our life — it’s food, and it’s for our strength. So it’s so interesting. He’s saying, “If you’ll eat this break and drink this cup in memory of me, you will have the inheritance I promise you.” And that has become the ritual of so many Christian churches and especially Catholicism and major sacramental religions. Without that, I can’t imagine us being who we are without the Eucharist daily, every Sunday. It’s the most amazing promise, and that’s what Jesus was establishing that night. “I want you to know something about me. I’m going to leave you.” And he knew he was going to die, and he knew they’d be scattered. He knew they would doubt him, and so he had to say these things, and even though they didn’t comprehend it, they went back, and they did comprehend it. And when they were infused with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, they saw the light. They saw the truth. They saw who he is. They saw what he’s doing for them. They saw what they have to do for others. It was a powerful night, that night that he spent having dinner with his disciples.

But then there was the other thing, the most interesting one. It’s funny that John’s gospel, which is the most spiritual, I think, basically when he recalls that dinner, he never mentions the Eucharist, but he does mention the next thing, the strange thing, that after Jesus dined with his disciples, he stood up, took off his cloak and put a towel around him and said, “I want to wash your feet.” That seemed very strange to all of them, because that’s the role of a servant, and probably the least attractive for the servants themselves, which job they were going to get when someone held the banquet, was the guy who had to — the couple of men who had to sit at the doorway and wash dirty feet that had come in. If it was a rainy night, they were muddy feet. Otherwise it was dusty feet, but they had to clean the feet, because people reclined at table, and they didn’t wear shoes and socks obviously. So it was the kind of thing like washing your hands before you sit down if you’d been working in the fields or something. Why would he do that? Why would he say, “I want you to let me wash your feet”? It becomes clear in the conversation because — particularly between Peter and Jesus, because Peter just said, “Absolutely not. You’re not going to wash my feet.” And the interesting thing about that is Jesus’ response. He said, “Look, unless you let me wash your feet, you will have no inheritance from me. You won’t receive what I’m leaving you as a legacy, as a gift when I die.” It’s like the person who leaves their wealth to their firstborn son. Well, he’s leaving the thing that made him so powerful, so effective, so life-giving. He’s going to give that to human beings if they allow him to do what — to be a servant to them. What? A servant? You notice, when Jesus is talking to Peter, he said, “Yes, I’m your master. You call me a master. You call me a teacher. Yeah, I am all that. You’re right, but I’m also a servant. And you, who are attached to me and who are looking forward to the kingdom,” and looking forward to a political kingdom, as they did, thinking they were going to be in positions of authority and power in the world because they followed the Messiah, and they would be the ones in the temple, running the whole operation — they thought all that. And what he’s saying to them is, “That’s not it. You’re not being empowered with my life and my blood and my body inside of you, my nourishment to be a master. Here’s the secret: you have to understand that you are empowered for one reason only, and that’s the minister to the needs and the wants and the desires of other people, not any of their whims but what they really need, what their heart longs for, what their souls are meant to be. You need to help them be that. You’re not their master, but you’re their servant.” And Jesus himself said to Peter, “Look, you call me master and teacher. That’s right, but I want you to be a servant.”

But the interesting thing about that image to me is that, when you look at what Jesus was doing and saying to Peter, it’s almost like he’s saying, “Look, I know you have an ego,” like everyone has an ego. “You’re looking forward to being a master over others, and that’s normal. But what I’m calling you to is to be a servant to others. Okay?” But then the interesting thing is it seems that, when someone refuses to allow another to serve them, then there’s often — you see that resistance reveals something. And what it means in the relationship with God is, if you don’t let God serve you, if you don’t accept his service humbly, then you can’t be in his kingdom either. That means, unless you allow God to be the source of life in you for the work that you have, you’ll never be able to do that work, and the thing about being effective in this world — and everybody, I think, that’s honest, knows that human nature loves to be effective and loves to be held up as somebody who is effective and powerful and helpful. It goes right to our head and not to our heart. Our head just says, “Well, I’m special. I’m special. I’m special.” Well, everything we do that’s powerful and transformative and brings people into the light is not us. It’s us with God, and so the idea of being a servant means you have to receive the gift that comes from the master to the servant, who gives the servant the ability to do the work that they do. So there’s something very much hidden, in a way, but not hard to see, that this whole idea of service is essential to this relationship we have with God. Let him serve you. Let him be the source of the healing power in you. Always acknowledge it’s him in you doing the work, and then do it in a way that is generous and wanting only the goodness that the other needs to be there, not to make you good or not to look good. So to move from master to servant, to move from somebody who is on their own to somebody who realizes that everything I am is because of God’s nourishing love and his life-giving forgiveness. When we have that rooted in us, we are then capable of becoming the servants that God intends us to be. That’s the mystery of Easter, this transformative union between God and man. Without it, we end up being people that control and people that tend to use and people that tend to be self-focused.

Father, the fullness of your revelation, the God that you are was shown to us in this mysterious creature, this God/man Jesus. There’s so much about it that’s hard for us to grasp and hard for us to comprehend, in terms of the reason you do this is so that we can become ministers just like you were, and it’s so easy for us to create a God that is more like a master than a servant. Help us always to be servants, servants to each other but most especially allowing you to serve us. So we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Palm Sunday
Mark 11:1-10 | Philippians 2:6-11 | Mark 14:1—15:47

Almighty, everliving God, who is an example of humility to the human race to follow, caused our Savior to take flesh and submit to the cross, graciously grant that we may heed his lesson of patient suffering and so merit a share in his resurrection who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

Before I read the gospel, I would like to tell you that this is going to be a different kind of program. I’m not going to be giving a homily, and I am using music, but the music is music taken from the actual liturgy of this most sacred time. But instead, I’d like you to focus on the story, the story of Jesus’ Passion and death. We all know how powerful stories are. They can have an incredibly powerful impact on us, and one of the ways in which that influence happens is that we’re watching. And in any good story, a pattern, maybe multiple patterns of how people live, how we react to things like evil, goodness, forgiveness, resentment. So I’m expecting you, or I’m inviting you, rather — so I’m inviting you to a meditation on this classic story, the story on the death and resurrection of Jesus, but this is going to focus on his death, on his surrendering to what he had to surrender to in order to save us. Watching for, listening for the pattern is what I’m inviting you to do. So I’m suggesting a kind of meditative listening to this story when you’re alone, simply quiet, and let it speak to you, because stories have power to change us.

So there are two readings before we get to the gospel. So each one is there to enhance and to set the tone for how we should listen. The first one is from Isaiah, 50th chapter, fourth through the seventh verse. “Lord God has given me a well-trained tongue that I might know how to speak to the weary word that will rouse them. Morning after morning he opens my ears that I may hear, and I have not rebelled, have not turned back. I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard. My face I did not shield from buffets and spitting. The Lord God is my help. Therefore I am not disgraced. I have set my face like flint, knowing I shall not be put to shame.” The word of the Lord. Responsorial Psalm, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

A reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, second chapter, sixth through eleventh verse. “Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name. At the name of Jesus, every knee should bend, of those in heaven, on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.” The word of the Lord. The verse before the gospel, “Christ became obedient to the point of death even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed upon him the name which is above every name.”

Now we turn to the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ from St. Matthew [sic], 14th chapter, first verse to 15th chapter, 47th verse. “The Passover and the feast of unleavened bread were to take place in two day’s time. So the chief priest and the scribes were seeking a way to arrest him by treachery and put him to death. They said, ‘Not during the festival,’ for fear there may be a riot among the people. When he was in Bethany, reclining at table in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of perfumed oil, costly, genuine spikenard. She broke the alabaster jar and poured it on his head. There were some who were indignant. ‘Why has there been this waste of perfumed oil? It could have been sold for more than 100 days wages and the money given to the poor.’ They were infuriated with her. Jesus said, ‘Let her alone. Why do you make trouble for her? She’s done a good thing for me. The poor you always have with you, and whenever you wish, you can do good to them, but you will not always have me. She has done what she could. She has anticipated anointing my body for burial. Amen, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed to the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.’

“Then Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, went off to the chief priest to hand him over to them. When they heard him, they were pleased and promised to pay him money. And he looked for an opportunity to hand him over. On the first day of the feast of unleavened bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb, his disciples said to him, ‘Where do you want us to go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?’ He sent two of his disciples and said to them, ‘Go into the city, and a man you will meet there carrying a jar of water, follow him. Wherever he enters, say to the master of the house, the teacher says where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples. Then he will show you a large, upper room, furnished and ready. Make the preparations for us there.’ The disciples then went off, entered the city and found it just as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover.

“When it was evening, he came with the twelve, and as they reclined at table and were eating, Jesus said, ‘Amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.’ They began to be distressed and say to him one by one, ‘Surely it is not I.’ He said to them, ‘One of the twelve, the one who dips with me into the dish, for the Son of Man indeed goes as is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would be better for that man if he had never been born.’ While they were eating, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, gave it to them and said, ‘Take it. This is my body.’ Then he took a cup, gave thanks and gave it to them, and they drank from it. And he said, ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which shall be shed for many. Amen, I say to you, I shall not drink again the fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.’ And after singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

“Then Jesus said to them, ‘All of you will have your faith shaken, for it is written, I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be dispersed. But after I’ve been raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.’ Peter said to him, ‘Even though all should have their faith shaken, mine will not be.’ Then Jesus said to him, ‘Amen, I say to you, this very night before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.’ But he vehemently replied, ‘Even though I should have to die with you, I will not deny you.’ And they all spoke similarly.

“Then they came to a place named Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, ‘Sit here while I pray.’ He took with him Peter, James and John and began to be troubled and distressed. Then he said to them, ‘My soul is sorrowful even to death. Remain here and keep watch.’ He advanced a little farther and fell to the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass by him. He said, ‘Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will.’ When he returned, he found them asleep. He said to Peter, ‘Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep watch one hour? Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ Withdrawing again, he prayed, saying the same thing. Then he returned once more and found them asleep. They could not keep their eyes open and did not know what to answer him. He returned a third time and said to them, ‘Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? It’s enough. The hour has come. Behold, the Son of Man is to be handed over to sinners. Get up. Let us go. See, my betrayer is at hand.’

“And while he was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, arrived, accompanied by a crowd with swords and clubs, who had come from the chief priests, the scribes and the elders. His betrayer had arranged a signal with them, saying, ‘The man I shall kiss is the one. Arrest him and lead him away securely.’ He came and immediately went over to him and said, ‘Rabbi,’ and he kissed him. At this, they laid hands on him and arrested him. One of the bystanders drew his sword, struck the high priest’s servant and cut off his ear.

“Jesus said to them in reply, even so their testimony did not agree. The high priest rose before the assembly and questioned Jesus, saying, ‘Have you no answer? What are these men testifying against you?’ But he was silent and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him and said to him, ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the blessed one?’ Then Jesus answered, ‘I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the power and coming with clouds of heaven.’ At that the high priest tore his garments and said, ‘What further need we have of witnesses? We have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?’ They all condemned him as deserving to die. Some began to spit on him. They blindfolded him, struck him and said to him, ‘Prophesy.’ And the guards greeted him with blows.

“While Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the high priest’s maids came up, seeing Peter warming himself, she looked intently at him and said, ‘You too were with the Nazarene, Jesus.’ But he denied it again. ‘I neither know nor understand what you’re talking about.’ So he went out into the outer court. Then the cock crowed. The maid saw him and began again to say to the bystanders, ‘This man is one of them.’ Once again he denied it. A little later, the bystanders said to Peter once more, ‘Surely you’re one of them for you too are a Galilean.’ He began to curse and to swear. ‘I do not know this man about whom you are talking,’ and immediately a cock crowed a second time. Then Peter remember the words that Jesus had said to him. ‘Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.’ He broke down and wept.

“As soon as morning came, the chief priest, with the elders and the scribes, that is the whole Sanhedrin, held a council. They bound Jesus, led him away and handed him over to Pilate. Pilate questioned him. ‘Are you the kind of the Jews?’ He said in reply, ‘You say so.’ The chief priest accused him of many things. Again Pilate questioned him. ‘Have you no answer? See how many things they accuse you of?’ Jesus gave no further answer, so Pilate was amazed.

“Now on the occasion of the feast, he used to release to them one prisoner whom they requested. A man called Barabbas was then in prison, along with the rebels who had committed murder in rebellion. The crowd came forward and began to ask him to do for them as he was accustomed. Pilate answered, ‘Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?’ For he knew that it was out of envy that the chief priest had handed him over, but the chief priest stirred up the crowed to have him release Barabbas for them instead. Pilate again said to them in reply, ‘Then what do you want me to do with the man you call the King of the Jews?’ They shouted again, ‘Crucify him.’ Pilate said to them, ‘Why? What evil has he done?’ They only shouted louder. ‘Crucify him.’ So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas to them, and after he had Jesus scourged and handed him over to be crucified.

“The soldiers led him away inside the palace, that is the Praetorium, and assembled the whole cohort. They clothed him in purple, and weaving a crown of thorns, placed it upon him. They began to salute him, ‘Hail, King of the Jews,’ and kept striking his head with a reed and spitting upon him. They knelt before him in homage, and when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak, dressed him in his own clothes and led him out to crucify him. They pressed into service a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross. They brought him to the place of Golgotha, which is translated Place of the Skull. They gave him wine drugged with myrrh, but he did not take it. Then they crucified him, divided his garments by casting lots for them to see what each would take. It was 9:00 in the morning when they crucified him. The inscription of the charge against him read ‘The King of the Jews.’ With him, they crucified two revolutionaries, one on his right and one on his left. Those passing by reviled him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘Aha, you who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself by coming down from the cross.’ Alike the chief priest with the scribes mocked him among themselves and said, ‘He saves others. He cannot save himself. Let the Christ, the King of Israel come down from the cross that we may see and believe.’ Those who were crucified with him also kept abusing him.

“At noon, darkness came over the whole land until 3:00 in the afternoon, and at 3:00, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani,’ which is translated, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me. Some of the bystanders who heard it said, ‘Look, he is calling Elijah.’ One of them ran, soaked a sponge with wine, put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, ‘Wait. Let us see if Elijah comes to take him down.’ Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.

“The veil of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom. When the centurion who stood facing him saw how he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was the Son of God.’ There were also women looking on from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of the younger James and Joses, and Salome. These women had followed him when he was in Galilee and ministered to him. There were also many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem.

“When it was already evening, since it was the day of Praetorium, the day before the Sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea, a distinguished member of the council, who was himself awaiting the kingdom of God, came and courageously went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Pilate was amazed that he was already dead. He summoned the centurion and asked him if Jesus had already died, and when he learned of it from the centurion, he gave the body to Joseph. Having brought a linen cloth, he took him down, wrapped him in the linen cloth and laid him in a tomb that had been hewn out of a rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb. Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Joses, watched where he was laid.” The word of the Lord.

My prayer for this experience we’ve had together this morning is that you will grow in your understanding in the patterns that we find in these incredible, powerful stories of the Passion of Jesus. We have four versions. This one was from St. Mark, and each one opens us up to a way of understanding, not just getting information but really understanding and feeling the emotion in this story that is our story — our story. So let me close with a prayer.

Heavenly Father, the fullness of revelation is found in this person Jesus. He’s the one who reveals completely who you really are and who we are and what we are together. Your presence living inside of us, your awareness you place within us of your indwelling presence is something that we need to grow into and accept and be blessed by. So thank you for this opportunity for us to grow in our awareness of who you are and who we are and why we’re here. Amen.

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The 5th Sunday of Lent
Jeremiah 31:31-34 | Hebrews 5:7-9 | John 12:20-33

By your help, we beseech you, Lord our God, may we walk eagerly in the same charity with which, out of love for the world, your Son handed himself over to death. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

This Sunday marks the end of the five Sundays of Lent, and we begin next week, the holiest of the year, with the Feast of Palm Sunday, ending with Easter Sunday. Then there is the Triduum, the holy Thursday, the institution of Eucharist, and then Friday, the death of Christ and then his resurrection on Sunday. This season is the culmination, in a sense, of everything that we need to learn and know about what it is that we are to engage in as we surrender to the will of a God who is all powerful, at the same time all merciful. If I go back to the first Sunday of this season, one of the things that was always brought up, usually, in terms of the reading, is the temptations of Jesus, and I just want to start with that one image, because it’s so clear that this last set of readings for this fifth Sunday, in a way, point to what it is that Jesus made clear when he was tempted. What was his intention in terms of his life here? What did he want to accomplish?

The incarnation is core to our teaching. It means that we believe that Jesus was fully human and fully divine, and when we see this creature that’s fully human and fully divine unfolding throughout its life on this earth, we realize that what we’re looking at is the fullest representation of who human beings are and who God is. The fullness of revelation is found in this human being who is also God. We see who human beings really are and who God really is. From the beginning it was clear what’s the relationship between humanity and divinity in this person of God and Jesus, and it’s this: the reason Jesus came into the world, he said, is to open himself as fully as possible as a human being, to learn as much as he could of what the Father is teaching. “I live on every word that comes from my Father’s mouth.” And when asked whether or not his words were worth trusting, the devil tempted him and said, “Well, make sure he’s going to do what he says or if his words really work. Test him.” And Jesus said, “I’ll never test him. I trust in him implicitly. Whatever he says, whatever he teaches, I believe in. I don’t need to have it proven to me.” And once Jesus made those two decisions, once humanity makes those decisions, then the next part is rather just like — it just turns out to be that way, and that is, when the devil shows him what it’s like to live in this world that runs on power and control, Jesus looks at it and says, “I’m not even interested in this. This is not the kingdom of my Father. It’s the kingdom of evil. It’s the kingdom of the devil.” That’s strong words for what is considered to be the world, but don’t confuse the image of the world as the world that God created but the world that we live in that is created out of an ego and a mindset that says the way to deal with this world is to be in a position of power and to use that position of power to achieve and get whatever you want. That’s living in the world. The other option is to live in God, which is what Jesus is teaching the world, what it’s like to live in God.

So we start with this first reading in this set of readings with an image of a change that came with time, in terms of how God was dealing with his people. He began, definitely, as his master, as the human beings’ master. He was the one with power, like all gods had power, and if you did what he said, and that was one of the ways to help them keep themselves from self-destruction, by following rules and regulations — there were first ten rules and regulations that were given that had everything to do with our relationship with God and with each other, the Ten Commandments. But it’s clear that human beings were so prone to wanting a power to tell them what to do, and if they could follow that, they wouldn’t have to do any of their own work, just obey the ruler. And if they gave themselves over to the rule and followed it, they knew they would be safe. They would not be destroyed. So you can see that that was the system in the beginning, and then we see, as God is revealing himself slowly over time, we realize that God is not a God of power over people but a God that longs to empower people. And so in this beautiful reading from Jeremiah, we have a kind of foretaste of what redemption is going to be, what’s going to happen to human beings, and what it is, it’s a change from looking outside of ourselves to a power greater than ourselves to tell us how to act so we can act that way and, our of fear, do it over and over again so that we won’t be destroyed. And that’s going to be replaced by something much more mysterious. “I will place my law within them, write it on their hearts. They will know the truth. They will know who they are. They will know who I am. Nobody’s going to have to teach them. It’s inside of them. It’s buried in their unconscious, and it’s going to become more and more conscious.” So no longer will people have to be controlled with rules and laws. They will know what to do. That’s the promise.

And that’s what we call redemption, and that’s what Jesus accomplished. We have to understand exactly how he did it. What did he do? Because what Jesus learned while he was here on this earth is what we all need to learn while we’re here on this earth. The first thing that we see in the next reading about Jesus, who was in the flesh, who was God in the flesh, is that he had to learn. He had to learn to obey, and he learned obedience from what he suffered. Now, what that means is obedience means to listen. So he had to learn how to listen to everything the Father was showing him, everything the Father was teaching him, and when he saw that what he was doing was not in sync with what he knew that God longed for him to do — in other words, when he was caught as a human being into being the powerful one, the one that could control people, he had to feel at times that that’s what he wanted to do as a human being. He was fully human, and if I want to change somebody, if I had the power over them to change them, I’d say, “You must change. Stop doing what you’re doing. Do this, or I will leave you, or I will destroy you. I’ll never have anything to do with you.” That’s the way the mind and the will work, but Jesus had to learn to listen to something new. And when he learned it, he had to surrender to it, which means to suffer, to allow it to take the place of where he was, what he thought. So he was made whole, more in tune with the truth, because every time he saw something he decided would work and it was revealed to him it wouldn’t work, he had to suffer it. He had to surrender to it and change, and what the change really was, was a change from being a figure that was a master over us becoming a servant. When Jesus said, in the first reading, “I had to show myself as master,” that’s the way he first revealed himself, as a master. “Follow my rules or die.” And yet he knew that that was not truly who he was, and he wanted not to be that, but he wanted Jesus to reveal who he really is. Who he really is, is a lover who wants to serve his people. He doesn’t want to have power over them, making them do what they’re supposed to do out of fear of losing his love or being condemned by him. No, he wanted so much for them to see that he was one that looked at their sins and didn’t want to destroy them because of them, because of those sins but wanted to offer forgiveness. And when he knew that we would understand that we were forgiven, human beings would begin to understand what it means to live in this thing, live in the world in God and not in the world as a place where the thing that works, the only thing that works is power over people, controlling them. How do you stop controlling people? Instead of that, empower them. Empower them to see who they are and to live as they’re called to live.

So we have, in this set of readings then, an image in the gospel, which is perfect, because the Greeks are coming to this great feast. Now, understand this feast is a celebration of the power of Jesus in the world. He had just healed a man that was born blind. Then he raised someone from the dead. This is power, and he came into Jerusalem as a rock star, as a celebrity, as the greatest of all kings. And it was a kingdom that was not the kingdom of God but the kingdom of the world. He was powerful, and so he had to have been, in a certain sense, intoxicated by that a little bit if he was human. And maybe he could look and realize, when he saw that he was being held up as some great powerful figure that had power over evil, he became worried that maybe he had made a mistake. And where would the mistake have been? Well, if you look at Jesus, he was really good about offering forgiveness, and as a human, remember, he was a human being learning how to become more like God. And at the beginning of his even ministry, he had a way of dealing with the scribes and Pharisees where he showed hate for them. He was judgmental and condemning and thought they should be destroyed, and yet he was soft as a human being over sinners who recognized their need. Well, doesn’t that feel human? It does make sense. If somebody who is absolutely bent on doing destruction to you — you want to destroy them. If somebody comes to you and says, “Forgive me. I’m going to change.” You can relate to that person. So is it true then that Jesus revealing in this story of the end of his life the final thing he had to learn — you cannot change the world by hating it or trying to destroy it. So you’ll notice that this statement, when the Greeks came and said, “We want to see where Jesus is right now.” This is the end of his life. “Where is he? What’s he dealing with?” That’s kind of what they were asking, and Jesus said, “Look, I realize something. Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat, but something has to die in us as human beings, and it’s power over people.” If you really are in that world of power, you know how effective it is, and if your motive is good, you feel empowered.

If I had the power to change everyone by forcing them to be who they should be, I would think I was doing a great thing, but the only trouble with every institution that gets that power inside of them is it may start out by saying, “I want to give it to people, empower them.” But then normally the source of power becomes intoxicated by their power, and they start to use and abuse instead of empower. So Jesus is saying, “Something in me still has to die at this last moment of my life, and I want God to glorify me and glorify God.” What it means, the glory of God is human beings intoxicated with the love of God dwelling within them, becoming everything that God longed for them to be. That’s what God wants. That’s his glory. So what it is that Jesus is trying to say to the world, “I’m finally seeing fullness of who I have to be.” Yes, to forgive the sinner is a very, very difficult thing for a lot of us to do, but how about to forgive evil, raw, demanding, destructive, ugly evil? What do you have to do with that? Can’t you will to destroy it? Isn’t that what God would want? No, he wants you to forgive it, and so the glory of God in Jesus and the glory of Jesus in God is that moment on the cross when the pinnacle, the high point of his humanity and divinity coming together manifests itself in a humanity that is surrendering to something that’s so hard for the will and the mind to understand. And that is power over people is always destructive, and empowering people is the only way to save the world. And what is clear in this moment of Jesus’ death, right before he realizes that he has seen all of this, and he wants to manifest it to someone, he says the most incredible thing. He said, “Father, I am a victim of the institution that I’ve come to save, and the people in that have become empowered with the way of the world, not your way. And I’ve hated them for that. I’ve tried to destroy them for it. It’s the wrong thing to do, and so now I’m hanging here and saying to you, look, I’ve learned it. I see it. I want to tell everybody that — look what I am doing. I am forgiving the very people who have set their mind on destroying me, and I wanted to destroy them first, but I couldn’t.” And the more you try to destroy the enemy, the more you empower them. And the more you empower them, the more you lose. And so there he is, saying the most amazing, powerful statement. “Unless you forgive everything, every evil, every wrong thing, unless you forgive it with your heart and want it to be changed by it, being forgiven, only then can you enter into the kingdom of God. Only then do you understand my kingdom.” Living in God is living as a figure that empowers every seed of goodness in everyone by loving it. To live in the world is to destroy every person who’s filled with evil, and while you destroy that, you destroy the seed of goodness in them. Hatred, destruction is the devil’s work. Forgiveness, understanding, compassion is God’s work, and it’s conceivable that the human heart can override the human mind and will that can work always toward destruction of evil. And the heart can win. Instead of destruction, there’s life and beauty and goodness and redemption.

Father, your gift to us is the life of the God/man Jesus. Without it, we would never fully understand who you are and who we are and why we’re here. Bless us with insight, understanding, openness to who he is and who you are in him, and let us grow in our understanding of what his life teaches us so that we can do it, imitate him, become like him. It is going through the same process he goes through. It’s not being told what to do. It’s becoming who we really are. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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The 4th Sunday of Lent
2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23 | Ephesians 2:4-10 | John 3:14-21

Oh God, who through your word reconcile the human race to yourself in a wonderful way, grant, we pray, that with prompt devotion and eager faith the Christian people may hasten toward the solemn celebrations to come. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

The scriptures are a treasure of information, of wisdom and knowledge, and many say that the scriptures are both anthropological and theological, meaning they reveal to us the nature and the evolution of human beings and the nature of God as he slowly reveals himself to his people. So through scripture we learn about who we are, we learn about who God is, and we learn about why we are here in this world.

So let’s look for a moment at this notion that we have of this God who reveals himself slowly to us, and it’s so interesting in this reading from Chronicles. We see the evolution of God from a God who, when he saw his people not being who they were supposed to be, who we long for them to be, he made them in his image, and they were not initially in that image. In the time of Noah, he saw what he created. Even though, when he created it he said it was so very, very good, he looked at it all and said, “I made a mistake. I’m so sorry. I don’t like these people. Their hearts are filled with darkness, and I’m going to destroy everything I created,” a very strange story in a sense. But it underscores the fact that we have a destiny that is so much higher than what he saw in his people, and in a way that we see in God a kind of connection to our humanness, it made sense. He created something he hoped for that would be so much more than it was, and he was so disappointed that he said, “I want to scrap it all.” So he reveals himself as someone like us, but in this story, it’s different. In this story, we see an evolution of God, because we see the same situation. These people are filled with all kinds of iniquity and all kinds of sinfulness, and they are just turning from God completely. And so instead of wanting to destroy them, his first reaction now is compassion. “I have compassion for them.” And so early and often — I love that set of words, early and often. He kept saying, “Listen, you’re in the wrong direction. You’re going toward something that will destroy you. Please, listen to my word that I give you through my prophets, and change. Change. Turn away from what you’re doing.” And they didn’t, and then you’ll notice, instead of God punishing them, he allows the enemies to punish his people. It’s a way of saying, “All right, you’re going to choose a way of life that is destructive. Well, I’m going to allow you to have that way of life, and it will destroy you. And what happens? You lose everything that you have, and you become a slave.” It’s a perfect image of a kind of — how would I say — addicted qualities of human nature that can turn away from light and truth and continue to go to darkness over and over again, and they are slaves of it. They can’t — they’re not free to do anything else. It’s a beautiful description of human nature. And so we see in that particular passage then something that God is doing, because at the end of a very difficult period, 70 years that these people had to live with the results of their choices, they were ready to change. And then God infuses in a man, Cyrus, who is able to create the world that God wants them to live in again for them. He allows Cyrus to build this wonderful temple, and they go back, and hopefully all those experiences change them. So you get a different image. God is not wanting to destroy that which is not what it should be. He wants it to grow and to change, but the only way he can do that in the Old Testament was to put them through a period of great suffering — great suffering. So there is always that image of God working with people, taking people on a journey, bringing them into something new, and they have to go through something that’s difficult and painful. So there’s something about, in a way, in that system, we earn, in a way, God’s favor, because we learn from our mistakes. We changed, and now we’re pleasing to him.

Something is coming. Something is coming, and the thing that is coming is so different from that that we don’t always understand how much we have received from God’s mysterious gift of revealing himself in the person of Jesus to be the one who is really the fullness of who God is. And he is mercy. He is absolute love and forgiveness for the sinner in his or her sinfulness. I don't know why that’s so hard for us to understand, the shift that Jesus reveals in the world of who God the Father truly is. He is not anyone who is interested in turning away from anyone who is failing. He wants to turn toward them, transform them, awaken them, and it’s done through this mysterious thing that is talked about in Paul’s letter. He says, “There is this thing called grace.” Grace, what is grace? It is an unbelievable understanding of who God is in his love for sinners. It is love incarnate, and when we think about the things that we have failed at, we think about the things that we’ve not done. We feel the shame. We feel unworthy of being loved, and we get caught in that, and that’s the antithesis of grace, because grace is never earned. Grace is graciously given. It’s not out of obligation that God loves us. It is a free gift. It is his favor, and it’s so hard for us to understand that God has such favor for us in our most unattractive states, when we are absolutely destroying one another, hurting one another, harming ourselves and others, and yet his response is not to destroy us, not to give us over to our enemies but in the fullness of revelation to do something radically different, to tell us over and over again that we are loved and that it is his and that it is his grace that enables us to realize that, even in our greatest imperfection, we have this God who loves us because he sees and understands and is aware of the seed of goodness within us. And he knows us. He created us, and he knows the thing that will work best is when that seed is loved for what it is. We put so much emphasis on our actions as that’s who we are, but there is a core of all of us that knows — that knows who we really are. It’s like everything — I think education is trying to awaken us to the things we already know, so it seems clear that human beings had to go through a process of evolution before they could fully understand the mystery of grace, redemption, forgiveness for sinners as we’re sinning, not when we change, not when we’re sorry, not when we ask for pardon. The love is given consistently. If we accept that love, that’s a way of realizing what we’ve done, and we go through a thing called repentance. And repentance means we regret what we did, and it doesn’t mean that we have to have the repentance before we have God’s love. That’s what I think is a mistake. I think I’ve been always told unless you choose freely to not ever sin again, promise you’ll never sin again, you can’t be forgiven. Well, that doesn’t make sense in human nature. We don’t sin because we want to necessarily. We sin, because we are drawn to it in a way that is somehow overpowering our own free choice.

So this image of grace is at the heart of this set of readings. So I want to see if I can awaken you to this gift a little more by showing you what Jesus did when he was talking to Nicodemus. You know this story of Nicodemus and Jesus. Nicodemus was one of the Pharisees or maybe a scribe. I forget, but he was a high official in the temple. And he, unlike many others, but maybe there was more than we know, were really intrigued by the message of Jesus. They had something in their hearts that made them realize what he’s saying would be incredible awesome if it were true, that we are truly forgiven, not because we’ve changed but because forgiveness is the stuff we need to change. It’s being loved in our sinfulness that awakens us to our goodness. So Nicodemus comes and wants to know about this thing that Jesus is teaching, and he uses a phrase. He says, “Just as the serpent was lifted up by Moses in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” And what is lifted up? What does it mean to be lifted up?

You know the story about the snake. The Israelites were on their journey with Moses, and they were uncomfortable, and the food was lousy, and the accommodations were terrible. They even said, “I wish we could go back to where we were in slavery, because at least we had good meals and things like that.” All that was just so typical human nature. God is taking you on a journey to change you, to bring you to something so much more than you ever could imagine being, and we want to go back to something more comfortable, easier, less stressful. And so what we see in that story with Moses and the serpent is all of a sudden, serpents started to appear. Serpents are kind of hidden. They come in through the grass, and you can’t see them, and they bite these people, and they die. And so it’s like some hidden thing is attacking them, and so Moses was asked to put the snake on a pole. It was basically, “Look at what’s going on. Look at the sin that you’re caught up in. Look at the effects of that sin. Look at how it eats away at you. It destroys you.” When you lose faith in God, you lose a source of life, and you die. And so it was like — it seems to me that the lifting up of the serpent was a way of saying, “Look at evil for what it is and what it does.” And the most evil, dangerous thing we can do is turn away from the truth of who God is and reject his absolute total, incredible, faithful love for us in our brokenness, in our awfulness if that’s a word.

So what is Jesus then saying about lifting up this cross of his crucifixion? He is saying, “I want you to be aware of what I did when I died on the cross for you. I made up for every sin you will ever commit. They are no longer anything that keeps you from the presence, the love, the attention of God. Do you believe this?” And of course he didn’t. Nicodemus didn’t understand redemption yet, because it hadn’t happened. And so Jesus is talking about something that he can only wonder about rather than understand, but he’s saying, “If you really think about it, what I’m going to do for you is going to be —,” dumb way to put it — a game changer. We’re going to move from simple justice to justice and mercy, and the mercy is the part that’s so essential for all of us to understand, because it means that there is nothing that we can do, no attitude we take, no decision we make that is opposed to our very nature that limits God’s love for us. It’s hard for people to understand that, but that’s grace. Grace saves us. If Jesus is telling us that grace is the thing that saves us, grace is best described as the presence in our very heart of the love that God has for us proved to us in the crucifixion of Christ. It changes everything, and it’s just something that is at the heart of these mysteries that we prayed for at the very beginning of this liturgy when we said, “Let us understand fully what it is we’re celebrating so we can celebrate these mysteries that are coming that are so incredibly life-giving: Jesus’ passion, his suffering, his acceptance of the cross, his dying on the cross and his statement. As he felt the evil of the world rejecting him, he said, “Father, don’t punish them. Forgive them. Love them as I love them,” an amazing revelation of the nature of God, who in the Old Testament is not seen as this great lover, but he fully reveals himself in Jesus. That’s the great mystery of Easter.

Father, we are so easily trapped in our misconceptions, our illusions, our lies. They lead to destruction, both to those we love and to ourselves. So bless us with an understanding of the love that you have for us in that state of sinfulness so that we can believe with you in our own goodness that, if we turn to you and trust in you and allow you to open our eyes to see all that is, we will find life. Bless us with this great gift. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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The 3rd Sunday of Lent
Exodus 17:3-7 | Romans 5:1-2, 5-8 | John 4:5-42

Oh, God, author of every mercy and of all goodness, who in fasting, prayer and alms-giving has shown us a remedy for sin, look graciously upon this confession of our lowliness that we, who are bowed down by our conscience, may always be lifted up by your mercy. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

GOD longs for our hearts to receive the message that has been poured out for thousands of years. There always have been those who understood it, who have taken it in, and it has changed their lives. They carry the message in a powerful and beautiful way, but the number, I think, always has been small. My personal opinion is that it’s growing at an unprecedented rate in this time we’re living now, and the key to this wonderful, core message that God has shared with us is that we keep blocking it in some way, not staying with it, not seeing it for what it really is. It gets cloudy. It gets confused with other things, and it strikes me that, in that second reading, Paul is saying that at the heart of this message that God has given to us, there is this way — he calls himself the way — to life. It has something to do with crucifixion.

When you look at the readings of Lent, in this period of time in Lent, what we’re asked to ponder is that very thing that brought about the fulfillment of the teaching of God. From the call of Abraham until Jesus, it is finally fully revealed that the crucifix is key. So what is the crucifix saying to us? What is Christ crucified saying? Well, the first thing we hear from Paul is that the image of a Savior who is saving the world through giving in to evil and dying this horrible death, that the core ingredient in the message is so quickly dismissed by those who hear it. He uses these phrases. He says the Jews — it is a stumbling block to them, and the stumbling block was that they had an idea of who the Messiah was going to be. They knew he was going to be a great leader. He was going to free the people from everything that had put them down, so he had a political career, and he was going to change everything and make it easier and better for the Israelites. Instead he ended up being executed as a common criminal. Well, that didn’t make any sense. You look at the Gentiles when they’re shown — let’s say they’re the ones who haven’t had any understanding of this mystery, and they just all of a sudden hear this idea that, if you die, if you suffer, if you give yourself over to evil, then you’re going to be much better off. So you take a person who’s fairly underdeveloped and not very sophisticated and certainly on a low level of consciousness, and it makes absolutely no sense. It’s foolishness to the Gentiles. What do you mean give in to evil? What do you mean to be a servant instead of a master? And the Greeks, they were the learned and the clever, and they were trying to figure out what this message meant and trying to analyze it too much. Somehow they were seeking wisdom, and by seeking it in a way that was too complex, they couldn’t see it. It reminds you so much of Jesus saying, “This message I have is hidden from the learned and the clever, and it’s revealed to the merest children.”

So all of that says there is something in this crucifix that is such a basic concept, so simple, so easy to understand if you can simply open your heart to understand what it says. So let’s see if the first readings of the gospel work with that image or don’t help us. Let’s see if they — I really believe they do help us understand this message of the crucifix. First of all, I want to say a few words about the word "crucifix" — crucial, crucifixion. The word crucial means that there are two opposite opinions about something, and it is absolutely essential that one of them be chosen over the other if there is going to be any success. We call it a crucial decision, absolutely essential if you want to go forward to decide which of these conflicting ideas is the one to choose. A crucible is an interesting thing. It’s a clay pot that holds metal that’s being mixed with another metal so that it becomes stronger. It’s also important to look at the word to suffer. This is the one thing we talk about, that Jesus had to suffer the crucifixion. There was a time in our history of spirituality in the Catholic church that, during the Middle Ages, everyone thought, if they were in a painful situation, if they were suffering, they were pleasing God, because it proved that they loved him, that pain was what suffering was about. Pain is not necessarily the core of suffering, although it includes that, but to suffer means to allow, to endure, to put up with patiently, without anger and without resistance. So there’s a conflict in us that we have constantly, I believe, as human beings; the conflict between truth and what is not true, lies, between being self-oriented and wanting everything for me versus being a person who wants the best for everyone else. There’s a whole sense of the way life is supposed to serve me versus whether I want to serve it. These are crucial questions about which you want to pick, and it seems that, when one selects the correct choice, there is an experience of loss or of something being taken from us that is our right, the right to have what I want when I want it. And that’s where we get into the real issue of the crucifix and crucifixion.

So hold those thoughts, and let me go back to the first reading and talk about the image of the temple, because the temple was the place where — you know they felt that the temple was the sacred place where you connect with God, and there was a place in the middle of the temple, in the smallest part of it where only certain priests could enter. It was the holiest place, and what was in that tabernacle was the first reading, the Ten Commandments. So here are human beings, in a way, worshipping a God who has done something for them, and what he’s done has been so incredible in their minds is that he’s revealed to them their nature. And that’s what the Ten Commandments are. They are a description of who we are, who we’re meant to be. We’re meant to be a people who trust in a power beyond ourselves. Our core essence is that we are people who respect those things that give us life, and when we’re in love and we have these most powerful of human emotions when we want to care for and love someone, we don’t want to lie to them, or we don’t want to steal from them or destroy them or even demand to have what they have. It’s hard for us to imagine that people didn’t really know what human nature was at one point, and this is the way God begins his work with people so they can see. “This is who I’m intended to be. This is my essence. It can be distorted by my mind and by my will, and I can become something that is the opposite of who I am.” And when that happens, then death enters and destruction and intense pain versus the pain and the suffering that is demanded when we understand the kingdom.

Then we go to the gospel, and what we realize is that Jesus is explaining to everyone that this image of the temple as a sacred place that carries within it the truth of who we are is about to be replaced. It has to be replaced, and Jesus is the one who replaces it. So when he looks at the temple as it is and he experiences it, he realizes that the whole notion, even of sacrifice, the notion of suffering, of offering something that you created, that God helped you make and you bring it to God and says, “God, you are the reason I have this gift. You are the one who enabled me to do this.” That was the heart of those sacrifices. It was a way of honoring God for being a part of your life and producing good through you for yourself and for others. And what happens? They turned into some kind of convenience store, meaning, if you had to travel to Jerusalem to offer your sacrifice, the problem was you had to bring whatever you created, whether it was the best of the fruits you raised or vegetables or wheat or maybe the animals became preferable, and you would bring some small animal that you nurtured, the ones who gave birth to this, and then you were identified with this creature you brought to God and thanking him for letting you be a part of him and creating life in this figure you are offering. All that was gone when they came and just had to buy the cheapest item they could to get through the ritual. It was about purification, and purification is about opening your mind to what’s real and true. And it was lost. It was all kind of a farce, and it must have been incredibly difficult. There were all these people from different countries, and they all had different kinds of coins. You had to have moneychangers. They made some money off it. I’m sure they had to give a cut to the temple if they got that job, and yeah, it was a marketplace. It was something that just had no similarity to what it was intended to be, which is what happens to people who take things like religion and twist it and turn it into something radically different.

So what is Jesus saying? “I am the new temple.” Well, what was in the center of the temple was wisdom as to who human beings are. Now the center of the temple is the person of Jesus. The person of Jesus has within him the person of God. So the new temple is not a building, but it’s us, and inside of us is God. God dwells inside us. Now, think of the difference. One is insight into who I am. The other is insight into the part that I am, the most mysterious part, and that is what I can’t do, what I’m called to do, be who I’m called to be, on my own. I have to do it in partnership with divinity. That means I have to believe in those incredibly mysterious moments of God dwelling inside me and being a source of wisdom and strength. And I call upon it consciously, and I know it’s there. And the three things that it’s trying to do so clearly is it’s trying to make sure that, on a daily basis, you hear the voice of this God inside of you, and he’s saying three basic things: “You are loved as you are. You are loved exactly as you are, and I want you to know that, basically, you are also the person who I need to be in the world. And I’m going to engage you in work that ultimately will change the world, if you surrender to my truth and you listen to me and you become who I want you to be. You’re valuable. You’re loved, and you are forgiven for everything you’ve done. And what you have to understand is that the world that I created for you is precisely what you need, and your struggles against the evil that’s around you, those are all things that I planned so that, if you’re working with me and I can help you go through this, you’ll find an amazing — amazing transformation happening to you.”

What a gift, divinity inside me versus a model of who I’m supposed to be, yet I feel at times, religion simply falls back on talking about what you should be. It’s almost like in homilies, we get the Ten Commandments, in a particular way, but in truth, it’s not about those rules and laws. It’s about a transformation, becoming those things that can only be done in partnership with divinity who is the only one who has the power to use all things and somehow use them for the good so that every evil and every setback and every problem we have continues to move us in the direction of insight, and awareness and consciousness. It’s so mysterious and so simple at the same time. To figure out how it works — you’ll never, never be able to do that. To know it works, to believe it works, to want it to work, that’s what a child does. That’s what we need to do, and when you trust in that, then life, the life that God has promised us, the Promised Land, the peaceful, inner place appears.

Father, we long for the gifts that you promise, and yet we still resist the process that you’ve opened for us. Bless us with the kind of understanding and the simple trust we need to have in you and the promise, and let us go into it without trying to figure it out, without having nice, neat clear lines that we can stay within, but give us the freedom of children who simply are so excited about a gift. And when they know that this gift has been promised, they know it will be given. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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The 2nd Sunday of Lent
Genesis 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18 | Romans 8:31b-34 | Mark 9:2-10

Oh God, who have commanded us to listen to your Beloved Son, be pleased, we pray, to nourish us inwardly by your word that, with spiritual sight made pure, we may rejoice to behold your glory. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

The theme of this set of readings is captured in the word listen. The opening prayer asked us to really listen, to listen to something that will change us, to open our eyes to see, to feel, to know something, and it’s a spiritual insight, according to that opening prayer. Open our eyes that we might see something, something radically new. It’s fascinating to me that we have two sets, in a way, of readings to work with in terms of scripture revealing to us the truth of who God is, who we are and why we’re here. And it seems to me, when you look at the first set of teachings in the Old Testament, what we’re hearing very clearly is the story of a God who reveals himself like other gods, and one of the things that he requires from us is the absolute capacity to surrender to whatever he asks us to do, to trust in him. And the way we express our trust is to do whatever he asks, no matter how difficult or how hard or how demanding.

So the ultimate thing with testing Abraham, who is the first person that God called into this intimacy with him, he was asked to basically give up the one thing that had been given to him as a gift from God, and that’s the first way that God reveals himself to Abraham. “I’m a God who can give you what you’ve never ever had that you’ve always longed for, a son. I’ll give you that.” And that gift was everything — everything to Abraham, and then for God to turn around and to ask him to sacrifice his son is so — really bizarre, in a sense. It’s like the son that you created, that I helped you create, that is something that God is willing to destroy just to show God that you are trusting him. There’s a phrase somewhere in the scripture there that implies somehow that Abraham thought, “Well, if I do sacrifice my son, something will come from that that will be maybe more than what I’m giving up,” because that’s got to be somehow — in human nature, you can’t give up everything, thinking that it’s going to leave you with absolutely nothing. But what I think this image is — and it comes up over and over in the Old Testament, people sacrificing their will to God’s will — it is a way of understanding your relationship with the divine power when human beings are in need of their help, and they need to know that we really trust in them. God needs to know that we are there with them, and so it’s one way of imagining your relationship with divinity. He gives us wisdom, gave us the Ten Commandments, and the relationship he wants with us is, “You follow these Ten Commandments, and if you don’t, you will be punished. If you do, you’ll be rewarded.” So it was a very binary world. It was a world of good and evil, a world of reward and punishment, and it makes total sense to the mind.

That’s very logical and very easy to understand, and that’s where God first began to reveal himself to our minds. But there is potential beyond that, and then we have a New Testament, a whole new vision. And you’ve got to look and understand the very radical difference. Imagine in the Old Testament, the ideal was to listen to the law and to follow it, and in place of the law and in place of all those prophets that demanded that people follow God or be destroyed, all of that was going to go away in the New Testament. That’s the hardest thing, to realize the Old Testament is old, and the New Testament is new. It doesn’t mean the Old Testament isn’t loaded with wisdom. In fact, the most interesting thing about the Old Testament is there are over 300 references to exactly what the New Testament is going to be, describing almost perfectly the life of Jesus. And so the first testament was never the full message. It was never intended to be the full message. It was reaching human beings where they were in terms of consciousness. That’s the best you could do, is get hold of their minds and give them some kind of sense of what’s right and wrong and justice and injustice, fairness, and God always demanded a lot from those who he was going to take care of. They earned his care, and that was what saved them from a life of destruction. It was motivation. They needed the motivation of punishment. It’s like maybe a child doesn’t understand fully the depth of why they shouldn’t play in the street, and so they’re spanked, or they’re punished for playing in the street. It’s about a more primitive — primitive understanding of life, and life on this planet has always been a case of human beings evolving more and more and becoming exactly who God created them to be, which is a reflection of God.

So time was a very important element in this revelation, story. So it began by listening to the law and trying to follow it. So we see that image, in the first reading, of that whole process, but there’s a part of God in that first reading that reminds us that every time that God was acting in the way that most gods acted, because the gods were always demanding sacrifice, there is this thing that this God of the Old Testament, Yahweh, does. Every now and then, he will take the stand that all the gods did, and then at the end, he goes, “Well, I’m not really going to do that. I just really wanted to see if you trusted me.” So then in the New Testament or in the gospel — let’s go there. The gospel is about what’s new in the New Testament. In the Old Testament, you had to listen to the word of God. Now, in the New Testament, the word of God is not a written word. It’s not a spoken word. It’s an incarnate word. It’s a word made flesh. It is a word that is living and active. It is something that can only be read with the eyes, not just the ears but the eyes. So Jesus comes into the world, and he’s going to be the one that opens the eyes of everyone to who God really is and what the relationship that God wants with us really is. And it’s something that could have never been fathomed by people with a much lower conscious level. It had to be — people had to grow into some potential to understand this, but he’s saying, “I want to come and dwell inside of you, and when I dwell inside of you, I bring you something. It’s called the truth, and the image of the truth is light, enlightenment. I will come into the world, open your heart, your mind to what is real, to what is true, and when you see the truth, when you are aware of it, it changes you. It makes a shift inside of you. It is a spiritual event. It is not something you can do for yourselves. It’s a mystery.”

So when you see this beautiful image of the transfiguration in the gospel, you see all these images that are loaded with meaning. Jesus calls just a few to give them a hint of what’s coming — Peter, James and John, and basically what he shows them is who he is. What they see with their eyes is they see this Jesus figure, who is conversing with the Old Testament images, the law and those who demanded the law be followed, the prophets. It’s as if they’re getting together and saying, “Well, thanks for your work.” This is Jesus saying, “Well, thank you for the law, and thank you guys for all this. But basically I’m telling you that there’s a new thing coming.” And then the disciples see the new thing, and when they see enlightenment flowing out of this figure, Jesus, they’re completely mystified. They entered the mystical world, the world of mystics, and they encountered divinity. They encountered divinity in their life, and that didn’t happen in the Old Testament. If anybody thought that God would enter into them, they would be disintegrated in a second. There was such a division between the goodness of divinity and the ugliness in the sin of humans they could not ever come together, and this new vision that is placed before them is just the opposite. No, no, there is no division between a sinner and God. There’s nothing but unity and communion. How could that possibly be? Because human beings are not anywhere near who God is. Well, the whole notion of the incarnation, when Jesus was revealing himself as the revealer and telling the disciples, in a sense, though they couldn’t understand it, that this is their destiny. They’re going to be like Jesus. They’re going to be something that Jesus later would say, “You are the light of the world.” Anyone that believes in the indwelling presence of God’s spirit inside them is a light to the world, and that interior life of God within us that Jesus manifests is also a manifestation of a God who is more a servant than a master. And Paul was so aware of this. He was so conscious of the fact that that’s who God is that he talks about it in this way. “If God has died for us, if God sacrificed his Son for us,” using Old Testament images, “then how could we not trust him?” We can trust him because he gave up everything for us, and what he gave up was this thing that is so crucial for us. He gave up any sense of demanding from human beings justification for their sins. In the Old Testament, you were always required to make some kind of action that would make up for your sin, and Jesus said, “This is blinding you to the real work that I’m here to ask you to help me with. You’re not in charge of getting — making up for your sins. I’ll do that. I’ll do that for you. Don’t worry at all about the justice issue about your sinning. That’s taken care of. Don’t wallow in shame and guilt and fear that you’re going to be punished. That’s just not going to help, because what I need you to do is not to be focused on your sins and the past but to be focused on the power that is now within you.” And the most powerful way that power is manifested is when you begin to have that same disposition that Jesus revealed to these disciples, the enlightened position that you are like the Christ, bringing into the world an image of a God relationship that is so radically new and different that it’s still hard for people to grasp it. God is so in love with you, with me that every one of our sins, because he knows that’s an obstacle for us to be close to him, they’re written off. He said, “I paid for all of that. Don’t even think about the fact of how you’re not worthy. Just think about the fact of how much God wants to give you an insight into who you are, the dignity, the value of the core that he created in you, and he wants you to find that, connect with that and share that with other people.

Good religion, truth is contagious as our lives, and when the truth is lived in a person, it awakens the truth in another person. When a person is lying constantly, the other people begin to think that lies work. They don’t. The only thing that works is truth. The only person that’s really valuable in the world is a person who’s living in the truth. They have all the authority. They have all the power, even though it seems that those who lie and cheat and steal, that they get all the power. Well, they don’t. They have power in a world of materialism and using and taking and killing, but we enter into a world of light, enlightenment, awakening people to the depth and beauty of who God is, who we are and why we’re here. It’s a great blessing.

Father, we have such a hard time believing you truly abide, live, dwell within a heart that is open to your mercy, to your credible gift of forgiveness. Our minds are so strong and justice is such a part of that. And we have a hard time moving to the heart that understands completely what this is about. It’s about love being the core of who we are, who you are, and what we’re supposed to bring to the world. No judgment, no division, simply a longing for all things to come to the fulfillment that you created them for. Bless us with this kind of faith, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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The 1st Sunday of Lent
Genesis 9:8-15 | 1 Peter 3:18-22 | Mark 1:12-15

Grant, almighty God, through the yearly observance of Holy Lent, that we may grow in understanding of the riches hidden in Christ and, by worthy contact, pursue their effects. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

Probably nothing is more reflected upon than the temptations of Jesus in the desert, and in this particular passage, we’re reminded that it happened. There’s an image there that he was in this place of conflict, I suppose. There were wild beasts there, and there were angels there. There was good; there was evil. And what is interesting to me about this moment in Jesus’ life is that it teaches us something about who he was when he began his ministry and perhaps not who he was when he was born and how he grew up exactly, but the most fascinating thing about Jesus is the years that he spent, 30 years, getting ready to understand enough, to know enough, to believe enough in what it is that God wanted him to do. And you say, “Well, wait a minute. He was God. He knew everything.” Well, yes and no. It seems clear that what we see in Jesus, and it’s the most important thing to understand the teaching of Jesus, when he came and lived on this earth, is he was like us in everything. He sort of didn’t use the divine card very much. He used it mostly because he was such a compassionate man that, when somebody was broken and needed healing, he knew he could heal, and so he would do it, even though it was a real detriment to his ministry, because he couldn’t then preach in towns. He couldn’t be in a public place without being mobbed with people who wanted nothing more than a fix and not necessarily what Jesus came to offer.

So we learn in these temptations the first and foremost thing about this God/man Jesus is he had one primary focus. I would say he had it from the time he was old enough to think, “I would like to know. I want to know the truth.” If you understand him as a human being struggling to understand that, he had to study the scriptures. He had to wonder, ask questions, pray, all those things that we do, and it brought him to a point where he realized, if there’s anything in life worth anything, it is to find what is true. That was his passion. That was his longing, and when you think about that, you say, “Well, what is it about this very core issue? Why is it so important?” Well, because there is this plan of God. There is this thing called life. We’re not in charge of it. We don’t have much to do at all about how we’re born and how we grow up and the process we go through. It’s all, in a sense, outside of our control. So if there is this life that has meaning and purpose, and that’s the second temptation that Jesus endured, which is, “How do I even know this is true? How do I even believe? What do I base this on?” Trust in the one who created him, trust in God. Two of the biggest things that we learn from the temptations of Jesus is to believe that there is a truth, that when we find it, when we understand it, when we surrender to it, it brings life to us and to the world. And we have this conviction there is someone who knows that truth who is communicating to us that the essence of it and the work of life is to be engaged in this work of pursuing, over and over again, “What does this mean? What is this for?” And what those two things empower us to do is the third temptation. He was shown the world in all of its magnificence, all of its power, all of its glory and genius and all that, and he just looked at that when he realized that that isn’t necessarily in any way, shape or form, the world that God has created for you and for me, and it’s not even attractive. And he knows that if you do it, you’re worshiping, you’re giving your life over to a lie. That’s one of the best ways to describe the devil. He lies over and over and over and over again to you and to me about what is, who we are, who God is. So nothing seems more important than these things.

So if we want to look then at this journey each of us is on and how it unfolds, I think it’s interesting that scripture is the one core thing we go to, but it’s also a story that happened in history, and it’s a way of understanding what’s happened up until this point, how God worked, how he evolved, how he changed, how he grew, how we have grown and changed. But there’s something more that is more than scripture, and that is the indwelling presence of God. He answers our prayers. He doesn’t just say, “If you want an answer, go to scripture.” Scripture will give you answers, but more — the thing about scripture to me is it’s the truth. It has truth all through it, but it has to be read as it was intended to be read, and it’s a story of a God who grew and changed and evolved and developed and about human beings who are going through the same process. Isn’t it interesting that God reveals himself as a God who changes? In a way, well, that doesn’t make any sense, does it? God is everything. Well, the God in scripture is not necessarily the God who is in that moment, because what you’re looking at is a story of a relationship, God relating to human beings. And when you think about that, all right, how would you do that? He could do a miracle thing and just make everybody understand and puff. That’s just not the plan. He wants us to discover him. He wants us to understand him. He wants us to surrender to what it is that he’s calling us into, because it’s so rich and full if we can see it for what it is. So there’s a problem, I think, with going to scripture to understand who especially God the Father is, because the fullness of God the Father is in Jesus the Son. That’s the fullness of God the Father. What we had before that is God, but it’s a God who is trying to convince a group of people that he is one of the gods, and if he’s going to convince people that he’s a God they’ve never heard of — Yahweh, who’s that — then he has to sort of explain himself and say, “This is what I do.” So he has to do the same things that the other gods do. So he’s powerful. That’s the biggest thing about gods. They were always the ones who could do anything, and they had a kind of temperament that they get easily angered, and if they didn’t like what human beings were doing, they would destroy them, or they would punish them. And God reveals himself as that kind of God in the Old Testament, and probably the strangest thing, in a way, when you think about the God who we now know, that was revealed in Jesus, for that God to look at human beings and say, “They are just a bunch of nobody’s. I so regret making the world, this beautiful world.” He said, “I just hate it. I’m just going to destroy everybody.” Well, that’s a typical god statement to people that gets their attention, that says, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to do what he’s saying. I’ve got to please this God. I’ve got to please him by my performance. Otherwise I’ll be destroyed.” That image comes up over and over and over again in scripture.

Look at the time when — the story that’s in the first reading, of Noah. He looked at everybody that he created, animals, beautiful — even the earth. He said, “I’m going to destroy everything I’ve made. I just regret doing it. I feel awful.” Does that make any logical sense that the God who created this world, and it’s all very good, that would look at it and say, “It’s all very bad, and I’m going to destroy it”? So what’s the story about? It’s about a tiny seed in people’s imaginations, that this God, who is like all the other gods, has a weakness, a kind of Achilles’ heel. He can’t stand, in a way, to be a destructive God. He is that, but then at the same time, he kind of melts when somebody presents to him some other alternative, like, “Maybe you should trust in what you created more. Maybe you should be a nicer God.” The other story that’s so powerful and so effective is when Moses had gone up to Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments, the core of what is in the Old Testament. That’s the heart of the Old Testament, these laws that reveal God’s nature and our nature and what we have to do in order to live in harmony with God and one another. We have to acknowledge God, who he is, and use him for what he wants us to use him for, not for pain, not for punishment but for goodness. He wants us to not have any other God but him. He wants us to be compassionate and caring for one another. So three commandments about how we relate to God, seven commandments how we relate to one another: that’s the wisdom. And he gives this great gift, and the Israelites have been irritating him anyway all along, which is interesting. He called them stiff-necked, but basically, when he came down, he was so furious that he decided — he told Moses, “Well, I’m going to destroy all the Israelites. They’re disgusting. I hate it when they don’t do what I tell them to do, and my hate turns to vengeance, and my vengeance turns to destruction, and I’m going to kill them.” That’s the God that reveals himself in the Old Testament, and it lingers as a bad smell in people’s imaginations of God. They really fear that that is who he is. And you can take any natural tragedy, anything, and people will say, “I think God is punishing us for doing something that we shouldn’t have done. He’s upset. He’s angry. We’d better shape up.” That’s the antithesis of the relationship God ultimately has planned for you and me and God, God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, the creator, the revealer and the empowerer. But that wasn’t there in the Old Testament. It couldn’t be there, because people weren’t ready.

I think it’s so important to understand something about human nature. When I used to think about people like Abraham and Adam and Eve, whatever, you think about these creatures. You think they’re kind of like us. They would be pretty intelligent, and so therefore, everybody back then must have been pretty intelligent and evolved. Five thousand years ago? What do you think the basic understanding of human beings was toward things like love and forgiveness and patience and forgiveness and all? They were more primitive, and primitive man may seem like then man is evil. But primitive human beings were just primitive. That’s what they are. They were just growing out of chimpanzees, and a lot of people don’t like that idea that we came, naturally evolved from nature. It doesn’t mean that God didn’t do it. God created us. Everything that is, is created by God, but the fact that he did it in a way that implies that there’s a need for time and effort and work in order to grow and evolve into who we ultimately were meant to be — we were made good. God says that in Genesis, but the goodness in human beings is like a seed, like a tiny seed, and it can be overshadowed by anything that is more primitive. You look at some of the things that human beings have done in the past, genocide or even racism, anything, people that murder, sociopaths. What is that? It’s a constant reminder that human beings without understanding who they are and surrendering to a power greater than then are not going to be able to evolve into who they were intended to be. We were never meant to be without God in us. That was never the plan, but it took 3,000 years before the call of — well, before, let’s say, the story of Adam and Eve, the call of Abraham 2,000 years before Christ. It took thousands of years to get people ready for the fullness of who God is, and the God who is, is irresistible when you see him, believe in him, know who he is. He is so much on your side and my side and wants so much for us to be freed of that lower nature within us, and we are all engaged in this work. In fact, to me it seems like that is the work of human beings, to grow and evolve and help each other to grow and evolve into the creatures that God intended us to be. And if we want to know what that creature looks like, look at Christ. Look at the man filled with patience and the capacity to suffer what is necessary in order to do the work that we’re called to do. It’s our choice to surrender to that.

We talk about understanding and knowing the truth. Well, I don't know that we’ll ever know the truth in the sense of understanding exactly why it’s this way and exactly what’s going on all the time. That’s not — to know the truth is more to surrender to the way things are. The truth is reality, the reality of your life right now, what’s going on. That’s real, and 90 percent of that is there for — all of it, in a sense, is there for you. And so do you understand why or how it’s going to end up and all that? No, it’s just a knowing deep inside that — there is truth in reality and what’s unfolding. And what’s unfolding is for us, always for us, and it brings us into a place of greater awareness and consciousness. That’s the reason we exist, and when one person grows in consciousness, everyone else around them is lifted up. There’s always been a small group of people who have got the message. It’ll probably always be that way. They’ll be the ones that are far, far above everybody else. They’re called mystics and the saints and great philosophers and physicists and all that. They’re gifted with insight into the way things are, and those are the unique people that God uses like avatars. They’re there, and they lift the whole human race up. And none was more powerful than Jesus. He was the one that lifted up people more than anyone else as he described God who is in us as we are and the world as it’s intended to be. Without him, we would still be living under a frightening, judgmental and angry God, but God slowly, not all of a sudden in Jesus, but slowly revealed himself in story after story after story. And there was always this hope in Isaiah that was so unbelievably important. The God who is, is not a tyrant. The God who is, is a servant God, and that’s what we find in Jesus, God the servant.

Father, you have a longing in your heart for union, communion with each of us. So many things are hard for us to understand. So many things are hard for us to surrender to, and yet you ask us to do this for you and for us, for one another. So bless us with that grace that is there that we will long for it. It’s our wanting it that is so crucial and so important; our believing that it’s there to be found. Bless us with this kind of faith and trust and the ability to decide and to live a life that is not in any way, shape, or form a lie. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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The 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jonah 3:1-5, 10 | 1 Corinthians 7:29-31 | Mark 1:14-20

Keep your family safe, O Lord, with unfailing care that relying solely on the hope of heavenly grace they may be defended always through your protection. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

One of the fascinating things about the Gospel of Mark that we are focusing on during this liturgical cycle is the way in which he reveals a part of Jesus that’s fascinating. The fascinating part was his relationship with demons. The fact that Jesus knew them and they knew him, what does that teach us? What does that say? I will put this whole idea of Jesus dealing with demons in the context of one of the core teachings that Jesus came to reveal, and it’s the incarnation. God of the Old Testament was the God of the Father. He was the strongest, most powerful figure who ever could exist, and he had a side to him that was demanding in a sense. God the Father was the one who said, “This is what I ask of you. This is what I expect of you.” He got disappointed at times at his whole creation. He at one time wanted to destroy all humanity and then found one family, Noah’s family, and said, “Okay, I’ll work with them.” But there’s a hardness, in a way, to God the Father when he’s demanding that we become what we’re intended to be, and we’re having such a hard time with that throughout Old Testament times. So there was always this conflict between the God who says, “Do this,” and you don’t, and so he says, “Okay, I’m going to destroy you.” So think of that as not the fullness of God but the beginning of human beings, who have strong egos, coming against something that is greater than they are, and it’s asking that they do certain things in order to receive God’s favor, God’s protection. But then there’s something more that God had planned to reveal. He isn’t just that God. He’s also a God that is human, and there we get to the heart of the mystery of who Jesus is, this image that he is the one that comes to reveal the fullness of who God is, and God is both human and divine. How can that be, God being human and divine? But that’s who the Son of God is.

So we have God the Father who worked with us and then God the Son who is part human. So what’s the difference? Well, the image is that this fullness of God is so much more sympathetic and empathetic about what it’s like to be human. His whole notion of who he is, is, “I want to be a part of your life, and when I see your faults and your weaknesses, I’ll take care of those for you. I’ll get rid of those. Those are the things that kept you from my Father, but I am going to take care of that so that you don’t have to think about that. Just trust me to be a part of you. Let me come and be in you.” The ego has a really hard time with that, that this God is the God who wants to come and be a part of us, because the thing about humanity is — and you can learn this from the book of the Old Testament, the Genesis book where it says, “This is what human beings did when God said, ‘I’d like to join you and be a part of you and take care of you,” and they said, “Well, we like that idea.” But basically the story of Adam and Eve is human nature, when it’s told, does it want to do things on its own or does it want someone to help them, they say — the ego just knows to say, “I can take care of this.” So the great sin of our original parents, in a sense, is the sin of saying, “I as a human being can deal with all that God requires and all that God asks, and I myself, I will be able to accomplish it.” But that’s not God’s plan. God made human beings, in a sense, incapable of becoming who he intends them to be without his indwelling presence, a great mystery. God had to reveal himself as one who has the potential to live inside of you and me, and in that indwelling presence, he offers the ego a balancing agent. It’s called God’s favor — God’s favor. What does that mean? Imagine that there is someone that meets you in your life, or you meet someone, and you fall in love with them, and you want to be there for them. You want to be with them. You want to know everything about them. You want to be a part of them. That’s God’s favor. That’s a good description of God has the same intense desire to be in an intimate relationship with every single one he created, and he does that, not because he decided that would be a good idea, but because human beings are made in such a way that, without that, they become like Job in the first reading.

The story of Job is fascinating, because it’s a deal with the devil and Job where the devil comes and says, “You love God, and God is such a good God because he gives you everything he wants, and he gives you everything you need. So the reason you love him is because he gives you everything you want. Is that really love? Would you love God if he didn’t show his favor to you and give you such a beautiful family and such success in the world?” And Job says, “Yeah, I think I can.” But the interesting thing about the story of Job is, when you see him without God’s favor, even though it was a very materialistic way of favor-showing in that story, he’s depressed. He’s anxious. He’s sleepless. He’s in bad shape. He doesn’t do well without favor, and that’s a beautiful image of human beings who are made for this gift of God’s indwelling favor. When we’re left with just the ego, the ego has two directions it goes in. It knows how to achieve and be the best. At the same time, it looks at our humanity and accuses us of being the worst possible creatures we could ever be. The ego either is building us up into these incredibly powerful, perfect people, or we’re trash. And when you think about it, human beings are not made to live in that kind of tension. They’re made for a partnership with love, with favor, with some Spirit that’s inside of him taking care of him. So that means to me that the essence of the revelation of God in Jesus is that human beings are destined to be in a relationship like Jesus where they have God in them, and they also have their humanity in them. And the two of them remain separate, but they have to be one. They have to be in union. They have to be in communication.

So let’s go back then to the work of the devil, the evil one. The evil one is so opposed to the work and plan of God, and if the plan of God is that he lives within us and is the source of the balance that we need to be able to achieve the role that we have in the world — and that role is both for us and for others — he wants us to be in this world and enjoy it. He wants peace and joy to be part of who we are in this world. He’s not interesting in us being in pain, yet pain is part of it, because pain does this mysterious thing of deepening us and changing us. But no, he wants us happy. He wants us full of the joy of this beautiful thing God has given us, even though it’s flawed and broken and has all kinds of evil in it. Fundamentally the world that God has created is beautiful and good, and we are destined to participate in that and be reflections of that, to be good, because we have this incredible gift of God’s favor that overcomes our ego’s, what I call it, duality that either throws us into perfection, and we become egomaniacs, or we’re wallowing in the same thing that Job, in the first reading, is wallowing in. So for balance, we need to integrate divinity. So the devil’s plan would be to keep those two things separate. So Jesus comes into the world, and when he starts driving demons out, they have this interesting way of saying, “Wait a minute. I know who you are. You’re the Son of God.” And Jesus said, “Shut up. Don’t say that.” Why didn’t Jesus want people to know that he was the Son of God? Because he was the Son of God, but what he did, it says in scripture, he pocketed his divinity. He didn’t play the divine card. He played the human card. He wanted to show people what it’s like to live with God in you, God’s favor as a human being, and so it was essential for him to say, “When you see me, you see who you are meant to be. You see who you’re supposed to become.” Now, we’re never going to become God like Jesus was God, but we participate in divinity. So he didn’t want to come onto the scene and act like a God, meaning he could have changed every — he could have destroyed everybody who was in his way. He could have done spectacular things. He could have done miracle after miracle and got everybody to believe in him, and they would have believed in a miracle worker, that they were supposed to be like God. And we’re not destined to be like, in that sense, God. We’re destined to be in a connection, in a deep, intimate union with divinity that balances our humanity and makes us these incredibly valuable, in a way, joyous, at the same time, struggling human beings. So when the devil is screaming out, “Hey, claim your divinity,” Jesus says, “No. No, I won’t. I can’t do that, because I will not be able to effect the change in people if I act like God, because they’re not going to be gods, but they’re going to be filled with my favor. And I’m acting as if a human being — that I’m a human being filled with God’s favor. So I’m going to be able to deal with all the struggles, all the disappointments, all the pain of life. I’m going to take it on and show you there’s a way to deal with all that pain. If you have God’s favor in you, you can do it. So then there’s a — look then at the devil saying, “Okay well, if I can’t get divinity to be the obstacle to you connecting with Jesus, then maybe I’ll work on you.” So what he does — and the devil’s voice is constantly pounding us with the same kind of thing. Instead of saying, like the devil said to Jesus, “You’re God. You’re God,” you know what he says to us? “You’re human. You’re just nothing but a human. You’re a broken, stupid, ugly human. That’s all you are.” It’s called shame. If he can get us to think only about our humanity, then he’s doing the same thing with Jesus, who is a man. He’s saying, “Play on your divinity. Do the divinity thing.” No, it’s got to be divinity and humanity. Jesus was, as a man, tempted to use his divinity to be spectacular, but he didn’t. It was one of the first temptations in the desert. “Do spectacular things. Turn stones into bread. Everybody will believe in you.” He said, “No, I’m not here to do that. I’m here to feed people the truth, to be fed on the truth. The truth is I’m divine and human. I want human beings to be that, both.” So the devil attacks our union with divinity by telling us we’re not worthy. He tempts God to say he’s more than human.

How do we deal with this mysterious thing of integrating humanity and divinity inside of us? You do it by simply acknowledging two very simple things. What’s God’s plan? God’s plan is that we live a full, wonderful life here, but in our humanity, we can’t accomplish that on our own. So his plan is that he will enter into us and give us a sense of what it’s like to live in our brokenness, experiencing it, being depressed at times but knowing, believing that, in all of that, there is this power, this mysterious power that can lift us from the depth of depression and shame and anger and bitterness, and it’s called favor. It’s called love, believing that there’s this divine power inside of you, inside of me that’s saying over and over again, in the midst of our experiencing nothing but our failures, he’s saying, “You’re loved. You’re forgiven. You’re redeemed. You’re my beloved.” It’s amazing what we can do with our broken humanity and that divine, incredible affirmation. It balances. It brings life and peace.

Father, it’s amazing. You’ve given us something to do that’s beyond our capacity, to integrate two things that are very different, separate in our mind, to imagine that they’re one. Our mind understands separation. Our heart understands unity. Move us to our heart so we can embrace a mystery as profound as your divinity living inside of our broken humanity, and help us to be consoled by this mysterious presence of your affirmation, your love, your favor. Without it, we’re dangerous. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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The 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jonah 3:1-5, 10 | 1 Corinthians 7:29-31 | Mark 1:14-20

Grant us, Lord our God, that we may honor you with all our mind and love everyone in truth of heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

This is the year of Mark, and we have the beginning of the ministry of Jesus described in the experience of Mark. And what he’s opening us up to and what he wants us to understand is how different, how different this time is when Jesus entered the world and became the prophet that was promised, that we had a whole new way of hearing who God is and what God longs for us. There’s an Old Testament and a New Testament. They’re both essential for us to understand, but there must be a transition from the old to the new, which is not always easy. I see in the opening prayer a reflection of both testaments. In the Old Testament, we honor God with all our mind. We listen to him. We recognize who he is. He created us, and he teaches us about justice. And the mind understands justice. It’s an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It makes sense to the mind. It works, and what we see so much in the Old Testament is that God reveals himself as one who is there to teach us about who we are and how we should treat one another. And it begins with the most basic level of evolution of human beings from self-centered human beings to other-centered where in the middle of that place is a place of justice. We understand that we have an obligation to be fair, and the mind understands fairness. That’s why it is — it is sort of made for justice, but also, in a way, the mind is made for revenge, because that’s a way of imagining justice. Someone does something bad to you; you can do something bad back to them. And in a way, that’s what God describes himself as in the Old Testament.

Listen to this first reading. The first reading is about God, who is saying, “All right, you people are asking for something more. You don’t really want to hear my voice directly.” I love that image, because one of the things that is interesting about God’s voice, in the minds of the early followers of Jesus, is it’s a harsh voice. It’s a scary voice. It has fire in it. And so they’re saying, “We’d rather have somebody reach us that understands a little bit more about who we are and isn’t so harsh on us.” And so God said, “Okay, I will do that for you.” But listen to the way he describes giving them a prophet who is like them, who would be more compassionate and understanding of what it means to be human, but you’ll still hear something in that Old Testament passage that’s so perfect for you to realize what the Old Testament is really trying to do for people: give them a sense of obligation to a power greater than them, that if they displease this power, that power gets angry and punishes. So listen to what he said. “You want this prophet? Okay, I’ll send you one, but if you don’t listen to the prophet I’m sending, I’ll take care of you. I will hold it against you.” That’s what’s implied, but then he’s still harsher on the prophet. He said, “If you’re a prophet and you prophesy in my name but you’re not really teaching what I told you to teach, I’ll kill you. I’ll get rid of you. I’ll destroy you.” Now, I know I’m saying that rather dramatically, but still, I’m trying to give you a sense of how people would have listened to this, how they heard it. You’d say what God is really saying is that, “A prophet that isn’t able to do what I’ve given him to do will no longer be a prophet.” That’s a death, but I think you really have to look at the Old Testament and see how it impacts people to know that there’s a God in the Old Testament that is someone that needs to be feared, and if you don’t do what he says, he is going to crush you, send you to hell forever. And that isn’t who God is. It’s a part of God, because the God of the Old Testament that speaks to the mind is speaking to things like logic and justice. And that’s where we began, and that’s how we evolved slowly from that. So in a way, the Old Testament had to be what it was in order to reach the people that it was destined to reach. It worked. It needed to be what it was. But I think, back to that opening prayer, it also said, along with honoring God with our minds, we have to love everyone in truth of heart. Notice, the Old Testament is about honoring God, worshiping him, doing things for him. The New Testament is more about how we treat one another.

So we are called in the New Testament to a new way of seeing. Our eyes are opened to a truth, and the truth resides in our heart. And what the heart is made for, it goes beyond justice. It’s called mercy, understanding, compassion, forgiveness. The two really do work together. One is the foundation. The other is the perfection of that foundation, and so as much as we’re called to being people who do what they’re told and obey the truth, we’re also called to be instruments of something that goes way beyond truth — well, maybe say way beyond justice but enters into the depth of truth. And the truth is we are human beings made in God’s image, and the fullness of the image of God is revealed in Jesus. And Jesus is the one who comes into the world without an intention of judging and condemning those who are not who they are but loving those who are not who they are so that they can be transformed. Justice frees the innocent and can only punish the guilty. Mercy can free the innocent but also free the guilty by not punishing them but transforming them.

Listen to the second reading with this image of Old Testament/New Testament. It’ll help you, because Paul is caught — he was a Pharisee, and he was caught in a lot of the Old Testament. I mean — caught in it, he was trained in it. You just don’t all of a sudden become somebody radically different because God enters your life. You still have a part of you that lives in the past, and we still have that ourselves, a part that’s more selfish, more self-centered. We live with it. It doesn’t go away, but we learn how to be different than that. We’re empowered to be different than that. But listen to the way Paul is imagining Jesus coming back again. He’s coming back next week maybe or the week after, and so he’s saying, “We should be paying attention to that.” But what I find interesting is he’s saying, “What God would really like is for you to give him your full attention. Just make him the only concern you have and ignore the people around you. Don’t pay attention to your relationships. Pay attention to God.” Now, that is just so interesting when you think about it, because that would be the antithesis of the New Testament. A mystic, St. Catherine of Siena, once asked, “How can I love you, God? How can I love you? I want to love you more and more and more.” And he said, “I don’t need that kind of love from you, but the way you would please me, the way you would be who I want you to be is love each other. Then you’re showing me that you’ve become who I’ve called you to be through my love for you and my acceptance of you as you are. And do that for each other, because I want you to pay more attention to your love of your neighbor than for me,” not in the sense of saying the two don’t go together, but a lot of people go around saying, “I love God, but I hate my neighbor,” and Jesus calls them liars. You can’t do that. If you love God, you are — no. If you are loved by God, understand his mercy and his acceptance, you will have that thing for your brothers and sisters. it’s just natural. It just flows that way.

So let’s go to the heart of the gospel. Jesus comes into the world, and he is the prophet that was promised. He’s the one that’s going to change the world, and when he comes in, he astounds the people that are listening to him, because he has something different than the scribes and Pharisees. What do we know about the scribes and Pharisees? They were hypocrites. They were saying what was right, but they weren’t living what was called for, and you know what that’s like. Those crazy-making people in your life that act and speak the truth, but in reality, they’re anything but the truth. They’re liars, and they’re users, but they speak the right language. Jesus has something that is essential for anyone who is going to be in the world affecting change for the good, and that is authenticity, another word, authority. He’s living the truth, not a lie. Truth has one major impact on the people that are engaged in it. It unifies, makes one. The opposite of truth is lies, and lies are always going to have a profound effect on those that are engaged in it, and it will be separation and isolation. When you find out somebody’s been lying to you, it immediately separates you from them. It’s a very, very frightening experience to have someone in your life that you’ve trusted and find out that they’re not telling you the truth, and the relationship then becomes deeply, deeply damaged and, in a sense, divided. And the only thing that can unify it again is forgiveness and understanding, but the forgiveness and understanding is offered only because it can be effective in changing someone. If the person doesn’t change, the relationship can’t exist.

So here is Jesus coming into the world and revealing himself as different, and the difference is authority, authenticity. And what does that mean? His intention. Intention is felt from someone. Your intention is something that we underestimate, because if you have an intention to be with someone and to give them life versus you’re with someone and you want to impress them or use them or demand from them something that you need, the difference of that is the difference between authenticity and being a fake. So what are we looking at here? We’re saying Jesus comes into the world with an authentic heart who has an intention that all he wants to do is bring people to life. And how is he going to do that? How is he going to bring people then to life? Speak the truth. Okay, when he speaks the truth for the first time, in the Gospel of Mark, what does Mark say that is the first sign for the disciples to watch? Because the disciples were told by Jesus, “Follow me. Watch me. See what I do.” The first experience in Mark’s gospel is they’re watching him walk into a synagogue, into a holy place, and in that place, there is a liar, someone possessed, someone with an unclean spirit. And the fascinating thing about this passage is that that unclean spirit knows instantly that Jesus has power over him, and he said, “I know who you are, and you’re here to destroy us, right?” I think that’s so fascinating. When you think about it, here’s a human being speaking in the name of evil. That means evil has a way of becoming a part of us where we’re not even aware that it is the source of things, but whenever something comes out of the core of our being that is designed to destroy, to use, to abuse, it’s evil. Not that I’m saying we are evil, but the evil is in us. That’s something I want to try to get to in this homily if I can, that we are this strange combination of good and evil, selfishness and self-centeredness. We’ve got to embrace it all. It is part of the work of being an integrated human being. We’re not good or bad. We’re both. So here it is, this unclean spirit recognizing that a person who has the intention of nothing but love is so intolerant to evil that their very presence shakes them and destroys them. So when the disciples see a man who comes into the world, who they believe is the Messiah, and they see that he is filled with something called truth, called love, called mercy, the minute he comes into contact with evil, evil knows it is busted. It is destroyed. Imagine the power we have when we stay in the truth, in love and in mercy, to overcome the influence of evil. Evil can’t stand to be around love and mercy. It lives in hearts and minds that are bent on revenge and anger and fear. So we have this new teaching with authority.

So his fame begins to spread everywhere, and if you continue in the Gospel of Mark, and we probably will as the next couple of readings, but what is interesting is not only does he show that he has power over evil, but he is able to heal people of distress and disease. So from this experience he goes and heals Peter’s mother-in-law. Then all the neighbors come, and they line up outside, saying, “Here’s a man who can heal us.” It’s just like the lines for vaccines. It’s like they were here. “I want this man. I want him to give me whatever he has so that I can be immune from the infection of evil and revenge and hatred.” I love the fact — it’s so human for Jesus when I think about it. So he’s there, and he’s exhausted by the end of the night, and so the next morning, all these people are lined up. And he slipped away at night and goes away to pray, like he’s saying, “All right, I have this power, but I’m here to give it to you to do it to each other. I’m not going to be the source always with you to do it. “ It’s not going to reside in one or two persons who have a role in religion that is going to save the world. No, it’s religious people being truly prophetic and awakening people to the power that’s in them, called love and mercy, that transforms the world. The world is never going to be changed from the top down. It’s going to be changed from the bottom up. That’s the way it works. Each individual representing this awesome new power that God is giving to human beings by creating the prophet Jesus, who is nothing more than the example of what you and I are to become. We are the incarnation of Jesus in the sense that we are like him, meaning divinity lives in us doing its work, and we still remain human, broken, filled with all kinds of negativity. But that’s the way it’s supposed to be, and that’s the way it works.

Father, your invitation for us to be instruments of your love, your mercy, your forgiveness to our brothers and sisters is often something that seems too difficult, but when we accept our humanity and its weaknesses and still know that you can work through us with your love, then we are safe and sure and confident in this work. It is you through us that brings life to others, not ourselves. As we grow in that knowledge, we will grow in the joy of watching those around us be touched by your mercy and your love. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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The 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jonah 3:1-5, 10 | 1 Corinthians 7:29-31 | Mark 1:14-20

Almighty and everliving God, direct our actions according to your good pleasure that, in the name of your Beloved Son, we may abound in good works. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

As we begin this ordinary time of the year, we’re going to be reflecting, as we always do, year after year, on the ministry of this God/man Jesus, and probably one of the most tragic things that happens is we take the Old Testament, with its focus on justice, focus on punishing the evil and rewarding the good — we take that way of God working with people in the Old Testament, and we continue to carry it over in the New Testament. And we don’t listen to the heart of the message of Jesus, and we end up living in a world of justice. A world of justice basically looks at evil and hates what it does and condemns it and punishes for it, and it’s so hard for the church and for all of us to believe that that is not the way that God is fully revealing who he is. It’s not the thing that we should be living in any longer, and I love that one phrase from the Old Testament reading that’s just so strong.

We all know the story of Jonah, the reluctant prophet who didn’t really want to see the Ninevites change. He’s a perfect example of the thinking of the Old Testament: bad people need to be punished; good people need to be rewarded. And so when basically Jonah was so anxious to see the Ninevites pay for their evil that, when God said, “Ask them to change, but tell them, if they don’t change, that I will destroy them, and use that as a motive of fear and see if they change.” And Jonah was hoping that they wouldn’t, but they did. But then the most interesting thing that God says about that action that he did, that he convinced people to no longer do what they were doing, because he threatened them with destruction, he calls that evil. This is the line. “When God saw, by their actions, they turned from their evil ways, he repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them.” He repented of the evil he had threatened to do to them. Does that mean God sinned, and now he’s sorry? No. What he’s revealing in that statement is the God who is, the God who fully reveals himself in Jesus is a lover, a forgiver, not a judge, not a condemner, and he will always, always find a way to accept the shadow that we’re in and long to change it. But he no longer requires that we be the ones that change it. Fear is the great motive for self-change, but what God is trying to initiate in all of us, through the coming into a human being and speaking the way he spoke to us, he’s saying, “I don’t expect you to change yourself. I will change you.” Redemption is the change. The Holy Spirit descending into you, illuminating your eyes to see the reality of a life that you’re called to live and to know that there’s a purpose for evil. There’s a reason for sin, and it’s not to be punished or to be controlled or to be crushed. It’s to be surrendered to and embraced. Wow. Does that make sense? Not if you’re living in the Old Testament.

Look at the reading from the gospel, and what it’s really saying is that, when Jesus came into the world, what he did, he was calling his followers, and he was calling them by saying, “Look, I want you to come and stay with me. Dwell with me. Hang out with me.” That was the interesting thing that Jesus was doing. The Old Testament, God was someone who needed to be listened to and then followed, obeyed. Now it’s not so much a God to listen to but a God to see, to watch, to be in his presence. Jesus is God incarnate. So in the New Testament, we have an experience not of a message from God that we have to listen to and obey but the presence of God that enters into us and that changes us. The disciples spent three years, three long years, with Jesus, and at the end, they were still confused, doubted him, expected him to do something that he didn’t really do. They thought he’d be a great political leader. They thought he’d put them in a special position. They were caught in the Old Testament image of life and power and control, and they had no idea what they were being invited into. And when did it change? When did they finally see? Two things happened. One, Jesus came and told them what it was. Imagine, he dies, and he comes back. And the first thing he says to his followers is, “Don’t be afraid of what’s just happened. You’ve doubted me. You’ve done the worst thing you could possibly do to me. You ran. You hid. You weren’t there for me, except for John was.” So he’s saying, “Look, that isn’t the issue. The issue that you failed me is not the issue. The issue is that just look at what you did. Accept what you did. It’s normal to do what you did. It’s human nature to do what you did, but what I’m telling you is that I’m going to enter into you, and my Spirit coming into you is going to forgive you in the way that forgiveness really works. It isn’t just that your sin is written off. No, forgiveness is that your eyes are opened to see the reason why we struggle with evil.”

Why do we struggle with it? Why didn’t God just erase it? Well, he didn’t, because there’s a teaching that’s so clear if you look at the life of Jesus. What did he really do? We mentioned it last week. He went through a process of surrendering to a plan that looked very much like evil was destroying this human being’s God figure, and so we see that evil was there to destroy the message of Jesus. But what it really did — they tried to destroy him, but you can’t destroy God, nor can you destroy the truth, nor can you destroy the Spirit of God that’s in you and in me. And so when someone attacks that truth and wisdom inside of you, what it is, it’s the opportunity for you to realize, “Wait a minute. If something is attacking this essence of the message of Jesus, then something is out of balance. There’s a division inside of me. There’s a part of me that believes that I’m forgiven, and I will be changed. There’s a part of me that believes that I’m responsible for all my actions, and if I do something wrong, I deserve to be punished, and I find myself hating myself, hating other people that don’t do what they do.” That’s the hangover from the Old Testament.

So how can I convince you in this short homily of the importance of knowing what it is that God has done by dying on the cross and forgiving, making up for all our sins? He is forgiveness, and forgiveness means that he has this really unique way of looking at you and looking at me and seeing you as both a combination of goodness and evil. And I’ll tell you one thing really clearly that you need to remember is grace, God’s Spirit, is always about unification. When you live in the world of evil and the world of justice, let’s say — not that justice is evil, but it’s incomplete. But you live in that world, then basically what you’re going to do is you’re going to see evil as the enemy that needs to be cut out of you, not surrendered to, not accepted, but cut out of you, hated. And what do you do if you’re given a challenge to do something that only God can do? What’s going to happen? Well, you pretend it’s happening. You pretend you can do it. What do I mean? Let’s take this as a principle. Every human being has a light and a darkness in them. It’s just human nature. The darkness comes maybe because it’s inherited from our ancestors. A lot of times it’s because we’ve been wounded by the people who raised us and the world that we live in, not that it’s done intentionally, but we get caught up in all kinds of lies and illusions. All right? So we are a human being who has both positive and negative qualities. Now, what Jesus is saying is, “I look at you and see you that way, and I forgive automatically everything in you that’s not what it should be. I don’t let your sins separate me from you. I’m here for union and communion. My forgiveness is I accept you totally as you are. That means I’m constantly pouring affirmation and love into you.” And guess what happens? In that process, there comes about a way, a wisdom that I can’t describe how it works exactly, but when you decide the evil in you is not something that makes you feel unworthy of being in the presence of others, when you stop letting evil rob you of the peace of what it means to be loved by God, when you stop that, you enter into this place of light and wholeness, unity. The fact that you have a dark side and light side does not mean that you are schizophrenic or that there’s something wrong with you. It’s means you’re human, and if you can accept that part of your humanity and take the part that’s not what it should be and say, “I can’t change this. I can see it. You can show it to me, and I can recognize it as evil, and I can own it,” then you can change it. Then you can change it, because the only person that can change our nature like that is the divine nature of God, and the only way he can do it is if you allow him to do it. And you can’t allow him to do it unless you accept it as part of yourself and know that you’re loved in spite of it.

So this idea of repentance is very, very important to understand. Repentance is a change of heart that’s based on an opening of our consciousness and our awareness of what is real, and when we see things as they are and we accept them without self-judgment and condemnation, then we are in a new place — a new place. And we regret — that’s the word. Repent means to regret. We regret the disunity that we allowed to happen within us by looking at one part of us and hating it, looking at the other part of us and saying, “Oh, I’m wonderful.” We’re both. Forgiveness gives us the opportunity to be one with our shortcomings and our failings, not to say they’re okay but to say, “They’re part of me. They’re not me. They’re a part of me. They’re a part of my human nature, and what I need to do is to know that I can’t change that.” The only way I can really change myself is to say, “I will destroy that part of myself.” And then you can’t really destroy part of yourself, because the shadow is part of the gift. So if you try to destroy your shadow, you’re going to destroy part of your virtuous life. And how do you pretend to destroy it? How do you do it? Denial. “I don’t have that part in me. There’s nothing dark in me.” Notice people when you try to point out a weakness that they have, and if they say, “Yeah, I know. I’m just really a mess. I’ve done that all my life, and I’m really — I don't know — trying to get out of it, but I can’t,” versus somebody that says, “What are you talking about? There’s nothing in me that’s like that. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Denial. If you’re denying part of yourself, you’re dividing yourself, and then sin has done its wicked work. You’re living in a world of duality where you accept the part of you that’s wonderful, and you reject the part of you that’s not. You live in this tension. You live in self-hatred, refusal to forgive, and you can’t find peace, because when you don’t accept evil, it controls you, and you will be divided. And the interesting thing — it’s one thing to say, “Well, I hate myself for evil, but I accept everybody else.” No, you don’t. Nobody is going to treat themselves differently than they treat others. If you look at your weaknesses and your sins as if they are the things that should not be there and you hate them and you want to destroy them and you do it by denying them, you are in the classic state that we all get caught up in. And that is living in a time of freedom and love and acceptance and blocking it and not allowing it to enter into us. What a tragedy not to believe that I’m loved in my imperfection, not to believe that I’m forgiven before I even do anything wrong, not to believe that the love of God and the acceptance of God is the transformation stuff. It’s the energy of transformation. It will change you permanently. The other is fear and hatred of a part of me, and I try to crush it and destroy it. And if I do that, I live in a dual world, and I never find peace. That’s the scary part.

So repentance is God’s work. Our work, open your eyes. Accept your human nature. God created it that way. He wanted it to be that way. He wants you to be indebted, in a sense, to him because of his love and how it changed you, and then you will start doing that to other people. And once you love people in their imperfection, watch them change. It’s phenomenal. Condemn them and judge them, try to get them to face it. It doesn’t work. So there’s a great, great lesson as we begin this time of reflecting on the work of Jesus. Keep in mind what he did when he died on that cross. He took away the sting of sin. It no longer is an obstacle to our being with him. In fact, it’s the key to experiencing his love.

Father, we pray that we might have the same experiences as the disciples as we go through the journey that you had with them this liturgical year.We want you to open our eyes so that we can really see how close you are to us but most especially the enormous gift of your love in spite of our weaknesses, in spite of our sins so that we can feel this affirming, transforming love that changes us and brings us not only a change of heart but a capacity to change the way we treat one another, the way we respond to evil in one another.May we respond to evil in the world.Your very gift is peace, oneness, unity.Open our heart to the way in which you’ve given us so that we might find it, experience it and share it with one another, and we ask this through Christ, our Lord, Amen.

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The 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Samuel 3:3b-10, 19 | 1 Corinthians 6:13c-15a, 17-20 | John 1:35-42

Almighty everliving God who govern all things, both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

It’s hard for me to believe that it was 60 years ago that I felt that I would like to be a priest. I don’t think I understood at all what it would be like to be a priest, but I knew somehow it had something to do with doing something that seemed valuable but, most especially, I felt would be helpful. I think if I look at the way I came into the world, I think it was that I came in and looked around and said, “Is there somebody here I can help?” It’s just the way I am, the way I’m hardwired, and what was happening at that time, which I had no idea was happening — no one really did, but in 1959, John XXIII said he was going to call a council to breathe new air into the church, to open the windows and let the Holy Spirit enter. So it was like he realized that the church had been, in a sense, closed to so many things that they needed to open their hearts to, and that’s a pretty good description of what is true for all of us and for all institutions. We get a certain understanding of the way things are, and then we don’t change. We just defend the position we’re in, and we fight those who think differently, and we protect it by trying to not let anybody else take away what we believe to be true. We’re not as open as we should be.

So one of the things that was so powerful about the things that were opened in the hearts of believers through the Vatican Council, which is what he called it, is that we were called, all of us, to be holy, and that was not something that was just for a few, not just for monks and for people that go off into the desert or into a monastery. But holiness is everybody’s right. It is what God died on the cross to give to us. He longs to be the source for you and for me to become the people we are called to be, and what we have to do in order to do that is enter into the world of holiness. Another word for that that I like to use is mysticism. Mysticism, we’re all called to be mystics, not just a few of us, all of us, and what’s a mystic? Well, the best description I can give you of mystic is in the first reading, Samuel. If you look at the context of this reading, it’s really interesting, because it says a lot about what maybe was in the heart without maybe realizing what was in the heart of the leaders of the church, particularly John XXIII, who realized, “Something is missing in this institution. We’ve got to get it back. And it was there in the beginning, but we’ve lost it. We’ve become too rigid, too legalistic, too closed to new ideas.” The thing about a mystic is that they’re the ones who have the capacity to know that God is in them, with them, for them, and they listen to him. They listen to God.

I remember once having a priest share a story with me where he said, “Somebody in the parish came to me and asked me to do something, because, they said, God told them to do that.” And he kind of laughed, like, “God doesn’t speak to people like that.” Oh yeah, he does. He does. I’m not saying that a parishioner can come and say, “You’ve got to do this, because God told me.” No, but for a person to believe that they have received a personal revelation from God is absolutely, rock bottom, Christian spirituality.

So let’s look at the story of Samuel. Samuel had a special birth. His mother was barren for a long time. She went and prayed in the temple. Eli was the priest of the temple. He was also a judge, one of the judges of the Israelite community, which is — the judges were basically kind of military leaders. They protected Israelites from all their enemies outside of them. He was also a priest, but anyway, Eli sees Hannah and thinks she’s drunk, because she’s mumbling these prayers. And basically she said, “I’ve been begging, begging God to give me a child.” And Eli says, “I believe he will.” Eli must have felt that God had spoken to him to tell her, “Yes, you’ll have a child.” She calls him Samuel, brings him back to Eli, and he’s now growing up in the temple. And he’s asleep in this story. He is in the temple asleep. I think that’s so interesting. My image of the church before Vatican II was pretty much asleep in many areas. And so he hears a voice, and he thinks it’s Eli. So he gets up each time and goes and asks Eli what he wants, and Eli is wise enough, old enough to realize, “Well, God is speaking to you.” And so this is what’s so beautiful about it. This man, who is listening and having God call him, he hears this voice, and what he’s realizing is that, “This God has an interest in me listening to what he has to tell me personally.” And that response that he had was so perfect. “You’re speaking. I’m listening. I’m listening.” That’s a mystic. To believe that God speaks is one thing, but to listen to him and then to add, “I’m your servant.” So a true mystic is one who believes that God speaks through situations all around them, that you are open to listen to what he’s saying, to interpret it and then to do whatever it is that you’re invited to do. That’s, to me, the hidden mystery of Christianity. That’s everybody’s right, to have this happen to them. It’s what we should all be aware of, sensitive to, open to, and we need to give, then, God the time to speak to us. We need to be still. We need to have a reflective life. We need to be reading things, not just on the surface, but looking for symbolic meaning behind things, not to an extreme where we’re following every little whim that comes along. No, we’re saying, “You, God, long to say something to me, and I want to hear it.”

And so what I think we hear next, in the gospel, is something very profound. We’re seeing Jesus revealing to the world and to particularly his disciples the way this whole inner voice works. The inner voice comes from God’s presence. Now, the most exciting and wonderful thing about this figure Jesus is he is God’s presence incarnate. So he’s the model of who we are to become, and you would think that this teacher, Jesus, who spent 30 years reflecting and working on it, and he wanted to work with some people the way, I think, the church would have at that time and maybe even today, said, “Well, how do we teach this to people?” Well, we’ll set up a classroom, and Jesus can live in the temple, and then the disciples can sign up and get 12 in a class. Then Jesus sits there and teaches them what they have to believe and how they should act, their moral theology, dogmatic theology. No, no. No, he does the most amazing thing. When they’re interested in him — and they asked the right question. “Where do you dwell? Who are you? Tell us something about you.” His response is, “I’m not going to talk about me. I’m going to show you. I want you to see me.” Now, compare that to what was told centuries earlier to the man in the temple. He’s sitting there, and he’s told, “Listen to me.” Now Jesus says to the disciples, “See me. Watch me. Pay attention to me, because I want you to understand something. I want you to see something that I am going to manifest for you, because that is exactly what you are going to be asked to manifest. And what is it? What did Jesus do? How did he do the work that he was doing? How did he convince anyone? Well, first of all, he didn’t convince them thoroughly. After John got it, the disciple John — but most of the disciples didn’t, couldn’t fully grasp what Jesus was trying to teach them. And what was he teaching them? “I am the model of who you are to become. You all are to be people who are filled with my spirit. My spirit is God in me, divinity in me.” So our challenge is how do you believe that God is truly in me and is manifesting himself through me, not necessarily by teaching me what to say or even what to do but empowering me to be someone. We are the presence of God. If we believe that God is in us, then his presence is in us. If his presence is in us, then it’s going to be like the presence of God in Jesus, and what was that like? Everywhere he went, he healed people. Wherever he seemed to do anything, it was so effective and powerful. He just willed to do something, and it happened. Even when he didn’t want to do it, it happened. So here’s Jesus saying, “The power of God is in you as it is in me, and it has the ability to do things beyond anything you could do with words or your will or whatever. Just trust that you are God’s presence.”

And that’s what Paul is then talking about when he talks about the body is made for something beautiful, something wonderful, something moral. What is morality? Morality goes beyond the law. Morality is a kind of ethic, a wisdom, an ethic that knows in this situation, this is what should be done, and that’s what the presence of God does through you. And I’m not trying to make this into something too weird, but that presence of God in you is so effective that you are not necessarily going to know exactly how it’s working or when it’s working. And that’s wonderful, because Jesus obviously, as a man, could have gotten caught up in his miracles and seeing himself as the great savior of the world. And maybe he did get caught up in that a little bit. He certainly was a celebrity when he entered into Jerusalem at the end of his career, but he was able to not buy into that. But it was his celebrityhood that cost him his life, because when he became so famous, that’s when the scribes and Pharisees had to get rid of him, because he was too popular, and he was too effective. And when he raised Lazarus from the dead, that was the killer. They had to kill him then, but think of it. What was he manifesting that whole time when he was with his disciples? He was manifesting the presence of his Father through his body. So it’s his presence, his presence, not his performance, his presence that changed people.

It’s the same for us. That’s exactly the mystery that I’m talking about that a mystic understands. You are — your body resonates whatever integrity is inside of you, or lack of integrity that’s inside of you comes through your body, and in a way that is almost like simply a frequency. But at the same time, it’s when people are aware of your intentions and your decisions and your actions, and they’re reading them. And when you’re reflecting divinity in those actions, because you believe it is in you and believe that he can use you in ways that you don’t even have to understand how and when, you are like the prophet who says, “I am here. I am listening. I will do whatever you ask. I will be used by you in whatever way you want.” The prophet said, “I listen.” In the New Testament, the disciples who encountered the incarnate Jesus said, “We will watch you, watch you and see what you’re doing.”

So that’s what I think Paul is really talking about when he says, “The body is not made for immorality.” Immorality would be a way of acting that goes against our very nature, our very essence. The moral choice is the right — as I said, a wise, ethical choice, and when we are making those choices and we witness that kind of choosing in front of people, we are so effective, very effective in achieving the goal for which we came. We’re here to help. We’re here to heal one another, and if you work solely on performance and that’s a shadow of any official religious person or in any person that claims to be Christian — “I’m performing moral acts all the time for the reason, maybe, that I want to seem pretty wonderful in the eyes of others.” That’s like a prostitute, and in that reading, Paul talks about, “Don’t be a prostitute,” when you might think he’s saying, “Just don’t ever get involved in sexuality outside of marriage.” Well, it’s much more complicated than that. It’s really saying, “No, look, the intention of you — your intention in sync with God’s intention is that I am in the world to reflect something that is bigger than myself, and I want to give it to the world. And if I can take time to reflect and be still and listen and allow God to transform my body, then my presence does the work, so much more important than words or actions that are not grounded in truth. And the mysticism is the great gift, and our hearts, our minds, our whole body needs to be open to receive this gift so we can be that gift in the world.

Father, the life that you’ve called us to is in such intimate closeness with you. It’s beyond our imagining. We’re not worthy to have you so much a part of everything that we are, but you promise that that is your will. That is your desire. So bless us with a kind of humble, open, servant heart. We can receive these ultimate gifts, share them with others and know that we are simply the instruments of your love and your healing and your incredible power to change the world. And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

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The Epiphany of the Lord
Isaiah 60:1-6 | Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6 | Matthew 2:1-12

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The 4th Sunday of Advent
2 Samuel 7:1-5, 8b-12, 14a, 16 | Romans 16:25-27 | Luke 1:26-38

Pour forth, we beseech you, oh Lord, the grace into our hearts that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ, your Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may, by his passionate cross, be brought to the glory of his resurrection, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We celebrate this amazing moment in the work of God, awakening us, informing us, empowering us to understand a great mystery, the mystery of the incarnation. Nothing seems more important than we fix our attention on what this really means, God becoming one of us, God entering into a human being, having then been given humanity and the humanity and divinity become one, inseparable. You can’t figure out which is which other than by sifacs [phonetic 00:01:19], and then you have this act that he performed, this salvific act of hanging on a cross and transforming everything, changing everything and doing something that was never conceived to be possible, and that is that we be freed from sin, the power of sin. So if you understand that process that happened in Jesus, his coming into the world, dwelling in a human being and then saving us and taking away the one thing that the Old Testament consistently made clear is the thing that keeps us from the fullness of understanding and acceptance of all that God teaches, and that is sin. Sin is the block. Sin is the thing that gets in the way, and what is it ultimately? Ultimately it is a way of seeing life where it has nothing much to do with anything other than ourselves. It is something about the way in which we first come into this world. We are very much self-centered, and the idea that we are called to eventually grow into people that are transformed by an event in the history of the world that changes us so radically that we become life-givers and not life-takers ⎯ amazing.

So let’s look at this mysterious moment in salvation history. And I love that the reading from the Old Testament so clearly makes something very, very evident, certainly to David but also to us who read the story. King David has been successful. There’s no king that pleased God more than King David. I might say that he was the only king, almost, that pleased God, and he is benefitting from all that God was able to do through him for his people. He was famous. He was rich. He had a beautiful home, and he decides that he will do what he sees as a blessing from God to God. He said, “I will take care of God. Now that I am so powerful and so wealthy, I will build a beautiful temple for God.” It sounds like a beautiful idea, and then God’s response is so interesting. “What? You want to build a house for me? You want to do something for me? You do not understand that my whole reason for creating you was to establish a relationship with you where I would be the one giving to you. That’s my greatest joy. That’s what I love to do. I will empower you. Since you have free will, if you make a decision to work with me, then that is all I desire. That is my greatest joy. You don’t have to do something for me.” Amazing. Focus on that for a moment. God is not looking for anything from us to be given to him other than permission to be the God that he longs to be, to be the one who inspires us, teaches us, empowers us, sends us, gathers us. He wants so much to be the source of life for us that he wants his people to receive from him, and in a strange, mysterious way, he said, “I want to do it through you, with you. I want you to share with me the joy that I have when I see the love that I place in you entering into someone else and transforming them and making them into new creatures, new beings, filled with this amazing capacity for understanding and wisdom and healing power.” It’s amazing.

And so when you see the second reading in Romans, Paul is talking about this incredible God that he now sees so clearly. He didn’t see him before, but his eyes were opened, and he saw him. And he saw what he was doing for Paul, using Paul as an instrument of grace for people, and all he can do is give glory to God. “You have revealed to us, through prophetic writings, through all the mysteries that we have in the scriptures, you’ve made known to everyone that the core of this whole thing that we live in is some kind of obedience to faith. It’s what we believe is there for us to enable us to find the happiness that we want and we long for.” And all he can say is may there be all glory forever for this wise and beautiful and loving God who, through Jesus Christ, gave us this mysterious, incredible freedom from the one thing in the Old Testament that said would keep us from the fullness of understanding and seeing God, and that’s sin. When we pray to God through Jesus, we’re praying to God always. He’s the ultimate goal of all spiritual life, that we want to be in union with God the Father, but it would be impossible without this mysterious death and resurrection of Jesus that redeemed us and took away sin, which was the block. So now, without sin being the issue, we no longer have to focus on it ourselves. It’s not the obstacle that we had in the Old Testament that kept us from God. It is now something that God has already forgiven, already forgiven. That’s so hard for us to understand, because we carry from the Old Testament to the New Testament so much of the baggage that was there about fearing that we had to get rid of sin in order for God to pay attention to us, and that is no longer necessary. No longer necessary. I want to say it over and over again.

You have been made whole by the death and resurrection of Jesus, freed from sin, and yet before Jesus came, there was a human being who, through some miraculous power of God, came into the world before the redemption and the resurrection of Jesus. Her name was Mary. In order for her to be an instrument of what God asked her to do, asked her to be, she had to be free of sin, and so we are taught that, that Mary came into the world sinless. And out of that goodness that was her, she was asked to do something that must have been absolutely incredulous. How could you believe how this could happen? She’s told by an angel, and it’s a manifestation, it seems, of Gabriel. It’s Gabriel, but he ⎯ it’s a gentle, gentle kind of appearance, not with fire and thunder but a loving presence of an angel that says, “I have a message for you that is essential for you to understand, that you have been chosen from all of humanity to be the one who will celebrate for the first time the goal of the Old Testament, the longing of every human being soul, the indwelling presence of God,” a completely unimaginable thing in the Old Testament, because if God got close to a human being, the only way they could imagine the result being was that the human being would be simply destroyed, burned up, obliterated. God was so much more powerful than humans. There was no way a human could contain divinity, yet we find now, with this story unfolding, that Mary is the model of you and me, all that we’re to become, and knowing first and foremost that we have been first gifted with this thing called redemption. Our sins are forgiven. Our sins are no longer a block.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t still have power to make mistakes, but mistakes are very different than being, in a way, controlled by the darker version of human nature. We know that human beings are capable of enormous evil, and God has allowed people that freedom to choose that. It’s a great mystery, but what he’s also given people the power to do is to reject all of that and to receive this gift with a desire that it gives us the enthusiasm, the being filled with God to know that we have this capacity to be used by God in a way that brings life to people around us, healing to people around us. It’s such an incredible gift.

So I don't know if I’ve ever said this before, but I want you to imagine with me that Mary, being the model of who we are to become, she then becomes a very, very powerful figure for us in our spiritual journey. We too, not in the same way, have been freed from sin, not from birth but by something that was done for us. And then there’s Elizabeth in this story. I’ve never thought about this before, but Elizabeth is, to me, an image of the Old Testament. Never was the Old Testament able to bring the new life and the fullness of the message of God to people, and so Elizabeth is this woman who has longed for a child for so long, longed to give new birth to people or to be a symbol of the new birth that the Old Testament might be able to create for people. But it didn’t happen in the Old Testament. So she’s now able to have, in her womb, the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, and his only message, it’s not for him to describe what is going on or what is happening. It’s to point to Jesus. “Listen to what he says. He knows what’s going on. Pay attention to him.” And what is he saying? What is Jesus saying with his life? That a promise made long ago to a king named David, that there would come one day someone who would fulfill the obligations of all the things that the Old Testament required by his very being. He would free us from all the rules, regulations and rituals that had to happen before we could ever get close to God. He announces something wonderful.

So the chance that you have now, as I have, is to understand this mystery perhaps in a new way that you haven’t seen before. The incarnation is at the heart of the message of the Old and New Testament. The fact that God chooses to dwell within our hearts and from there to transform us slowly, daily in our struggle with all the things that God has placed in our life so that they will be the very things we need to change and to grow through the experiences we’ve had, both in our ancestry and also in our family of origin, we have this wisdom given that can bring us out of anything that would have kept us in darkness and be a light, a star, a light in the darkness. What a beautiful promise, and I pray, on this Christmas Day, you will feel the power of this message. We’re engaged in an amazing miracle, and we are all able to participate in it as we accept it and understand it and try to seek to live it, not through our own strength but because of what’s been given to us. It’s a great celebration, and such a wonderful gift has been given to us. Amen.

Father, open our hearts to the mystery of what happened in Mary’s life. This miraculous promise is not something we should simply think about as happening to one person but that it happens to all of us in some mysterious way. So bless us with that kind of faith and that kind of expectation of being one who can become a vehicle to bring Christ into the world, manifesting himself through us, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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The 3rd Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 61:1-2A, 10-11 | 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 | John 1:6-8, 19-28

Grant your faithful, almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet Christ with righteous deeds at his coming so that, gathered at his right hand, they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Last week, I went to a doctor to have my eye operated on. The issue really was not my eye, but the muscle that held my eye was not functioning very well, and so I was having a real problem with double vision. And without glasses, I saw, very distinctly, two of everything, and then it was amazing that this operation, which was not that difficult on me ⎯ it took just one day, and without glasses, I saw absolutely one vision where always I saw two. And somehow it just really impacted me. I don't know why. I don't know whether my brain had to make an adjustment or whatever, but all of a sudden, I felt different. I just thought, “There’s something in me that’s changed.” And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that one of the things I continually do, especially as one who’s been ordained since Vatican II, every Sunday I work with an Old Testament and a New Testament, and there’s always this sort of separation that I have in my head about them. One was like, well, one was for when we were living then. The new one is for us now. The Old Testament is wrong, and the New Testament’s right. Always there was some division, and I think what’s happened, if I can just use this operation as a kind of metaphor, I feel like something has come together. And it’s going to sound maybe strong because ⎯ I’ll try my best to tell you how I feel about the Old and New Testament, and it goes like this. They’re both correct. They’re both timed perfectly for the people who listened to them, and even though we might say, “Well, all the people have already listened to the Old Testament. They’ve worked with it, and they’ve got that down. Now they move over to the New Testament.” No, because people keep entering into this world over and over again, and we always begin with the kind of Old Testament understanding of right and wrong. That’s how we learn as children. We all go through this process.

What’s beautiful about the process is it begins with a lot of logic, and the Old Testament is very logical and pretty much understandable for the brain. And we see that, if we do the right thing, we get rewarded. If we do the wrong thing, we get punished. It’s pretty simple, and many people need that very simple thing to hold them steady in the work that God has given them. Choose always to do what is right. Choose never to do what is wrong. But we know that that keeps us in pretty much of a childlike state, and if you listen attentively to the readings of this beautiful Sunday of Advent, it’s so clear that one of the big changes that happened from the Old Testament to the New Testament is who’s in charge, who is doing the work. In the Old Testament, it seems clear. It’s up to us to always choose to do the right thing. Otherwise, we lose our connection with God, and the New Testament is all about God changing us, doing something within us, clothing us in an image of a bridegroom or a bride connecting with this beautiful creature called God. And he’s there to say, “I’ve come to give you something that you’ve longed for forever, and this thing that I long to give you is my presence. I want to enter into you. I want to marry you. I want to be a part of you, and when I’m in you, it’s like a force of growth and transformation, and you have this power in you.”

It’s clear in the New Testament. We are anointed like Jesus was anointed, and that anointing is the ability that we have to do something that the Old Testament does not talk about at all, and that is an intention of transformation ⎯ an intention of transformation. The Old Testament is about doing what is right and being punished if you don’t, and there’s some value in that for a lot of people. But then we move into something that seems so radically different, but maybe it isn’t so different. And that is that we now believe that there is a power given to us by God, who will then live within our hearts, and in that presence that he has given us, there is power. And instead of simply condemning those who do wrong and honoring those who do right, we’re invited into a very different relationship with sin, that sin becomes an opportunity, an opportunity for those of us who understand the fullness of God’s message that our response to sin can change the world. And the change is from the Old Testament to the New Testament, even though in many ways, the Old Testament still works. But rather than demand justice and demand retribution and making everything fair when something goes wrong, we’re invited to have a very different response to sin, a very different response to our own faults and weaknesses. They are the opportunities that God has given us, in the New Testament, to respond to these things with a healing force. The indwelling presence of Jesus is like the presence of Jesus in the world, and when Jesus was in the world, he had this wonderful power of knowing that there were things in people that kept them from living the life that they longed to. They couldn’t see the truth. They couldn’t hear the wisdom that was there. They couldn’t get to where they should be or do the work they were called to do. So many miracles were therapeutic, and we can see this incredible gift given to this human being called Jesus. And then he looks at us in saying, “Listen, the reason I came into the world is so I can give you this gift that I have. I want you to feel it entirely, spirit, soul, body. I’m preserving you blamelessly in this world so that you can be a healer, a transformer, a source of life for those in darkness, not telling them that they now will be punished, but they can be transformed, the intention of transformation.” It seems not to be at odds with everything in the Old Testament to me now, but it seems to be just the fullness of what we need as a people who are drawn into this promise of creating the kingdom of heaven here on this planet, here on this earth.

And so it has something to do with the idea of baptism, because that’s the gospel theme. And I want to go back to the baptism of Jesus, because it is the moment when, I think, we could say Jesus became fully aware of what his ministry was going to be. Jesus was always the Son of God. There’s no doubt that that was always there, but the interesting thing about his baptism was something happened to him. And maybe it was just for the crowd. Maybe it was also for Jesus when the voice of his Father from heaven was audibly heard to say, “This is my beloved Son. My spirit is now in him. I have anointed him to be me on this planet, to be my healing power on this earth,” incredible promise. And we know that we too are baptized like that, and John’s baptism was really basically reminding people that they needed to change, and it was up to them to make the change. The baptism of Jesus was something radically different. It was the pouring of a power into us that makes such a difference in terms of how we live our life. Can I be free of any kind of justice and retaliation and demanding somebody give me back what they took? Maybe, but there seems like there’s some part in the world that that still operates, but then at the same time ⎯ and it’s like it’s different, but it’s the same. You look at the person that you might have asked to return what they have taken, but at the same time, you long for the whole experience for that person to be something that you anointed as God’s presence in this world, also look at that person and want them ⎯ nothing other than want them to change, to see, to understand what they’ve done. To turn away from it, to be that kind of anointment, to have that anointment, to have that ability in this world is a beautiful, beautiful complement to a world of justice.

It’s not justice or mercy. It’s justice in mercy, both together. That’s the key. How often I have tried to somehow figure out how they work together, and I just feel like now it just makes total sense to me. We need both. We need justice. We need mercy. We need to correct one another when we do something wrong. At the same time, we need to love one another in our brokenness and believe, through that love that we have for each other, people change. People are made new. People enter into a new beginning. That’s the theme of this whole wonderful season of Advent. A change has come. It doesn’t take away the old. It enhances, enriches, enlivens it so that it becomes filled with hope, growth and change. I pray that blessing for me and for all of us, amen.

Father, you have made all things one. You’ve brought unity into a world that seems so separated and divided. Bless us with the wisdom of our hearts to see this oneness. Our mind is mostly comfortable with either/or, right or wrong, but there’s so much more than that. Bless us with wisdom, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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The 2nd Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11 | 2 Peter 3:8-14 | Mark 1:1-8

Almighty and merciful God, may no earthly undertaking hinder those who set out in haste to meet your Son, but may our learning of heavenly wisdom gain us admittance to his company, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

I’ve always wondered why the Old Testament is so long and the New Testament is so short, because really, what you need to know and to focus on is the New Testament is the fullness of who God is. He reveals fully his plan for us, and so it would seem that we would spend much more time talking about that than we would the centuries of recorded story after story of people who have struggled to try to understand this God and who he is and what he’s asking of us. And God had a problem in the Old Testament. He had to be both the God of good and the God of evil, because gods were the source of everything. So many people look back on the Old Testament as a way of saying, “That’s the God I don’t want to be a part of. That’s the God that frightens me. He’s violent. He destroys people, because they don’t respond to him, and that’s not a God I want to get close to.” And what we need to understand fully, and especially it's important to listen to those words that we just listened to from the letter of Peter, time ⎯ time is really not the issue. Time is, in God’s way of looking at things, a day is the same as a thousand years. So the length of the Old Testament is not anything to pay attention to, in a sense. It’s a story about human beings’ resistance to who God really is, and when God knew that this resistance was there, he worked with people patiently, guiding them through patriarchs and prophets and kings. And all kinds of important things took place that would shape the way in which people were thinking and change it so that it could be something seen as new.

So just imagine with me, when we look at the stories of the Old Testament, they’re all terribly important, but what’s important is to do what God did in the Old Testament. And that is slowly he revealed himself, not as a God that lives like other gods, a god of vengeance, a god of destruction, but slowly, slowly he began to reveal himself as who he fully is. And that didn’t come until the time was right, and it’s hard to know exactly what it was that had to be in place, but it had to be some kind of basic instinct that they were ready to hear, ready to open themselves to a new image of God that would have been considered absolutely insane in the beginning of the Old Testament. God was always holy, other. He was always so holy, and we were always so evil that, when we got too close to God, we just ⎯ we burned up. His light was so strong. Our inability to receive anything directly from him was so limited, and yet in the story, over centuries, we see this change coming over people, being more receptive to their openness to God, perhaps because they suffered to much, and they did so much in terms of turning to God and trusting in him. Even though they would fall away, they would go back and trust him.

It’s interesting in the first reading, when Isaiah is talking about something that’s going to come, some new thing is going to happen. This is the season when we focus on this great shift in the Old Testament to New Testament, and he says something there when he says that the people in the Old Testament paid for all their sins. They were so often punished and went through difficult trials, and it’s almost to say, if we ever feel like we’re not worthy of this great gift of God freely coming and choosing to be with us, our ancestors paid a high price. And human nature likes somehow to say, “I earned this,” but it’s already done. It’s already finished, and now something is going to happen. And what happened at this time was that God revealed himself for the first time as one who comes with power and enters into a human being, and we need to shout this out. We need to proclaim it to the world. The God who was the distant God, who was demanding and required reconciliation and repentance constantly, has now shifted into the God who fully is who he always has been. He’s this incredible, loving, human-like God who shepherds us, feeds us, gathers us, carries us next to his heart and leads us as children are lead. No one in the Old Testament ever could imagine that there would be a God like this, a God so caring and so interested in us that anything that we think now, in the New Testament time, that is our responsibility to create something in us that allows God to enter into us, if we think about that as our weakness and our greatest sin, then the answer is simple. It’s this: stop saying no to God’s presence. Don’t look at reasons why you don’t deserve it. All God wants ⎯ and this is so important for you to hear. All that God wants from us is our permission for him to enter into us and to somehow reimagine what it’s like to be filled with divinity.

John the Baptist, the man who came crying out and saying, “There’s something coming after the law, something coming after this whole notion of a religion surrounding rituals that primarily do nothing more than forgive,” though I shouldn’t say that’s just forgiveness, but they were constantly given a way to be forgiven. And instead of a ritual doing that, now we have a God who comes in the form of Jesus, and he looks at you, and he looks at me, and he says, “There is no need for you to make up for your sins. It is already done for you.” Jesus says, “That’s why I died on the cross for you.” And I’m not talking about you trying and struggling to do better and you going to confession. That’s fine, but I’m trying to say that the heart of what God is saying about the new earth, the new heaven that he’s creating is it’s nothing like the old. It’s so radically different, and the difference is in the intention of God. He's not looking at you, and he’s not looking at me, saying, “Why aren’t you better? Why don’t you work harder? Why don’t you get your act together?” None of that is applied to the heart of a human being from a God who is love. He’s rather saying, “I want you to listen to me and learn from me, and I’m going to do this by being your teacher. And the way I’m going to teach you is by entering into you and living inside of your heart, and from there, I’m going to guide you into doing the things that you saw me doing when I was on this plane, on this earth.” We are children of the Father. We are like Jesus.

When I was growing up, I always thought I had to be like Jesus, and all I could think of is that I had to try to be sinless. Jesus is so much more than a person who came on this earth and was sinless. He was a person who came on this earth to teach us about the mystery of the incarnation. God was living inside of Jesus. The part that was God and the part that was Jesus is indistinguishable. You can’t tell one from the other, and we don’t have that kind of intimacy with God, but we have something like that. He enters you. He enters me, and he wants so much for us to give comfort. “Comfort my people.” And we can do that so powerfully by not making us the source of that power, not using our ego to do the right thing, to impress or to help or to heal. No, he just wants us to let him work through us, and we need to give him permission to not only use us but to change us.

So many images of the end of the world are so dark and frightening, and many people feel the kingdom of God will only come when there’s a great catastrophic destruction of everything. That’s one way to look at that, but another way to look at destruction and fire is to look at radical change. A landscape is radically ripped of everything that’s there when a great fire goes through it. When an earthquake shakes everything, everything crumbles. They’re all images of radical change, not ending, not God destroying those who aren’t worthy and then saving the few that are good. That’s such a misunderstanding of the final times. We are in the final times, and the final times are this extraordinary invitation to be like the Christ, to be Christed, that is to be anointed as he was anointed with spirit and power and healing.

And I tell you, when you shift from thinking about, “How do I make myself more attractive so God will love me,” and shift it to, “How can I open my heart and my very being to the God who loves me beyond anything I could ever imagine and has one single longing, to bring us to the glory that God has created us to be, to bring us into fullness,” that’s the obligation. And when you realize that the entire New and Old Testament are all directed toward these final times ⎯ and we’re living in the final times now. The image of the destruction is about everything being broken open, everything being seen for what it is. There’s no way you could miss the fact that, in today’s world, everything that is being ⎯ everything is being exposed that is there for a purpose, and the purpose is not being accomplished, because the people who are doing the work have lost the sight of what the work is fundamentally about, to care and to encourage and to grow and to comfort people into fully who they are. When that’s gone, then there is this darkness, and the darkness, when it’s below the surface, is so powerful, and the darkness is so vulnerable when we see it, when it’s evident, when it’s clear. If there is any kind of confrontation with the disaster that fits the end of the world, it’s the breaking down and breaking open and breaking new into something that was corrupt and broken into something that is renewed and glorified by the presence of God that continues to use everything for us, for our comfort, for our sense of value, our sense that everything is as it must be. These are his gifts. It’s a new earth. It’s a new world. It’s a world that’s been redeemed and now is ready to be filled with light.

Father, open us to this great mystery of your indwelling presence, your life living within our hearts, resonating a healing presence, a life-giving presence, a comforting presence. With this gift, we have so much to accomplish for the good of the human race. It longs for a transition, and the transition has begun, and our task is to surrender to the part that you’ve asked us to play. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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The 1st Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 63:16B-17, 19B; 64:2-7 | 1 Corinthians 1:3-9 | Mark 13:33-37

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming so that, gathered at his right hand, they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

We begin this Sunday with a new season, season of Advent, and it’s the beginning of our church year. I always want to tell people on this Sunday happy New Year, because in the spiritual world, it’s not on the same exact time as the calendar that we follow in the world. But maybe it makes sense that it’s a little bit off, because it’s a different kind of time. And what I want you to think about with me is where you are in this journey with God, and it’s important that you take stock of that, because it’ll give you a beginning point. And you can move forward and invite God into those places in your life ⎯ in my life, I want to do the same thing ⎯ where he isn’t yet fully alive, fully infused into our understanding of life.

So I love the opening theme. It's always the same for each of the Sundays of Advent in the three seasons of A, B and C cycle. Wake up, watch, watch, watch. Watch what? Look at what? The image for me is that at this time, when I start a new year, I’m wondering where I was years and years ago, and I look back on those years and realize how far I’ve come, how much I’ve changed. Each season has brought with it some gift, some interest in something that I didn’t talk about before, and when I think ⎯ if I go way back to my seminary ⎯ for some reason I was thinking about that today, and I remember Advent was always the time we were getting ready to go home for Christmas. So the first two weeks, we were in the seminary. The last two weeks, we’d be home, and I remember it was always an interesting time. It was about family, about relationships, about coming home. That was my experience of it, being in a seminary, but what I really look back on is there was a lack of enthusiasm in me for the challenge that I was being offered in the seminary, because it seemed to me, over and over again, what I was being asked to do was to perform rituals. And that was important, but to know that your major job is to say mass and do it with solemnity and dignity and belief and forgive sins, and we were encouraged to also be sure that we encouraged people to go to confession, even though it was just a venial sin, but weekly confession, monthly confession was considered a very good practice. So sin was always on the table as an issue, and then at the same time, there was this whole notion of preaching. And somehow it wasn’t really talked about that much. I didn’t even have a course in homiletics, because the seminary I went to wasn’t offering it at that time. And so I skipped that, but I don’t remember the enthusiasm that I have now. I don’t remember anyone filled with it when they would talk about telling people about this God who is so incredibly wonderful and powerful and transformative. It was just more about, “Do what you’re told, and you’ll receive what you need.” And it was kind of bland and not very exciting or mysterious or frightening or enlightening.

So I want to look at one thing that I’m looking at in my own heart right now, and it came from these readings. And I think it might help us all think about where we are in our relationship with God, because in this set of readings, we have a great contrast, particularly the first reading and the second reading. And the first reading, it reminds me so much of the way I used to think about myself. I was always considering myself as not being yet what I should be. I was always considering myself as being ashamed of who I was. The focus of my training was sinlessness is the goal, and if that’s the goal, which you can’t ever accomplish and shouldn’t ever try to actually accomplish ⎯ you should pay attention. Watch your sinfulness, learn from it, but in the beginning, it was the thing that I was burdened with. I lived in a world of shame. It was just natural, and when I listen to this reading, it’s so perfect when it describes that kind of understanding of God as someone so different, so contrary to the sinful, broken humanity that there’s a great divide between us. And the images of we are nothing but polluted rags and withered leaves and unclean and that we have nothing to offer God at all, and yet we do say in that reading, which is hopeful, “But we’re in a place of work. We’re in a place where you are molding us.” And that’s the most positive, wonderful thing, I think, we can say about this set of readings, and that is be aware, be alert, watch the way in which you are being molded, the clay that you are, the influences. We are such clay-like when you think about it, in terms of our families of origin, what we learned at the beginning. It forms us, and it's really hard. It gets baked in. Sometimes you have to break the pot again to start over again. So that’s a beautiful image to stick with in this set of readings as we begin with Mark’s gospel. So listen to his insights as we weigh them against where we are in this journey. We are being molded, remade, broken and then remade, broken and remade.

Then we listen. It’s so clearly in St. Paul’s letter about the beauty of the fullness of the revelation that came in the New Testament that this God is a seeker, a God who longs for us to be open to him. He is pursuing us. In the Old Testament, it seems we were always pursuing God’s favor by trying to do the right thing. Follow the rules. Follow the regulations. There was ⎯ in my early years, it was really a very clear thing. You do what God wants; you receive what he needs to give to you so that you’ll be even more pleasing to him. So it was almost impersonal. Do this; get that. Do this; get that. Nothing is further from the truth. Paul alludes to it so beautifully when he says, “We have been given Christ.” When I say the word Christ, know that that’s not Jesus’ last name, as I used to think as a child, but it means anointed. And what I want you to believe with all your heart, that this work that I do as a priest in my preaching is to anoint you with this awareness of the power of God living in you, manifesting through you, because you said yes. You said yes. Watch what you’re saying to God. Do you say, “Yes, use me. Make me into what I need to be,” or do you say, “Wait, I prefer to be in charge of this, and I’ll do what I think I have to do in order to please you”? No, human beings, by nature, are longing for a relationship with God, God by nature fully, finally revealing himself. Throughout the New Testament is a God with a passion, a longing, a desire to be a part of your life and my life. That’s what’s so radically different about where I was back in the seminary days and where I am now. I never had an image of God longing, desiring, passionately wanting an intimate relationship with me so that I would feel his presence floating in my heart, being there with me, resonating through my heart, through my very being.

The miracles that Jesus performed, that is so exciting to me, and I remember at times in the seminary, I didn’t really think about anything in my ministry that was that exciting. Obviously it was so unknown I couldn’t really figure out what it was going to feel like to be a priest, but I knew it didn’t demand that much. Everyone can learn these rituals, but I had no idea the depth and the breadth and the beauty and the frightening aspects of this journey of intimacy with God. And that’s what I want you to be watching for and looking at. Jesus uses an image with his disciples that’s very, very often used in all the scriptures, in the synoptics rather, and basically he’s saying, “You, disciples of mine, you’re going to be managing a household of servants, and this is my house.” So we know the kingdom of God is a house, often considered a people gathered together, believing, trusting in God, listening to his marvelous personality, if I can say that. That’s funny. I’ve never said that before. God’s personality is so complex, but at the same time, it is so endearing, so intensely in love with us, almost it seems at times wanting to tell us how much so that he can shake us up and make us feel like we have to work a little harder to be open to him. But ultimately his desire is just to be inside of us. Watch for that. Say yes to that. And then he says about this house, he said, “It’s like you’re running this household.” That’s you in charge of all the people in your life. You’re not in charge of them. You’re just living your life with them, and the good steward of the house is the one who takes care of his ⎯ of the others and cares for their needs and makes sure that they’re well-paid, that they’re cared for and that they know what they’re doing. It’s this image that God has placed in our hearts that we are not individuals working on a salvation track with him. We are on a track with a community of people called our church, our friends, the people God has called us to share our lives with. That’s the work, is to be somebody for them, not to be somebody just so I can please God, and then he can give me what I want. It’s not that kind of one-on-one solely. It’s about God in me, the Christ in me ministering to the people in my life, and there are multiple opportunities. Watch for those opportunities. Watch for the mystery of the way in which God will give you something, a longing and intention in your heart for someone that you know and you love, and believe with me that that intention is the most powerful prayer that you could ever offer anyone. Watch for those signs, those longings in your heart for those around you. Know that they are powerful agents through which God is working.

There’s much to learn. There’s much to see. There’s much to wonder about. That’s my promise to you, that I will give everything I can to this work that we have for this next year and then another year and another year I hope, I hope. I hope it keeps going. So let us be blessed with the attention we’re called to have to the great mystery of a God who longs for us and we who long for him. Amen.

Father, we celebrate a wonderful mystery, our union with you, you in us, we in you, and that unity is something that we need to pay attention to. So help us in this time of watching and waiting and hoping and longing for the growth that is this intention of the season. Every season prepares us, but these first Sundays of Advent call us to a beautiful opening. Bless us with that eager desire to see, to know, to feel you, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe
Ezekiel 34:11-12, 15-17 | 1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 28 | Matthew 25:31-46

Almighty, everliving God, whose will is to restore all things in your Beloved Son, the King of the Universe, grant, we pray, that the whole creation set free from slavery may render you majestic service and ceaselessly proclaim your praise. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

This celebration of the Eucharist is our final celebration for this year. The liturgical year is not the same as our calendar year, and it ends with this great feast of Christ the King. And it seems so appropriate that it ends this way, because we know that, throughout this entire year, as we’ve listened to the gospel of Matthew in particular, we’ve recognized the call that God has placed in the hearts of human beings to enter into a kingdom, the kingdom of God. So it’s appropriate that we then call this last Sunday a feast, a celebration of the kingdom of God, and when we look at this idea of a kingdom, it seems at first so counter to who Jesus is, because he keeps talking to us about his work as a shepherd, as a caring, loving, simple man who is there constantly caring for us. So we have to be careful of the image of Christ as a king, but it works when we understand something about the promise of how the kingdom of heaven is going to be established on this planet, on this earth, what it is that we’re all engaged in. And it is a new kingdom with a new leader, and the interesting thing about this leader is yet he carries the image of a patient, loving person. At the same time, he is so strong and so powerful, and he can get rid of everything that is not working toward the kingdom of God.

So let’s look at these images. The main thing that I want to start with is the image of God as revealing a Son who then becomes a Good Shepherd. In the first three centuries of the church, the church was a hidden church, an unlawful church. It was something that was considered, if you were following this new way, that you would be ⎯ if you would be discovered, you would be destroyed, and so it lived underground. Like in the catacombs is where they gathered, buried their dead, and the first images of who the Christ is in those first 300 years was always the same. It was an image of his face, but usually, always, if it was an image of what he was doing, he was a shepherd. There’s no crucifixion depicted in those first 300 years. The first one that we discovered was around 323, but that interesting thing is that the focus in the beginning was this kingdom that God has come to establish is best described not as a legalistic kingdom where there is a magistrate, a judge and everyone is constantly being judged. No, it’s about caring. It’s about a kingdom of caring, and so we go back to one of the earliest images in the Old Testament, in Ezekiel, of this image of God as a shepherd. And it's a beautiful, beautiful image, and what it’s saying is that the kingdom of God that is being established is one that is an empathetic, compassionate environment in which one would live. And when Ezekiel uses images of the scattered living in darkness, being stressed, being lost, being strayed, being injured, being sick. At times, that may be in your mind, as it was often in mine, that we’re looking at these people who are obviously in this state. When I look at people and they seem to be fine, they’re sitting in an airplane near me. I watch them at the grocery store or whatever. I have no idea where they are. I don't know if they feel disconnected from people, if they’re scattered, if they’re dealing with depression, if they’re feeling so stressed they can’t find any rest, if they feel that they have no direction, that they’ve strayed away from who they really believe they were, and maybe they were trying to find themselves or sick.

I want you to imagine. This is the thing that we have to understand that Jesus is saying to us in his ministry, foreshadowed in this beautiful image of Ezekiel, that this kingdom is about sensitivity and awareness and consciousness of the human condition that we are all sharing in. When you are in a position of being separated from the culture, when you’re running the risk of dying if someone finds out who you are, the communities that are formed in that time are really intense. And so we go back to the early church, and when we listen to these directions that were given to the early church, they were very much designed to help them at this time in their life. And so we can’t always just take literally some of the images that are used, because they’re used to address a need at that time, and yes, the need is universal, but in some ways, it’s unique to that particular time.

So the overall theme is that we’re living in an environment called the kingdom of God where care and support of one another is so essential. Matthew goes to the same things, and it’s interesting. In Matthew there is something given that is even more mysterious and something to ponder, and that is that, when we’re told in Matthew’s gospel that we should be caring for each other, the images given to us that the reason we care for each other is because when we’re caring for each other, we’re caring for God, that we are him, he is us, that there is a union in this whole mysterious thing called church, called life. Whatever we do to another we have done to divinity. Whatever we do to each other, we’ve done to ourselves. It’s like there’s a oneness, a unity in all of this that we need to ponder, and it’s difficult to figure out how it all works. But the one thing I want to make sure you don’t take away from these readings, something that I used to take away all the time, is an oversimplified, binary way of looking at the world, because Matthew’s gospel talks about the world at the end. Everyone is divided, almost 50/50. Half of them go to hell; half of them go to heaven. And it’s a very depressing kind of thought that we’re judged that way, and we’re not judged that way. This passage is not about that kind of judgment. It’s not so much about whether there are some that are cast into eternal fire. That’s not it. The main thing is there is a risk of not following what we’re being shown, what we’re being taught, and the way to talk about the risk is to say, “If you don’t do it, it’s really a catastrophe. It’s a mess. It’s destructive.”

So living in the kingdom is living in an awareness of who we are to each other, how important it is that we be there for each other, how we need to perceive each other and penetrate the façade of other people, not by invading in your questions and things but just going past what you know is probably a façade that we also put up, that we look great, we look like we’re doing fine, and just ponder the beauty and the awesomeness of what it is that we have before us, an opportunity to be sources of life for each other. That’s why we’re here. That’s what it’s all about, to be in a room full of people and to realize that they’re all dealing with whatever darkness, whatever difficulty, whatever way in which they feel naked, exposed, whatever, just to have an intention for everyone, that we want them to feel and know that they are loved, they’re valued, that they’re beautiful. That’s the kingdom of God. That’s the kingdom he came to establish. So just as the disciples were challenged to be attentive to each other’s needs and desires, longings, so we too today have the same responsibility, and when we’re in that awareness, we’re celebrating the kingdom of God.

Father, open our eyes, open our hearts to the mystery of your kingdom. It lies just below the surface of our consciousness. So often we get tied up into all the kind of self-centered ways in which we struggle to live our lives, but you invite us into the most beautiful kingdom, the kingdom of love, kingdom of truth, life, holiness, grace, justice, peace. Let us embrace this responsibility with hearts filled with hope and trust that your kingdom has come. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Proverbs 31:10-13, 19-20, 30-31 | 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6 | Matthew 25:14-30

Grant us, we pray, oh, Lord our God, the constant gladness of being devoted to you, for it is full and lasting happiness to serve with constancy the author of all that is good. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

As I’ve mentioned often to you, we’re at the very end of a church year. In other words, we’re finishing up a whole reflection on this beautiful gospel of Matthew, and as we get closer to the end, we’re focusing on what should be the impact of this work, what should be happening within us. If we paid attention, if we’ve opened our hearts to the mystery of what this man, Matthew, is trying to share with us, we’ll come to understanding something, and the understanding we’re looking for, it seems to me clearly, from this set of readings, is we’re looking carefully at who are we. Who are we as a people? Who are you? Who am I? What’s our essence?

And if I look at these set of readings, it’s interesting. You’ll see that the first one gives us an image, first of all, that there is this way that God speaks about who we are, when he says, “I want to marry you. I want to be with you. I want you to have a relationship of me of intimacy.” So what we know somehow is that we are children of our Father, and that Father wants a union with us that he compares to marriage, which means it goes well beyond parent to child but more person-to-person, God to us as an adult. So we are a people who are connected to God, married to him. Listen to the images that are in that first reading. We see a man who is married, and the man is married to a woman, and she is a great joy to him. She is the image of who we are to become, and so what does she do? She has two things that she does for her husband. She makes material. She creates warmth, comfort for him, and then also she reaches out to the poor and the needy. And so her praises, her song is not that it’s her body, her beauty, but it’s her actions, her motives, her intentions. She gives warmth, and she gives some kind of wonderful care, nurturing, a beautiful image of who God — when God marries us, what he’s expecting to see happen to us because of our union with him is we become more like him. We are children of our Father. We are made to be like him, and marriage is a beautiful image of the way in which he’d like us to imagine we have a relationship with him, one of intimacy. And out of that image comes a quality of warmth and service.

Then in the next reading, we see Paul talking about who we are also, and he’s talking about we’re not people of darkness. We’re not people of depression and darkness and sin. That’s not our nature. No, what we’re made for is light. We are made to be enlightened. So we have an image of we are basically children of our Father, but we’re called to be like Christ. Christ is the anointed one. What was he anointed with? A human being in one sense, filled so much with this anointing, enlightenment that he saw so much and understood so much as a human being, because he had within himself this incredible talent, this incredible gift that was that he could see his relationship with God, understand it and know that God was living inside of him. And everything that Jesus was able to do, he made clear, was not he alone who did it. It was his Father within him enabling him to do it, and so we see the other image is that we are children of the Father, but we’re also called to be like the Son. And the Son is this amazing figure that is filled with this capacity to heal and to bring life to people. And what is it based in? It’s based in the fact that God has promised to live within this figure Jesus to such an extent that Jesus is God. For us, it is like that but not the same. We don’t become God. We become like Jesus, anointed with what? Mysterious talent of bringing life to another person.

So then we go to the gospel, such a fascinating parable. One of the things I love about parables is how they are so filled with multiple layers of meaning. I can go back to a parable year after year after year and still come out with something I never saw before, but there’s something really beautiful about this particular parable about this relationship that we have with God that empowers us to be a source of life for the people around us. And that gift of indwelling presence is given to people in different levels and different ways. So let’s just imagine that there are three groups. Some groups of people are given all kinds of amazing gifts, and they realize it, and they have a lot of talent. And what do you think of — talent in this image is money. It’s a form of money. So what that might mean is — if I think about what is money, what does money give you? What does it do? Prestige, importance somewhat, but the real thing that money is, is energy. If you have unlimited funds and you want to do something, having that kind of energy is a resource that will achieve all kinds of things. So let’s just say talents, in the form of money, is energy. So this parable is about God sharing his presence, his energy in another human being, and to some, he gives them amazing talent. But the clear image is that this God figure in this parable is the owner who leaves his servants in charge of something, and the thing that he gives them is the energy to fulfill the obligation, and their obligation is to make it work for others. And so the one who receives a great deal of talent goes off and makes a great deal more. So let’s just say that he took the gifts that he had. He shares them with people, and as he shares them, they became even more. He became more gifted, more enlightened, and then the next one was similar. He has, let’s say, an average amount of talent. He has two talents. He does the same thing. He takes those two talents. He believes he has them. He knows he has them. They give him confidence, and he goes out and makes two more. Living the life that God has called him to be, he becomes more what that is — that very thing that he is intended to be. The more you have, the more is given to you, but then we get to the real issue of this parable. The real focus is this last person, who isn’t that talented. He didn’t get that much. I think it’s just fascinating. I never thought of it before, but it would be probably harder for this last person to believe that the talent was enough to be really successful, so he was really worried about whether or not he would be able to do whatever he was called to do to make this grow and become, which would be living it out, doing the things that God called him to do, saying the things that he was given as an insight to share. He didn’t believe in it. He didn’t believe they were that good perhaps, and he worried about something else. He worried about the way in which it might work, the way it might go, and what if he fails? So he was a fearful person. He thought, “Well, what if I get in trouble?” All of us that have gifts from God often worry about, if we have an insight that seems new and different, we’re afraid to speak it, because we’re liable to be looked at as some kind of crazy person or something, and we don’t have confidence in what’s just been given. So we sort of bury it. We just open — we don’t open our mouth when we aren’t invited to by God with an insight that is given to us to give to others. And so he buries it, and that’s the point. What happens, when you believe that God dwells in you, that you are his child, that you have been given this gift, and this gift is given to you to be given to other people, and when it comes to you to be given, you’ve doubted, because you’re afraid you’ll be ridiculed, or maybe you’ll be looked at as stupid or whatever?

I know that feeling. I think most of us know that feeling, a lack of confidence in the reality of who we are, who God has made us to be, who he has intended us to be, who he has empowered us to be. We doubt it. We don’t believe in it enough, and if you don’t believe in the gifts that you’ve been given, you lose them. That’s what the whole parable is really trying to say. Those who have been given something, and they believe that they’ve been given it, and they share it, they are the ones that are fulfilling the role that they’ve been given in this kingdom. But those who don’t, who doubt it, who are afraid, they bury it, and they don’t say anything. They keep all their insights, all their sense of things to themselves. So what are we learning? Well, one thing is clear, that this image of this man, who is a man who’d you first say, “Well, he’s afraid. He’s a fearful guy.” But at the same time, when God talks to — well, in the story, when the master calls him, he doesn’t call him fearful. He calls him lazy — lazy. “You lazy, worthless, wicked servant.” Lazy means you didn’t do your work. So what didn’t he do? Well, you say he didn’t share what he received, but the real work would have been receiving it. The work would have been, “How do I believe in the things that God has given me? How do I trust in those things? Where do I get my confidence?” And it’s in this deep, demanding question that we all have. Who am I, and what am I here for? That’s the big issue in this parable.

Do you really believe in what God has revealed in scripture, that we are these incredibly gifted people filled with God’s grace and power to be instruments of his healing and his enlightenment that he gives to other people? Do you really believe that? Because I don't know what you think about when you think about, “Who am I?” But some of us think about, well, it’s our feelings. That’s what makes us who we are, or our thoughts, that’s what makes us who we are, or our possessions or our bodies or our gender or the color of our skin or our possessions. All those things, is that who I am? No, not really. No, the work is asking the hardest, most profound question, and it goes back to something more than just who am I, but when you look at the world, you have to say, “What am I living in? A temporary place of examination and testing and finding out whether I’m worthy to be rewarded with the next place, or is it something much more subtle and much more exciting? Is it about being a part of the evolution, the enlightenment of myself, my circle of friends, the whole world?” That’s what I’m engaged in, and God has given everybody, depending on their destiny, a whole lot of power, a little bit of power, a little bit of insight. It doesn’t matter, but the point is, unless you believe that you’ve been given this gift, it evaporates. So the image at first doesn’t sound fair. If you’ve been given a lot, you’ll get more. If you weren’t given much, you won’t have anything. Well, it’s not the giving. It’s the receiving end of that that’s so important. If you don’t believe that you’re a gifted, life-giving figure in your circle of friends, you’re going to not be able to be, in the moment, confident enough to express things or just feel things for them. And we think we communicate primarily by words, but it’s so much more complicated. Our intention, when we’re with friends, our intention for whether we want — we’re competing with them or whether we’re wanting to empower them, those are things that are powerful communicators, and all God is saying is, “You’ve got that in you, but that’s not really you. Who you really are is who I created, and what you’re here for is what I gave you a destiny for, and believe in that and trust that.” When you do, then you’re filled, whether you are the most insightful person and wrote 50 books or whether you said something in a moment that changed someone’s life, it doesn’t matter. What matters is you understand it. You believe in it, and you’re living it. It’s a challenge that is probably at the heart of why we’re here, and it takes work, real homework to exam almost everything, especially yourself.

Father, your gifts are so abundant, and we often feel that we are in a relationship with you where you are judging us and wanting us to be more and more.And your desire is that we just be who we are meant to be.It’s a natural state, and we have to learn.We have to learn to be familiar with that incredibly wonderful experience of being a source of light for others.So bless us with this gift.It’s hard for us to grasp.We are fearful, and we are afraid of making mistakes.If we just trust more, we’d be fine.So give us that great gift of trust, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Wisdom 6:12-16 | 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 or 4:13-14 | Matthew 25:1-13

Almighty and merciful God, graciously keep from us all adversity so that unhindered in mind and body alike, we may pursue in freedom of heart the things that are yours. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Today’s readings are, like many of them that come at the end of a cycle of readings, are going over some core, main teachings of the scriptures, and this set of readings is loaded. What it’s talking about is, first and foremost, if I go to the second reading, I see in that a way of reminding everybody that this world that we live in is temporary. It’s hard for me to hold onto that at times and probably for you. We’re not made for this. If we’re looking for the world to be a place where we’re easily fulfilled and it’s all working together perfectly, that’s never going to happen. What seems to me is that we are in a place where we are working with both the truth and that which is against the truth, wisdom and the opposite of wisdom, which is, you might say, a lie. So what we have in this reading is a reminder that one day — we’re ultimately made, first and foremost, for union with God. That’s our goal, and we will one day be with him in this mysterious place, and we will have our bodies back. The teaching on the resurrection of the body, which is crazy, when you think about it in a way. How is it that all of us who have ever existed are all going to live with our bodies in this wonderful place? But that’s the promise, and when it doesn’t fit into our way of understanding, that means we’re too much stuck in the brain, and we have to move to the heart where things like this, mysterious things, can be embraced and understood and believed in.

So then we go to the issue of wisdom, and wisdom is so important to understand. What it means is that — wisdom could be interpreted, in my way of seeing it, as reality, knowing what is real, knowing what is true, and this truth is in us. It is all around us. It is speaking to us constantly, and I love the images of the feminine wisdom that is like, if you’re paying attention to her and you say, “I wish she was here,” you open the door, and there she is. She is, wisdom, this truth that we’re longing for, is everywhere. It’s reflected in everything that’s happening in the world if we have the eyes to see with the heart and not the mind. The mind judges things as good or bad. The heart is open to the mystery of what’s going on, and what is it saying to us? There’s one thing that’s going on in our world today, at least in our country. We’re looking at an election, and we’re looking at — the thing that makes our country so great is that the decisions that are made, as far as the direction of our country, are in the hands of the people, not just those leaders, and we can choose our leaders and make decisions. And that’s a powerful, wonderful thing to imagine, that we have that gift, yet what we’re realizing now is that there’s a split in the way this country is — the direction of it, and that’s disunity. And in a way, there’s something valuable about pondering that. What is this that separates us? And I wanted to go to this next. The separation, things that separate us, are the antithesis of what wisdom is calling us into. Wisdom is calling us into unity, oneness, oneness with God, oneness with who God intended us to be, understanding that our role here on this planet is to be connected and in union with other people, and through that union, to carry something that’s been given to us as our unique gift, amplified by the presence of God, divinity inside of us. We resonate that to one another, and the effectiveness of that is union, communion, oneness.

And we’re so aware, I think, in the culture that we’re living in right now, of the things that divide us, and the things that divide us are based in a mind that is filled with judgment. Then that judgment leads to a kind of acceptance/rejection of what is different, of what isn’t understood. We think about it in a way that, when I think about judgment, I think about it as living in a world that’s binary, and things are either good or bad. So a binary world is filled with judgment, and just think about it, how we judge people so quickly. Look at the decisions that we’re making over two different leaders and the judgments we have about them. We’ve decided one is good and one is bad, and that’s not true. They’re all a mixture of good and bad, and somehow wisdom is the one place where we can go to begin to understand that mystery. We’re called for unity, oneness, and that unity and oneness is a result of a heart that is open to wisdom, and it moves us in that direction.

So let’s go to the gospel, a powerful parable. What’s it talking about? Wisdom. What’s the image of wisdom? Oil. Oil is that thing that the ten women that were to guide the groom to his wedding, which is an image of the movement of the effectiveness of wisdom is to move us always towards union and communion with one another, with ourselves, with God, and that union can only happen if there is a kind of energy, a sense inside of us. It’s a sense of reality, the way the world really is, and when you have a sense of that, and it’s in you, and it resonates out of you, when you’re not quick to judge, when you don’t live in a binary world where somebody can be judged because of one action. I think so many people today, you can have a life of goodness and doing all kinds of things, and then something happens, and you’re judged by that one action, that one thing, that one picture on the Internet. And they write you off, because they say, “Well, goodness and evil can’t live in the same person. If you’ve done one evil thing, then you’re evil.” It’s insanity, that kind of judgment, and the oil is the wisdom of understanding reality, that we are this incredibly powerful, beautiful mystery of goodness and evil, and we’re struggling, and we’re moving. And what we need is less judgment and more understanding and more compassion for each other, and the more we can unify and become one, the quicker we will move into a world of fullness and the environment in which people truly flourish.

So let’s look at these women in the story. Their job was to get the groom, to get to the bride and to have a wedding, and the beautiful thing about weddings — I’ve done a zillion weddings in my life. They’re the best parties ever. I know in Italy, where I’ve spent a lot of time, a wedding is usually in the afternoon on Saturday, and then they gather usually in a place, if it’s out in the country, they have a big tent by their homes, and then they party from late afternoon until the morning. It’s — why — we don’t do that at birthdays or anniversaries or even Christmas or Easter. Why are weddings so enthusiastically embraced if they aren’t some archetype or some metaphor for something that we’re all longing for, unity and oneness? When two people find something within each other that is life-giving and they recognize they each have a unique gift for each other, and they fall in love, we call it, and that means they are convinced that this person is someone that they’re going to receive something wonderful from, and they’re going to want to give something wonderful to. And it’s called — that thing that we give each other is understanding, wisdom, reality checks over and over again. I’ve never been married, but I know if I was, there’d be so many decisions I probably wouldn’t have made the way I would, because somebody would be saying, “Are you sure that you want to do that?” And right now, in my personal stuff, I make my own decisions, but there’s something about a loving presence of someone else that knows — the goal of union — I’d say the unity is a means of a goal that is a flow of life and love and truth between two people. And what a gift that is, and if we understand that this beautiful call to unity and oneness is at the heart of what it means to be alive, to be here, then the knowledge of how the world works, the knowledge of an aspect of God, called the Spirit of God, which is feminine — I think it’s so fascinating. And this feminine wisdom is seeking you and me and not looking at us like a judgmental male figure that is sort of saying, “Unless you shape up, I’m not going to be even interested in giving you any information. Clean up your act, and then we’ll treat you with dignity and respect.” No. Wisdom looks at you and says, “You are filled with potential. You’re filled with something that is uniquely yours, and you’re here in the world to share it with someone else in a group of people. That’s reality, and this oil I’m trying to place in your heart is this knowledge that I, and only I, wisdom, can give you.” And those worthy of this great gift are just simply the ones who sit there and say, “I want to know. I want to see. I want to know who I am and why I’m here.” And that’s so different than living in a world of simply walking around and judging everyone and separating people because of judgment, and anybody that’s different is considered to be suspect and a little bit scary to some people. And we categorize people and divide people, and it’s the sin of the world, disunity, separation, isolation.

So finally, this pandemic is creating an artificial separation, isolation, just to give us a sense of what it is like to lose that union and communion that we so long for. All right, so now we’re doing it to protect each other from a disease, but think of it as — the pandemic is a teacher, just like everything is a teacher. Wisdom works with every single thing in the world to give you and me a better perspective on what we’re here for and what this world is about. So if we live in a world, where we’re consciousness of protecting one another from that which harms us, that makes us sick, that could even kill us, if we knew that that was the judgment that we have toward each other, that feeling of being right, when you can point to everybody else as being wrong, that addiction is a disease, because what it does is it kills the uniqueness in every person that God has created. We need to live in an environment, in an atmosphere of radical acceptance, of differences and stop judging people over one action. Stop saying, “You have a life of service to everyone, a marriage that’s long and been wonderful, and if there’s one mistake made because of a drunken night or because of some — I don't know — some mistake, some misjudgment, then you’re written off as some kind of predator, some kind of adulterer, whatever.” Mistakes, mistakes, they’re made, and yeah, we pay attention to them. But we don’t judge the person as if they are the mistake, because we want somehow to be a vehicle of wisdom to this person who is struggling to us as we struggle. In a way, it seems so simple, when you understand the goal of religion, unity, oneness, togetherness, and that’s because we have this gift of truth given to every individual. And that beautiful image at the end of that parable, when these foolish people come and say, “Hey, God, I’m here. Let me in,” and he looks at them. He says, “I don’t recognize you.” Well isn’t that a perfect image of what it’s like to live in a lie? You aren’t yourself. You aren’t who God made you to be, because you’re afraid of that, or you don’t know that yet. What a horrible thought, that you live a long life on this planet, and you don’t become who you are, and therefore you can’t be the source of life and truth and wisdom you’re called to be.

The gift of your wisdom is the greatest gift you have offered us.Open our hearts to embrace the mystery of life, the mystery of why we’re here and what you call us to be, and let us focus on those things that bring life to us and to one another.It’s called the kingdom.It’s called Christian community.It’s called family.It’s called love.So bless us with wisdom as we seek this gift, and help us to bring it to everyone, everyone on our planet, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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31st Sunday in Ordinary Time
Malachi 1:14b-2:2b, 8-10 | 1 Thessalonians 2:7b-9, 13 | Matthew 23:1-12

God of power and mercy, only with your help can we offer you fitting service and praise. May we live the faith we profess and trust your promise of eternal life. Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The passage from the gospel this morning is taken from a section in Matthew’s gospel, which is a kind of transition from a long tirade that Jesus had in terms of his dialogue with the scribes and the Pharisees, or at least there was so much conflict there that we saw story after story of they trying to trip Jesus up, Jesus trying to teach them, their resistance to Jesus teaching, Jesus trying to make them aware of how far they had drifted from what God had intended them to be. So in this particular passage, we see Jesus turning away from his conversation with the scribes and Pharisees and now talking to the people, talking to them about the scribes and Pharisees. I’m sure you’ve had this experience. I’ve had it more often than I wish, where people come up to me and tell me a story about a minister. It doesn’t matter what religion but some minister who acts in a way that is self-centered or that is, in a way, abusive or harmful to the person. Instead of helping, they seem to hurt, and it’s so common that a person who goes through an experience like that will tell me, “That’s it. I’ve finished with that religion. I refuse to have anything to do with that religion,” or perhaps with any religion. And it’s fascinating to me that, when Jesus talks to the crowds here, when he’s talking to the people, he’s talking about the scribes and Pharisees and talking about how far they’ve drifted, again, from what God wants them to be. And there’s never a statement on the lips of Jesus that said, “So let’s start something like a church without ⎯ or a religion without a church, a religion without institution or a religion without leaders.” He knows that there is something so valuable about a community, a church community, about a leader who is strong and vital and filled with wisdom. He knows how important good teachers are, and he knows the value of community. And so Jesus doesn’t say anything, in a sense, about dumping the structure, but he does say, “Be careful of leaders who have lost their way, and whatever you do, don’t buy into what they’re doing. Don’t take on the burden that they place upon you.”

Now, it’s interesting that Jesus would use a phrase like a burden, because it’s interesting to me that life is difficult. Life is not easy. It’s filled with many struggles, many difficult things, and it’s so sad and so awful to think that those who are in the business of lightening our burden or putting us in a way in this life that allows us to deal with the struggles of this life without becoming depressed or discouraged or without despair, the very people in this world who are to give us a way of sort of freeing ourselves from the things that burden us, when they’re not doing their job, then there automatically is this enormous burden, which is just life itself. You know the scribes and Pharisees had taken the Ten Commandments ⎯ I shouldn’t say just them but the whole system, the institution, typical of institutions take a simple, powerful, pure message and somehow cloud it up and confuse it with so many other things that are not really essential. And because the work, the simple message of God, the simple message of the gospel, the simple message, I think, of every religion has something to do with surrendering to a power greater than ourselves and opening ourselves to this new way of being where we let go of the illusions that our ego so often creates for us, and we become different kinds of beings, not caught up in ourselves but somehow open to something greater than ourselves, open to service, open to life. And that’s such a difficult message for the ego to hear, and so oftentimes the ego, which loves to be the center of attention, which loves to be separate from others, which loves to be better than others, it would love to avoid that message. And so what it tends to do in order to silence the heart of that message is it comes up with all these things that we’re supposed to do that somehow make us better, better than someone else.

The ego is a powerful force inside of all of us, and it’s something that we need, but it needs to be kept in balance. And when it’s out of balance, we know it. You can feel it, not so much in yourselves, but you feel it and sense it in someone else. How often I’ve heard someone say, “God, after talking to that person, they’re so full of themselves,” or someone ⎯ my favorite is someone gets up to give a talk or a eulogy, and they say, “We want to remember our friend who has died.” And then they go on and tell you this long story of their life and how they met this person and what they’ve done with their life and how their life is different than it was because of this person, and you get a few references to the deceased, but it’s all about the person speaking. When you see that happening, it’s usually pretty irritating, but one of the things that we need to look at is that that’s a kind of universal struggle that all of us have. How do we not allow ourselves to be the center of everything? How do we allow ourselves to sacrifice that sense of importance, that sense of being the center and give it over to something? It’s almost impossible to do if ⎯ one of the core issues for us as egocentric people is that we tend to identify, we tend to find our worth and our value in, not just who we are but what we do or what we possess or how people see us, and once you’re in that, once you buy into that, it’s almost impossible to watch yourself carefully enough to make sure you don’t fall into that trap of constantly trying to build yourself up in the eyes of others or present yourself to others as having the things that are really cool or really important and make you look and feel that you’re better than.

So that was the problem with the Pharisees, and it’s a problem that happens to everybody that’s in a position of authority or a position of great talent. Isn’t it interesting that so often people with great talent have such messed up emotional lives. So of the most talented people have tragic lives and short lives, and so you know it’s difficult for our human nature to deal with having great power and strength. It’s not an easy balancing act, and the only way it seems that we are told that we are able to balance it is if we allow some power greater than ourselves to come in and to be the balancing agent. We can’t do this work of life, living a healthy, full life without divine power. That’s at the heart of every religion, every recovery program. You can’t do this on your own. You’ve got to surrender to something greater, and that was the big problem that Jesus saw in the scribes and Pharisees. It’s why ⎯ the word rabbi means the great one, and isn’t it interesting? He’s looking at his disciples, and they call their teachers rabbis, the great one. He said, “Don’t ⎯ don’t fall into the trap of needing to be the great one. Don’t even call anyone great one. Don’t call each other the great one. Don’t call yourself the great one. Don’t call yourself the teacher. Don’t call yourself the father.” All of that is somehow a direct attack on the ego that tends to want to be the center, wants to be the father, the teacher, the best teacher, wants to be the great one. And so Jesus is saying to these followers of his, “Just be careful. The ego is a very, very integral part of who we are, and we all share in its weakness.” And its weakness is it’s so needy and so desirous of being the center that it will do the strangest, sometimes totally unconscious things to try to put itself up there as the best.

Listen to those complaints that Jesus reminds the disciples of when they look at the Pharisees. He says, “You don’t like them, the way they make their phylacteries larger.” Phylacteries are interesting things. If you don’t know what they are, they’re little square boxes, leather boxes in which little scrolls were placed, little segments of the law, and they were hung on the forehead of the rabbis. And it’s ⎯ I’m sorry. It shouldn’t be funny, but it’s such a literal translation of things that are found in the Old Testament where it says, “Keep the law ever before your mind.” So they said, “Okay, I’ll keep the law ever before my mind. I’ll put it in little boxes and hang it on my forehead, and therefore, all I’ve got to say is I’ve got the law before my mind.” But they weren’t able ⎯ their ego was so strong that they weren’t able to let the word seek into their mind, and that’s where the ego thrives, in the mind. It’s all about thoughts. It’s about what I think about myself, what other people think about me. It’s not who we are. That’s a given that is good and marvelous and wonderful, but what we tend to fall into is the thought that we need to be better than just who we are. And so the literal translation, the literal way in which they took that, to put just pieces of the word on their forehead, I think they thought, “Well, now I’ve got that covered. I did that.” So you wonder what else they did that way to say, “Well, I’m a rabbi, so therefore I’m good. I’m the boss, therefore whatever I say is right,” without reflection, without consciousness, without awareness of what they were doing and what effects it had on people. That’s one of the greatest problems with the ego. It’s so self-centered that it never seems to watch or see or understand the effect that it has on other people. That’s one of the great complaints that Jesus had about the Pharisees. They would do things that laid enormous burdens on people, and they didn’t even do a thing to lift those burdens off. That’s not because, I think, they say the people as burdened and didn’t want to do it, as much as it was they just didn’t see anything beyond themselves.

Now, the first reading reminds us of that wonderful ⎯ excuse me, not wonderful. The first reading reminds us, again, of a kind of statement as to what’s wrong with those that are in positions of power and responsibility, and the complaint in this book of Malachi is that the priests were offering sacrifices that weren’t worthy of God. So if you had an animal, you had a herd of animals and you had to give one to God, they would pick the blind one, the lame one, the one that wasn’t very good, and they said, “Here, sacrifice that one.” And the whole theory was, no, sacrifice the best of what you have, but they would sacrifice something not very valuable. It’s a great image of how the ego works. What Christianity and what all religion seems to cry out for is a sacrifice of that egocentric side of ourselves. That sense we have to give up and sacrifice is us in that illusionary state to find our true self. So when you sacrifice a little bit here, a little thing there, a little something over there and say, “Well, I’m doing all this sacrificing,” it’s not the sacrifice that God is asking us to give to him.

And then we look at the second reading, and it’s St. Paul, and he’s describing his ministry and how contrary it is. Remember, he’s a converted Pharisee, and one of the things he does ⎯ it’s so beautiful ⎯ is he said, “We came among you, and we didn’t come among you as great leaders or the great ones. We came among you as a minister who simply wanted to do something for you. We worked ourselves to death. We tried everything we could, and there was great drudgery in what we did, but we wanted you to be free. We wanted you to be free. So that’s what we came to do, and in offering you this freedom, we’re hoping you will see the joy in us as we let go of our need to be the center, and we become servants. And when you see that, when you see divinity working in us, when you see God’s strength helping break that awful egocentric part of us, when you see that working inside of us, then something is conveyed to you.” And what Paul calls it, which is such an interesting image for any of us that are in ministry or any of us that take seriously our role of being instruments of God’s grace to people, what he’s saying is, “What I’m giving you is not me, not my greatness, but I’m giving you God’s word. And it’s at work in me, and when I give it to you, I’m giving you God’s word, and it’s going to be at work in you.” It’s like it’s a power that Paul realizes he’s giving to the people, and what he’s really giving them is an image of an ego that has been supplanted by something more exciting and more fascinating and more wonderful, and that is divinity, the truth, God. And when God becomes the center, and his whole being is about service and love, that means that somehow the ego has to be, has to be in service to something greater than itself. That’s what’s hard. That’s what’s difficult.

We have a zillion examples of it. At least I certainly do in my experience of my life, that so often things come up, and when somehow someone misunderstands me or I’m put down or whatever, I have that kind of chronic problem of griping and complaining and saying, “This isn’t fair. This isn’t right.” And when you see that kind of whining thing that comes up in our spirit, nothing is the way it’s supposed to be, nothing is the way it’s supposed to be, I’m not supposed to have to wait, I’m not supposed to have to be in this traffic jam, all that kind of stuff, we just need to smile a little more at that sort of thing and recognize, “That’s my ego. That’s that part of me. It’s raging right now, and it needs to be shut up and sat down,” much like a two-year-old needs to be, at times, told to just sit down, and you can’t have what you want right now. That’s what the ego always wants, what it wants right now, and what it wants more than anything else is to be the center, to be at the heart of things.

So the challenge of having this story in the scriptures about Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees is so important psychologically, because it’s really the problem that every human being has with that part of them that wants to be the great one, that wants to be the center of everything. And unless we realize how burdensome that is to us and to all the people around us, until we see through it, until we begin to be aware of how it operates and how much it robs us of that authentic thing that God has created in us, that wonderful, initial thing we had in the Garden of Eden where we and God were one ⎯ we had this wonderful, easy relationship with divinity flowing through us, and we just delighted in being, delighted in life. That’s what the gospel is calling us back to. That’s what we’re invited to begin to imagine, and it begins and has to have as part of it the destruction of all that needs to be the great one and the father and the great teacher in us.

Father, we thank you for the gift of this life that you long to see flourish within us. Bless us with the freedom from all that is illusionary that keeps us from that life, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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30th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Exodus 22:20-26 | 1 Thessalonians 1:5C-10 | Matthew 22:34-40

Almighty, everliving God, increase our faith, hope and charity, and make us love what you command so that we may merit what you promise. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

If you remember last Sunday’s homily, it was a story of the Sadducees, who were considered to be the most influential and the most important of those who cared for the temple. They didn’t believe in the resurrection of the body, and so they had a dialogue with Jesus, and Jesus was somehow able, with his wisdom and knowledge, to basically expose their error. And so he corrected the Sadducees, saying that God had used terms, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob,” proof that there was such a thing as life after death, something the Sadducees didn’t believe in. Pharisees did, so maybe the Pharisees felt, “Wow, he’s on our side.” And so they came to him with a really sincere question. I don’t think they were trying to trip him up like the Sadducees did, but they just asked — and this was a question that was very common to the Pharisees, because the Pharisees were more engaged in interpreting the law, interpreting scripture. And so basically, they come and ask Jesus, with a sincere heart, “What is the heart of the law?” Because that’s what people had asked them over and over again. “What is the heart of the law? For 600 rules, can you boil it down to something more easy to grasp?” And the answer that was given in the past, but the answer Jesus gives, is all about love. That’s the heart of all these commandments, treating each other with love, understanding that love is your nature, and the thing that brings you the greatest joy and the greatest happiness is following your nature, living as you were created to be. We are made in the image and likeness of God. It’s a beautiful, beautiful image, and so it seems they were pleased. But Jesus also added something that I’m not sure was ever added before, but he also said, “When you say love God, I’m asking you to be a lover, not just to love God, but you have to love your neighbor, and you have to love yourself.” So it’s not something you do. It’s something you are. If you’re a lover, you love everything. If you say you’re a lover and you love these things and hate those things, you’re really not a lover.

So Jesus is setting the stage to say, “This is the heart of my message. This is what I want to say to you, and my Father was not able to say it to you in the Old Testament.” This is really fascinating. Why not? Well, listen to the first reading from the Old Testament, and basically it’s stating the way God dealt with the people of the Old Testament. And they were much lower in terms of their level of consciousness as to who they were. They were more, I would say, rooted in more their animal instincts. So the biggest thing about the people in the Old Testament at the time was that they were concerned very much with self-survival. They needed to get what they needed, and they needed to mate so they would continue their race. But it was all basically self-centered stuff, and when you’re dealing with self-centered people, what’s the best motive you can give them for doing something that would be more helpful to the people around you? That is a threat to say, “If you don’t do what I’m asking you, I’ll kill you. I’ll take your — I’ll go against your most basic instinct.” When you hear that phrase in the scripture, it just pops out, because the God of the Old Testament is not different than the God of the New Testament, but the God of the Old Testament had a different audience, and he had to say things to them that they would understand. And so when he says to them, “If you mistreat each other, I’ll kill you. I’ll just come with a sword and chop your head off, because I’m compassionate.” Wait a minute. Who is he compassionate to? The one that’s abused. How does he feel about the abuser? Kill him. Now, what is that supposed to mean? Is God mean? Is God vengeful in the Old Testament, and then he has a big awakening in the New Testament? No, he’s working with his audience as they would understand, and one of the things he’s basically saying to them, which is much deeper and much more powerful — the people in the Old Testament, caught up in their self-centeredness, had no idea how interconnected they were with everyone else around them. What the wisdom behind that statement is: if you hurt someone else, you’ve hurt yourself. If you kill someone else, you kill something in yourself. It’s a wonderful, wonderful wisdom that eventually is revealed in Jesus, and it’s this connection that we all have.

So what changed the audience? Why, when Jesus came, were there some people who could really accept him? That was because there was a slow growth of consciousness in the Old Testament. There was experience after experience that led them to say, “I wonder why this isn’t working, because every time I go to kill someone, they come back and kill me.” They grew up a little bit, to say the least, and so finally, when Jesus comes, he is basically the law incarnate. He is the truth. So Jesus does his teaching not by explaining it so much but by being someone. He was a lover, and he had anger and resentment to those who were not — especially if they were in a place of authority, they were not teaching anything in the direction that the Old Testament had in seed form, but they didn’t let it grow. They didn’t let it evolve, and they were still locked into a justice system where condemnation was going to be the best motive of fear, creative motive of fear to control people. They were controlling people. They weren’t awakening people to their true essence. So how did it happen? What happened? Well, it’s called redemption. We could talk about how loaded the image of Jesus on the cross is, but there’s something in it and — well, we’ve talked about that at other times. We’ll talk about it again. There was something in that very act that awakened something in human beings about their nature that they realized is surrendering to something that they don’t understand, and loving those that hurt us is the key to any kind of spiritual growth and change. It’s the key to peace. It’s the key to being able to live in community. So we see this so beautifully producing a change in people when they see it and they understand it.

So listen to Paul to the Thessalonians, because he’s saying the same thing. He’s saying — let me say he would say to them if he was going to amplify it. Jesus came into the world, and he was the word made flesh. He was love. He was not there to tell you how to act. He was witnessing what it’s like to live as he lives, and he has such a powerful, unbelievable, effective effect on people. His very being healed people and changed people and changed their mind and their understanding. So Paul in Thessalonians is saying the same thing to the people of Thessalonia. They’re saying, “Look, you’ve been the model, just like Jesus, and it’s so beautiful to see it working, because people are changed because of who you are, not because of what you’re teaching.” The early church was not a case of everybody signing up for classes. It was a case of people watching people take care of each other in a way that was absolutely foreign to their understanding of what human beings are for and what they’re really made for and how they really are designed to work. Think of it. When you live out your life as God intended it, doesn’t that make sense that it’s going to work, and you’re going to find peace? But when you’re living it out of an illusion, let’s say, of separation and isolation and the idea that it’s all about me, and the more I can take and get from people, the better, you can see how that is going to lead to a life of emptiness, frustration, depression, fear, shame, anger. It’s all there in a world where you’re forcing yourself to be something you’re not. And what a difference when you realize, “I am — I am love. That’s what I’m made of. That’s what I’m made for. That’s my nature, and if I can just trust in God awakening that in me and allow that to work, I can become a witness to the world that’s going to change the world.” That’s what he’s saying.

It’s funny. We have this tradition in our church about the first sin, Adam’s sin and how we, when you — but that isn’t understood correctly, and it’s very misleading as it is. Even Pope Benedict XVI wrote a beautiful article about the dangers of misunderstanding that teaching, because it almost implies that God created evil people, and when tested, they showed up they were all evil. We’re not evil. We’re not damaged by our humanity. Our humanity is a gift, and we’re going to integrate that into our humanity, and the two are made for each other. And the misunderstanding of sin and the sinful nature is that that’s who we really are, so the only way to control that is by fear, by making people do it out of the same place they’re in when they choose to hurt somebody, self-centeredness. It’s playing up our self-centeredness. That’s who we were made to be. That’s the danger of the original sin. It’s like we came into the world selfish. No, we didn’t. We came into the world with a heart ready to grow into love. We still are born as infants into a family where we’re meant to love, and if we learn from the family love is the essence, we’re going to have this amazing capacity to evolve. But if you grow up in a family, like most of us did, like I did, it was always based on obedience, reward and punishment. That was in 1940, and I don't know if it’s changed a whole lot in most families, but I believe it has. I believe people now are much more sensitive to how you raise children and how important it is that they feel that they are loved and that they’re valuable and that they have dignity and worth. And whenever you see a system that just denies that and works with power and control, then you know you’re not in a place where people are going to flourish. You’re in a place that’s going to draw them back into a dark place, a place of less consciousness, less awareness of who they are.

So it’s a beautiful message in this set of readings, I believe, and to summarize it, it means that we are born, by nature, to be like our God. And God said, “I am here to help you evolve into that. And you can’t do it on your own. So when you think about all the things you’re guilty of and all the things you’ve done wrong, I’m going to wipe all that away. It’s called redemption. I’m going to die on a cross so all your sins are forgiven.” Now, having your sins forgiven is something we don’t really believe is as complete and total as God is saying, but what he’s really saying, not so much that you’re off the hook completely and that you don’t have to pay for anything you’ve done. No, what he’s saying is, “No matter what you’ve done, I only respond to you by loving you. That’s all. That’s all I ever do.” If you do that to your brothers and sisters, if when anybody does something wrong to you, you just love them more, believe that this is not who they really are, trust in a goodness that’s in them, if you love it, it will be awakened, that’s the genius of Christianity. And it’s so simple, and it’s so basic, and it can be done by anybody. And it’s not tied to one religion. It’s everywhere. it’s the truth. So I pray that — the world today especially needs to understand this compassion that God has placed in all of our hearts, and the idea that we follow rules and laws that abuse and use people or hurt them and we think that that’s good for some other reason, like it helps the economy, helps me in my job, or it helps them, but if it’s using people, if it’s abusing people, it’s wrong. And it’ll never bring peace.

So this timely, timely message is look for people who love. Look for people who have respect for one another. Look for people who have this capacity to be more like the God that created them, and then celebrate that unity that we all have and feel one with each other as we witness and live this truth. And I know the world will be changed. I know things will be different. I know that whatever separates and isolates us — and certainly we have a disease that is reminding us that there’s something in us that, if we’re not careful with it, it’s infectious, and it can hurt, and it can pull us down, and it can rob us of energy. Our senses go down. It’s all there. Pay attention. Enter into what’s happening. Learn from it, because it’s the teacher. And it’s always teaching the same thing that Jesus longed for — love.

Father, your gift is our heart, the part of us that is made for love and understanding and compassion and communion, union, oneness, surrender to what is, learning, growing.You put your heart in our hearts.Help us to be connected to that great source so that we know that the work you ask us to do is not based on our power but on your power in us.We can love like you love.It’s our inheritance, so bless us with an awareness of its effectiveness — loves effectiveness and the power you give us to do it.And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 45:1, 4-6 | 1 Thessalonians 1:1-5b | Matthew 22:15-21

Almighty, everliving God, grant that we may always conform our wills to yours and serve your majesty in sincerity of heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

Jesus was a major problem for the Pharisees for he spoke truth, and they were caught in a way of being, a way of thinking, a way of teaching that was so foreign from what they should have been. And it’s interesting that God uses this situation so often in our life. We see something that’s really way off, way destructive, and when it should be instructive and helpful, to point out the problem when you see it, is a way of saying, “Look, you don’t want to become like that.” So bad times are often the richest times to change and to grow, and it was a bad time for the temple. The temple was anything that it should have been. It had lost its heart, its soul, its essence. It became no different than the Roman empire, in a sense, because we see in this story the Pharisees trying to trip Jesus up by asking him to choose two extremes, take sides on these issues of tax, whether it’s fair to do it or not, whether it’s right to do it or not. So he just says, “Look, this is not the issue. You give to Caesar what’s Caesar’s. You do what you have to do in terms of civil law, and then you give to God what is God’s.” And the Pharisees were amazed at his response, but the thing that’s interesting, that he did avoid joining one extreme or the other. But the other thing is they didn’t fully understand when he said, “You know what the problem with you guys is? You’re not doing what God wants. You’re not giving to God what he’s asking you for.” And the tragedy is what he was asking for, what God was asking of those people that ran the temple, that they would simply allow God to be a part of it, they would let divinity and its wisdom to enter into them so they would be guided to do the right thing.

So let’s look at the other two readings, because they seem to stress this beautifully. First of all, in the reading with Isaiah, Cyrus is not an Israelite. The Lord had always a problem looking for kings that would do what he asked, and when we look at the way God works with people, there are two things that we need to understand, that when God exercises his authority with us, it is in two forms: being chosen and being anointed. The civil authority, which the temple had become, was simply the authority that had the power to demand blind obedience ⎯ blind obedience. So let’s look at the way in which Isaiah describes to the people that the reason Cyrus was chosen, even though he wasn’t an Israelite, was because God used him by empowering him to do what needed to be done, because he couldn’t find an Israelite who would do that. And he gave Cyrus all the power that he needed to accomplish it. He opened all the doors for him, left gates unbarred, enabled him to do exactly what God asked him to do. And then Isaiah makes it clear that that’s exactly the way God works. He chooses us because ⎯ in fact, I love the image in scripture where God says, “I chose you before you chose me.” And to be chosen means you’re called into a relationship with him where you work together with him, not you for him but you in him, him in you. So he’s saying very clearly that there is no one like me, no one like God. No authority like God has ever existed, because his authority is radically different than that of the world, one, power over people, another to empower them.

So we see in the second reading, Paul and Silvanus and Timothy, they’re sending a letter to the Thessalonians saying, “You’ve got it. You’ve figured it out. You have been empowered by God to do something wonderful, and so we pray with you. We pray for you. We are with you, because you understand the authority of God.” The authority of God is to give you a task, to empower you to do it, and to let you know that this is not something that you are asked to do for God, but he’s saying, “Would you allow me to come into you and work with you, guide you and be the source of the things you need?” Power is intoxicating to a human being. The ego, the will, they love, love power. Power over people is something that is addictive, and like all addictions, it takes over and runs your life. The power that we have, as ministers of the gospel, is not that kind of power. No, it’s the power to awaken in people who God really is, how powerful he is. He can accomplish anything. If he asks you to do something ⎯ and he does ask all of us to do something. We have a destiny. He empowers us to do it by being a part of that so that we have this thing, this wonderful thing that Paul and Silvanus and Timothy are acknowledging in the Thessalonians, a conviction of the power of the Holy Spirit working through them. What a difference it is to live under that kind of power. There’s actually no ⎯ well, it is under, I guess, under the authority of God, but it’s not something that demands blind obedience.

Where this comes so much into my attention is when I look at the way in which sometimes the church gives us demands and demands that we do certain things in a certain way, and yet they may not really fit the situation. So what I love teaching and being a part of is proclaiming the beauty of this law of God that he swears will be written on our hearts, and when it comes to making moral decisions, we have this power, this Spirit within us that informs us. And when we have an inspired understanding, an inspired conscience, we make the decision that we believe that we make in God is going to be the best possible thing, and no law can cover that kind of situation. So it’s more than taxes we’re talking about here. It’s a different kind of legal system. The interesting thing is Jesus is pointing out to the scribes and Pharisees that, “You have created more like ⎯ you’ve created the church more like the Roman empire, power over people, telling them what to do.” It’s never intended to be that, and there’s always a danger that anyone in a position of power ⎯ in the church, it’s no different. They have to be careful not to make it something that it’s not intended to be. It’s not power over. It’s empowering. It’s love.

Father, I pray for all of those who are called to minister this beautiful message of God, the gospel, the good news. Free us all from any kind of excessive power over people. Help us always to be attentive to how you long for us to awaken in them the true authority that dwells in their hearts, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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28th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 25:6-10a | Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20 | Matthew 22:1-14

May your grace, oh Lord, we pray, at all times go before us and follow after and make us always determined to carry out good works. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

Most of my life has been lived out of an understanding that I have of God that flows so directly from the Old Testament, a God who had a conditional love for his people, a God who simply would look to them and ask them to do things for him, and when they failed to do it, God would reject them and cast them out. There’s that moment in the early days of salvation history where God looks at all the people that he created and says, “I see nothing here that I’m attracted to. They’re all filled with darkness and evil, and I want to destroy all of them.” And then he reconsiders and saves one, and the first covenant is made with God and his people to not destroy them. It’s the covenant of Noah. So having this as my image of God, it’s easy to see that I was drawn, in my simplicity of my understanding of the church at the time, when I was a child and even well into my ministry ⎯ I realized that my job was to seek approval from God. That was my core reason for being. I was taught so clearly as a young boy that sin was the thing that separated you from God, and whenever you sinned, he pulled away. And then this institution that he established, the church, particularly the Catholic Church, because I was taught then it was the only means of salvation, which gave me a strange feeling of sadness for those not part of my religion and then kind of a sense of pride that I’m with the real religion ⎯ all of that was changed so radically by the Vatican Council that teaches that all religions that seek the truth, seek God’s wisdom are means to salvation. But there I was, living in this church that had this conditional lover at the head of it, and so it’s easy to see why I was drawn to Jesus, because Jesus was the one who loved and who showed his love for me and would do something for me. And I didn’t quite understand it, but he somehow would do away with any responsibility I had to make up for my sins, which I was never taught that was true. I was always taught there would be punishment. Even if you had your sins forgiven, I was taught you would be punished for what you did.

So the idea of Jesus completely freeing me from the God of the Old Testament never really sunk in, but now it seems so different when I look at it. And I see the God of the Old Testament is limited in his ability to reveal who he is, because he had to deal with people the way they were. And they were not open as fully as they would be one day to the mystery of a lover seeking them instead of them being told to seek the lover. Nothing changed more for me in my understanding of my religious life than recognizing the initiator of what we are called to be engaged in. Our relationship with God does not primarily flow from us to God but from God to us. He is the passionate lover.

I remember reading once a phrase that I thought was so interesting since I’ve always grown in my understanding that everything in religion is relational. It’s all about our relationships, God with us, us with ourselves, us with others, and the thing that I was so struck by, by this particular author, he said, “The whole idea of the way God has chosen to work with us is surprisingly simple and embarrassingly intimate.” He wants to live with you. He wants to marry you. He wants to stay with you day and night. He wants to be with you in all the situations you’re in, and he’s saying, “If you allow me to do that, something will be established, and it’s the thing that I’ve always planned for my people.” The relationship that humans have with God and the ministry that God is able to awaken in us and use us ⎯ he needs our part in this, that together we will do something that saves the world and establishes something here in this world, on this earth, a thing called the kingdom of God. The goal is not simply to try to get to heaven. The goal is to try to make this world that you live in and I live in right now as fully in sync with who we are and what we’re here for and what we’re called to be as we can. And God is saying, “I don’t want you to be the one that takes that responsibility on so that you can please me so that I’ll give you a reward at the end of your life and you can go to heaven.” No. He wants a partnership. He wants something from us, but he is the initiator of that relationship, because that’s what he wants, an intimacy with you. Using your wisdom, your knowledge, your background, your weaknesses, all of that with God in you, you can do what he wants to see happen in this world, and that is the creation of a kingdom, a place of peace, not without struggle, not without pain, not without problems.

So I want to go back to two Sundays ago and last Sunday, as well as this Sunday, of course, to talk about something that I see so clearly about this relationship that God is pursuing, the one he wants so badly. It has the need, or it creates the need in us to do something, to freely do something, to choose to be with him, to choose him as he presents himself to us as one who longs for union and communion. It doesn’t just happen. So you look at that ⎯ two weeks ago, we had the image of someone who is told by his father to go to work in his vineyard, that the vineyard is the work of creating the kingdom of God. And he says, the first one says, “No.” And the next one says, “Yes.” And then, like true human nature, the one who said no thinks about it and wonders about it and ponders it and says, “Well, I think I will go.” And the one who said yes right away, he just forgot about it and didn’t pay any attention to it any longer. What is that about? When we’re presented with the images that God longs for us to participate in with him, usually the first response, and it seems a natural response, is, “Whoa, no.” Either, “I’m not worthy,” which should be one thing you’d get from the Old Testament. Another would be, “I don't know how to do that,” and then, “I don’t want to be religious and separate myself from the world and everybody around me that’s involved in all this stuff. But then when he ponders it and says, “You know what? I think this might work. I think this might be good,” that choice, that we look at God looking at us and say, “Okay, let’s try this. I’m open to it. I’m open to partnership with you.”

The next gospel, the next Sunday, is about servants who are working in the vineyard, and they become extremely caught up in their own self-interests and greed. And they’ve decided, instead of working for the master of the vineyard producing grapes, they’re stealing from him constantly, and that’s about what it is to be empowered by God, is not in any way, shape or form to use that power in a negative way, in a greedy way, in a taking and using way. And that’s a major part of this. When God empowers you to be the one that you’re intended to be, you will be powerful, and how careful one must be with the power of God. The commandment that says, “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain,” means not to use the power of God for anything that’s self-centered. So the kingdom has to have, or the partners of God have to have a desire in sync with God that is there. Their power, their gifts are only there in the mode of service for others, and indirectly, in a sense, serving them with the satisfaction, the joy that can only come from a life of service.

So there we see not only do we need to make our own decision about choosing this relationship. It must be focused on others, and then in today’s reading, it’s really interesting, because what is clear is the kingdom is described in this passage beautifully as a wedding feast. What could be better? It’s a wedding feast where you’re invited to come to a celebration of union between two entities, man and woman usually but in this case, divinity and humanity. That’s the celebration that the New Testament is all about, God’s full plan revealed. He chooses to marry us and become part of us in our everyday life, bringing life and freedom and hope to the people around us. And so the fact that people have ignored this invitation is probably the most common thing that’s going on right now. Most people are too busy to talk about any kind of deep connection with the sacred. It’s more about, “What do I need to do to make myself healthy? What do I need to do to make money? What do I need to do to make friends, keep friends? What do I do to have fun?” All that, and that’s okay. Those are things that are important, but when you’re not paying attention ⎯ not paying attention to what it is that you’re invited in to ⎯ I can see where you’re just busy. That’s kind of a scary thought. “Thank you, God, for working with me or at least inviting me to work with you, but I’m too busy. I’ve got other things I’ve got to do. I’ve got business to take care of.” But then what you see so clear, that that isn’t the will of God, but he wants everyone to enter into this relationship, everyone. So when those people who are invited don’t come, he said, “Look, kill those people, and then I want you to go out and get everybody in here for this feast.” And so they have the good and the bad and everyone. This is a beautiful image that this invitation from God goes out to everyone.

And then the interesting thing, maybe the most dramatic thing in this particular passage, is everyone’s been drawn right off the road into this banquet, so there’s no way that they would have a wedding garment on. They wouldn’t run home, get a tuxedo, a ballgown or whatever. No, so when he sees that they’re not dressed right, he casts them out. Now, what is that? It’s so clearly that, when one understands this relationship with God, when one is working in that, they resonate something. They resonate this Spirit of God, this willingness to serve and to love. It’s just so attractive and so beautiful. It’s the outer garment that one perceives, and so when he’s saying, if you don’t change, if you come in here, even though you’re not worthy maybe, to say that, or not so much worthy but if you’re ⎯ there I go back to my old self. If you’re not interested, okay, but if you’re here and you understand the celebration of divinity and humanity, you understand who you are now called to be, then you will be changed. There’s no showing up at the wedding celebration and automatically becoming in union or moving to greater union with God. It’s a choice. So the idea that those who come have been given an opportunity to choose, and the unfortunate thing he says is that most of the time, people don’t realize that they’ve been chosen, and they walk away. And that is a deep sadness in God and in the person that witnesses so clearly what we are to be. Jesus, he came to explain to people not with words but by actions. His very nature was human and divine, 100 percent both. He’s the model. That’s what we need to focus on, not our worthiness but a choice that we’re free to make. Amen.

Father, your invitation is so exciting and scary at the same time. Bless us with the courage to make the right choice so that we can experience the world as you intended us to experience it, with things that are difficult and things that are so wonderful they’re beyond our imagining. Help us to trust in you and everything you teach, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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27th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 5:1-7 | Philippians 4:6-9 | Matthew 21:33-43

Almighty, everliving God, who in the abundance of your kindness surpasses the merits and the desires of those who entreat you, pour out your mercy upon us to pardon what conscience dreads and to give what prayer does not dare to ask. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

Salvation history is fascinating. The more I study it, the more I work with the words and the images in the stories, it becomes clearer and clearer to what I’m looking at. It’s a story, a love story, about a God who created human beings at a time in their existence where they had a very, very difficult time of even understanding the basic things that God wants them to know. The very beginning was, in a way, not a disaster but certainly something that didn’t go very well. He created this beautiful garden and said, “Here, all you have to do is tend this beautiful place and just do as I ask you to do, and don’t do certain things.” And of course, they went ahead and did the very thing they were told not to do, and there was division. You look at those early years of the story of human nature. It was clear that over and over again God would say about them that they were not what he wanted them to be, even to the point of destroying all of them at one point and saving Noah and making it a covenant with people, “Okay, you guys are not who I wish you were, but I won’t destroy you again. I’ll work with you.”

So imagine, the Old Testament is the story of God trying to establish a relationship with his people, and the aggressor, in a sense, the one who is creating the need for this connection, is coming not from human beings but from God. God is in love with human beings. He loved them the minute he created them. He saw them beautiful. He saw them as reflections as himself, and he wanted a relationship with them so that they would love them freely, and he would love them, and they would live in this wonderful thing called the kingdom of God. But the stories in scripture have this rhythm to them. It’s God doing things for people, and then they respond and thank God, and they do what God asks. And that lasts a little bit, and then they turn away from God, and then God says, “Stop doing that.” They won’t do it, so he punishes them. And then the punishment lasts for a long time, and then he comes back to them. It goes over and over, God giving in to the needs of people, longing to help them to become who they need to be in order to be in this relationship with God. But the primary mover is God. God is a lover, and he’s pursuing you. He pursued these people. He wants a relationship, and he knows that, in order for that relationship to happen, we have to understand some things about who we are and why we’re here.

So we have two beautiful images from the Old Testament about this kingdom of God, the work that God is wanting us to be engaged in, and the two are the vineyard images. And they’re beautiful, because if you look at this as a kind of allegory, parable, whatever, it’s a story about human beings and their relationship with God. And God created human beings, gave them this life on this planet, and basically that is an image of a person setting up a vineyard. The vines are planted, and then everything is set. And then it’s time for grapes to come. In the first story, it seems that there’s something wrong with the vines, because the vines that are planted do not produce grapes that are usable. They only produce wild grapes. So it’s an image, I believe of a ⎯ God is saying about the people at the time that they would not, they could not understand fully their nature, that God wanted to work closely with them. And so he had done all kinds of things for them. Think of this as the period of time when he took them to the desert. He gave them the law. He did all these things for them, but they still, themselves, were hard-hearted and were not able to produce what God wanted, which was a kind of way of life that reflected who God is. And so it’s a kind of indictment to the Old Testament times. Constantly we see that there’s a failure on the part of the very being of humanity that wasn’t ready to understand what it meant to produce something called the kingdom of God.

Grapes, what an interesting image. Why grapes? Grapes have always been around in ancient history. It’s a vine that was very much a part of it, and you realize what you’re seeing in the grape image in this vineyard story is something that comes about clearly in the New Testament. I especially think it’s interesting to think about the wedding in the feast of Cana. The first miracle that Jesus performed was producing wine for a wedding. And then you look at the Old Testament, and God says things to human beings like, “I want to marry you. I want a union with you. I want to communion with you.” And so this idea of grape as a symbol of the fruit of the work that God wants us to be engaged in with him makes a lot of sense. It’s about an intoxicating, wonderful image of a wine that is used later in the New Testament as the blood of Christ, and it’s about forgiveness, which is about being capable of being a source of unmerited love for the people around us. That’s what God wanted people to have, always has wanted people to have that.

So we look in the Old Testament image. We see definitely that there is a problem with human nature, and then in the New Testament, it’s different. It’s shifted a little bit on who’s responsible. At the beginning, it seems like it’s the problem with the vines, but in the second case, it’s the problem with the tenants, the ones that leased this beautiful vineyard that is producing wonderful grapes. But those who run it are not sharing the grapes with the owner, and so what it is, it’s an image of the Pharisees and the scribes, an indictment from Jesus that they have this gift of trying to explain to people how much the God who created them loves them, and they were not allowing that to happen. The very system that they created was robbing them of who God was. It’s a frightening thought about anybody that preaches the gospel. It’s amazing how we, as those who talk about it, can be responsible for it becoming something it was never intended to be. It’s not intended to be a burden. It’s not intended to be something that takes away your dignity and your value or forces you to answer certain issues with their answers. No, the relationship we have with God is this incredible kingdom that’s an interior kingdom of peace that resonates out through us to the people around us. It’s an amazing love story when you feel truly, absolutely, totally loved by God, not for what you’ve accomplished, not for what you have done but simply because he made you in such a way. In his eyes, you are beautiful. You are a reflection of him, and when he knows that you’re a reflection from him, he wants you to live your life in this world as he longed to live it for us. In other words, his longing is always to teach us to be loving and forgiving and caring human beings. It’s been that way from the very beginning, but it had to go through these stages of evolution and development and change.

There’s one thing I want you to take from these images. It’s what Paul is saying about this world that we live in. Yes, we have to be transformed in order to produce this wonderful, abundant thing called the kingdom, and we have to have teachers that teach it in order that we can enter into it more fully. And then he gives you the most interesting image that he’s talking about, his ministry, and he’s not shy at all about saying he’s a good minister, but listen to what he's saying when he’s talking to his brothers and sisters. He says, “Look, here’s what I want you to do. Do what you’ve learned from me and received from me and heard and seen in me. Be like me,” he’s saying. And when he’s saying that, he’s saying, “Look, this kingdom is a kingdom where the person who’s in it has found a way of experiencing God’s love so amazing and so unconditional and so abundant that he, a person who persecuted Christians, killed them, because they were following this false prophet, Jesus, he’s loved so intensely.” He’s just simply saying, “Look, if you can realize what it means to be loved like this, then you’re going to be wanting to live a loving life like this, and it’s a life that is true and honorable and just and pure and lovely and gracious and excellent.” That’s who we are, not who we have to force ourselves to be. It’s where we are meant to be, but it’s also the result of being loved, unconditionally loved. And I don't know why, but religion has a way of wanting to hold back, wanting to say, “Well, no. You’ve really got to earn it. You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do that. You’ve got to make this happen first, and God isn’t interested ⎯ and God is very disappointed in you.” And all that is just so much unnecessary motivation, because its motivation is fear. And fear is not a motivation that will ever bring you to the kingdom. Fear just creates more fear, shame more shame, anger more anger, and there’s nothing in the kingdom that resonates with that. But the kingdom is about a goal. It has a goal. It has ⎯ it needs to be fruitful. Religion has to be, by its very nature, something that creates something that comes from us that’s abundant, full, rich, intoxicating, freeing, life-giving. It’s what we’re here for, to receive in order to become. Amen.

Father, you promise us a kingdom of peace, a kingdom of knowing how important we are and how blessed we are with your presence flowing through us. Keep us from focusing on our faults and more on who you are and how your love transforms everything. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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26th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ezekial 18:25-28 | Philippians 2:1-11 | Matthew 21:28-32

.Oh God, who manifests your almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy, bestow, we pray, your grace abundantly upon us to make those hastening to attain your promise heirs to the treasures of heaven. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

From the very beginning of God’s relationship with human beings in a garden, sin was there, and ever since, we have struggled with this part of human nature that seems so foreign to who God is and who we are told we’re created to be. So when I look at the first reading, it’s clear that what’s being said is that the ways of God are fair. If you commit a sin, God destroys you; you die. Look at the covenant that was made to Noah when God decided to destroy the entire human race and all the animals, everything, and when he was doing all that, he found just this one person that he thought, “Okay, maybe I’ll work with this one person.” And what’s so powerful about that is the promise he made then was, “I will never again destroy sinners.” But throughout the Old Testament, the history between God and his people is really fraught with God separating himself from sinners, God condemning sinners, God judging sinners, God punishing them. It’s not until the New Testament that something radically new, something radically different comes into the picture, and what comes into the picture is what we’ve always longed for, is a way to deal with sin by not motivating somebody to not sin by fear. And that’s what I think the readings are about today.

The God who created you and created me tells this wonderful salvation history story, and in that story, he has this wonderful progression of ideas and thoughts that move from a God of punishment to a God of love and a God of forgiveness. So we know clearly that what we should see in the Old Testament is many things that had to be what they were because of the people that God was working with, but there’s so much in the Old Testament that we have to leave behind. And when you’ve been imbued in something and grown up in something, it’s so hard to get rid of that. It’s a pattern in your very being, it seems. If you’re guilty because every ⎯ when you do something wrong and you feel separated instantly from God, that’s because that’s what you’ve been trained to think. And what has to happen is a change, and we see that so clearly in the gospel. Jesus came into the world to change people. The Old Testament didn’t really talk that much about changing behavior from the inside out. It always seemed to say, “There will be a reason for you to keep this commandment. So look at that, weigh it, and then choose, because if you’re smart, you’ll choose to do what God asks you to do, because then you’ll have God with you.” But in the New Testament, it’s radically different. No, God says, “Not only am I with you in your sins,” but if you’re a person who doesn’t feel the need to change, who lives in the past, who is working out of, more or less, let’s say, the Old Testament model, he’s saying, “I have a really hard time reaching you, because it’s so much a part of your life. You can’t imagine something other than the law being the thing that is going to save us from sin.” It never will save us from sin. It’ll only control behavior.

So what does change us from sin? Well, Paul has a beautiful way of describing it. He’s saying so clearly that this Jesus, who comes into the world, is the model of what we’ve longed for from the very, very beginning. This being Christ, this teaching Christ, this truth that is in Christ has been longed for, and what we have to do is make sure that people understand it, embrace it, accept it. And this is a hard thing ⎯ not a hard thing to say, but it’s a hard thing to do, to stop trying to earn it and try to give God permission to enter into your heart and to make you like Christ ⎯ make you like him. And what did he do? He destroyed sin. That’s what they tell us. He destroyed the power of sin. How? He didn’t make stricter rules. No, he did this weird thing. He loved sinners, and in that love that he had, there was this grace, this energy, this force given to people who, when they are in sin and they know that they are deeply loved and that there is someone who believes in their potential to change and longs for them to be free of all the pain they’re in, that’s their intention. When a person responds to their own sins and the sins of somebody else with that same disposition, compassion, mercy, they begin to feel a participation in something. The healing, transforming presence of God entering into the heart of a sinner will do the work that the law could never do. And what it does, it awakens in someone a sense that they are valued, and when they’re valued, they want other people to feel that value. When they feel the freedom of not being filled with shame and anger and fear all the time, they’re going to want that for other people, and that’s the way it’s supposed to work, individuals believing in what’s been given to them, feeling its power and its beauty and wanting it to be given to others. And what melts away is all that judgment, condemnation, wanting to destroy someone, because we think that this sin thing has to be hated out of the world, destroyed and removed. We want to get rid of all the bad people, and then we’ll have something wonderful. No, we want to transform all the bad people by doing what Christ tells us we should do, and that’s to have a different disposition toward them where we’re longing for them to change, and we believe they can change.

It's interesting. In the world today there’s a lot of tension. In religious circles, there’s a lot of attention about change. It’s certainly true in the Catholic Church. People that are so used to the old way that we used to do things, especially the way we worshipped, some people feel that could not change, should not change, and yet it’s clear that the Holy Spirit knows that we need something different now than we did back then. And it may be unfamiliar. It may be difficult. It may not seem as comfortable, but that’s the direction God wants us to go toward. And I will tell you, the fundamental difference is a religion that is private in a kind of separatist, only wanting to be around the people that think and believe like I do, to a community of believers who have been transformed by this extraordinary power of forgiveness and acceptance and wanting to give that to others. That’s the shift. That’s the change.

Father, the power that you have shared with us is beyond our imagining, but you fill us with your Spirit. And that Spirit not only transforms us but gives us the ability, when we join your intention to save those who are struggling with darkness, that it will take place. Bless us with this faith and trust, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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25th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 55:6-9 | Philippians 1:20c-24, 27a | Matthew 20:1-16a

Oh God who founded all the commands of your sacred law on love of you and of our neighbor, grant that, by keeping your precepts, we may merit to attain eternal life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

Religion is a very, very interesting entity. The way I first learned about it was when I was a young man getting ready for first communion. I understood very clearly the beauty of what the Eucharist said to me. It was something very, very special. I’d only seen my adult friends ⎯ my parents and my older brother could go. I couldn’t. It was very exciting, the first communion thing, I think, for most of us who received it. It was a special, special moment, graduating into the adulthood of ⎯ well, the beginning of your adulthood as a believer in this religion. When I think about it, I look so clearly into my own self and what I have struggled with in my own religious practices, but I remember clearly, in the beginning, it was so simple and so easy to grasp. God was a conditional lover. He loved those who did what he asked them to do, and sin was our big separation from him, because when we didn’t do what God asked us to do, he would punish us by separating himself from us. I took that to mean ⎯ that just became part of my psyche. I just always knew that was what I was doing, trying to please God so he would love me, and I realized, after being ⎯ reflecting as long as I have over the scriptures, that that is not the goal of what God wants from us, not obedience, especially not blind obedience. There’s no act of love that isn’t really free. What he wants is our love, not our obedience, and so when I’m thinking about the whole notion of how my own religious life evolved, I realized this evolution of who we are and what we’re here for is a constant, constant, wonderful process to be engaged in. And not only are we individually engaged in it, but religion itself is engaged in it, because human beings are creatures that evolve. We’re not the same as we were at the time of Adam and Eve or the time when Abraham called a people together and formed them as a community following a particular God that had a particular, beautiful way of dealing with people and calling them into freedom. All of that is a sign that we continually are engaged in this evolution, and what I’m seeing now is, even though that early church was so comforting to me, and I just had made a big decision not to ever do anything wrong, because I didn’t want to be separated from God. So I had ⎯ my spiritual journey was set. I knew what to do: just don’t do evil things, and this whole thing works, and you go to heaven.

Then I listened to Isaiah in the first reading. Seek God. He wants to be found. He doesn’t want someone to tell us about him. He wants us to find him. And Isaiah was 700 years before Christ, and when you think about it, there’s a lot in here that sounds like New Testament. But it was the Old Testament, and it did talk about a God of forgiveness. But the thing I find so interesting in this passage is he’s saying, “You know what? Please understand the ways of God are so much more than we could ever have thought or even that we could easily accept.” It's an incredible plan that God has got for each of us, and it’s mystical. It’s mysterious. It’s wonderful. It’s frightening. It’s comforting. It’s so much more than just doing what you’re told, and so I want to try to open your heart and your mind to what this evolution has led us to at this point, because I see so much now in religion itself, great conflict over the direction, it seems, that we are following under the direction of Pope Francis. But I don’t want to focus so much on just that, but it seems that there is a great anxiety with a certain number of religious people that, if you take away this simple code of performance, that everyone does the same thing, everyone believes the same thing, everyone makes moral decisions in unison with everybody else, when that is threatened, it seems that they’re terrified that they’re not going to have a religion to go to anymore, that everybody will be doing just what they want to do and all this kind of stuff. But I think it’s so fascinating how these readings seem to me to say we never do move backwards. We always move forward, and there is definitely something more about our relationship with God than simple obedience. It’s a relationship. It’s intimate. It’s a call to be part of what he is in this world, to participate in the same ministry that Jesus had, Jesus, a man filled with this beautiful divinity of God but absolutely, totally just like us. And I think more than anything else, that incarnational event has so many meanings and such purpose. But the one that I think we haven’t looked at closely enough is that it is an invitation for you and for me to believe that we can have that gift of God in our hearts, and through that presence of God, when we align our will to his will, we can accomplish things like Jesus accomplished, making people whole, freeing people from darkness.

So look at the gospel, and I think it really does underscore what I’m trying to say about merit. So it’s about Jesus telling his disciples another parable, and now, this is to the disciples, so it’s got ⎯ it’s a little bit more important than say ⎯ well, I would say this: he spoke mostly parables to his disciples so they’d ponder it, because it was always about more than they could possibly understand at that moment. And so he’s just telling them about a person who owns the land, and he wants to hire laborers. And he hires them all at different times of the day, and when it comes to payment, merit comes into the picture. The workers realize that the master is going to be giving ⎯ he’s giving the ones who worked an hour the same pay as us. Well, he couldn’t possibly do that, because they don’t merit it. They didn’t earn it. And he does just that. He gives everyone the same, and they’re furious and upset. And I love the fact that he’s saying, “Are you worried about me being generous? Are you worried about me wanting to do what I want to do? Why do you want me to do what you want me to do, what you expect me to do? Am I not free to be my own man?” But the thing that I love most is the way it ends. Those caught in meritocracy, those who think that they are the ones who are the cause of God’s love for them, they’ll be the last, because the ones that will be the first were the ones that were hired at the end. So it’s so beautiful that he’s saying, “Those that work in merit are not where you need to be now.” That’s about the past. That’s the last. That’s the misinterpretation ⎯ not the misinterpretation, but it’s the thing that we mostly go to. It’s what I was taught, but to think that God is not about merit and he loves me, when I am absolutely not working at what I thought he wanted me to do, being perfect and being free of sin, it’s a totally different image of God. He says, “No, Don. I’ve loved you from the beginning. I’ve not ever not loved you. I am there for you whether you or good are you are bad. Whether you deserve it is not the issue. What counts is how much I love you and see your value and see your worth. That’s what I want you to teach people to be.”

And so I look back at the second reading. There’s this beautiful image of what I believe God is trying to teach us today, and it’s not what we’ve always been taught, but it’s always been given to us to teach. And we’re now just discovering it, I think, but look at the way Paul looks at his life. Now, he’s redeemed. He has been lifted up out of a level of consciousness that would fit a child who can only understand how to act if somebody tells him too and then punishes them if they don’t. He’s a whole other generation in a sense. He’s the beginning of our generation, and what he realizes is, he said, “I know something now about me. I have this gift.” He did miracles. He raised someone from the dead, and he’s saying, “If I stay here, believing the way I believe and God working through me as he’s working through me, I’m magnifying him in my very essence, my very being. I’m making God more present to people.” And he’s delighted with that, and yet he’s so in love with the God that gave him this gift that he said, “I’d like to just be with him. I don't know which one is better.” Well, it seems he chose, in a sense, to stay, because he didn’t ⎯ he didn’t take his own life. He remained in the flesh and was a great benefit to the teaching of Jesus. I long to be a benefit to the teaching of Jesus. I want you to understand how exciting and how different the religion that we’ve been called into is intended to be. It’s an incredible gift, incredible responsibility, and it will never be greeted very openly by people who are caught up in merit. Amen.

Father, open our hearts to understand the mystery of your love, the mystery of the dignity that you give to each of us in inviting us to be partners with you in the salvation of the world. What a privilege, what an honor and what a great mystery, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sirach 27:30—28:7 | Romans 14:7-9 | Matthew 18:21-35

Look upon us, oh God, creator and ruler of all things, that we may feel the working of your mercy. Grant that we may serve you with all our heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

People have asked me if God created evil. It’s an interesting question. Evil is a real part of who we are in this world and how we are to live in this world. We have rules and laws, and there’s a part of us that resists doing that. And so the only way that I could answer that question, did God create it, he allowed it for sure, but when you look at what he gave to us, something unique that he didn’t give to any other thing that he created is this amazing capacity to make our own decisions, to be free, to be free of the yoke of the law. So when I grew up as a child, I learned the lesson early that, if I became a bad little boy and I did something wrong and I didn’t go to confession, that because of that one thing I didn’t do correctly, I would be sent to hell. So I grew up, as a young Catholic boy learning about my faith, that God had, in way, a short memory. If I did one thing that was against his rule, against his law, I severed his relationship. The only thing in that that is the truth is that, when we fail, we fail what we believe is what we should be or what we should do, when that happens, we do feel somehow we’ve severed something. We could say we’ve severed our own sense of wellbeing about ourselves. We’ve put ourselves almost at odds with who we just were when we did that, and we feel shame, and we feel confusion, and we get angry at ourselves. Or we really do feel that, when we’ve done something wrong, God does pull away.

It's the opposite. When you sin, you do something that is against your very nature, who you are, who you are meant to be. Sin is in the world not as a test to see where we are and then be accepted or rejected. No, we’re always accepted, as a sinner, as a saint, whatever you want to say. God’s love is never diminished. In fact, I would say, if I used an image of parents and children, when a parent sees their child in trouble, they give them more attention and more care than a child that seems to not have any problems. God is deeply affected by our sin, and his instinct is not to punish, not to condemn but to somehow heal, embrace. And the way he does that healing, when it comes to our sins, is the way he planned it all. Let me say this about the old ⎯ the Old Testament is much more focused on sin. In the Old Testament, you see a God who, when sin is there and people don’t respond to the prophets, he will destroy all the sinners. It's a real clear indication that God wants obedience to his way of life, which we learn in the New Testament is simply our human nature. Laws were established to help us get a sense of who we are and what makes us fulfill or what robs us of our inner connection with ourselves and others. It is sin that’s the problem. Yes, we’ve got it, but if you look at the way God responds to sin, it is the most beautiful model of how you and I are supposed to deal with our own sins and the sins of those who sin against us. And the answer is not, “Stop it. Don’t ever do that again.” No, it’s forgiveness ⎯ forgiveness.

Ninety percent of what Jesus teaches in the New Testament is on one theme, forgiveness, and why would he at that point in his revelation of who God is, why at that point was he able to say to us, “Don’t try to destroy every part of you that might lead you into sin. Don’t think sin is the end of your relationship with me.” No, he wants something radically different. He wants you to know that his response to your sin is not revenge, get back at you or any kind of major punishment. He wants you to learn. He wants you to experience sin for what it is, and that means that we are, in the act of forgiveness, saying we allow sin to be part of this process. Don’t expect yourself not to sin. Don’t work to not sin. Work to learn, from every sin you commit, something about who you are. Your own consciousness is the reason we’re here, to grow into a greater union with who we are, to become fully ourselves. That’s essence, and you don’t get there by being told what to do. You get there by experiencing what actions produce when you realize that the thing that you might think is going to be good for you, at the cost of someone else ⎯ if you think that’s going to work for you, okay, that’s the wrong way to see it, but who’s going to change you? What’s going to change you? The experience of doing it is what changes you, experience of seeing how you feel, the shame you might feel, the disappointment you feel, to see the separation that happens between you and other people when things are done in a way that is totally self-centered. One person I love saying this. We never do get past a sin by willing it and forcing ourselves to have a resolve that we’ll never do it again. He said, “No, we outgrow our sins. They just become stupid. They become what they are, nonproductive, promises that can never be fulfilled.” That’s the reason forgiveness is so essential. It’s so that we can sin and learn and change and grow.

It's not the way I learned about sin. It’s not the way I began my spiritual life, and maybe in a way ⎯ you know that, when we’re children, we have to be told what to do, but the beautiful thing about the way I believe God works with us on this planet while we’re here is to slowly reveal to us the fulness of who he is and what he’s here to do. He is in our life to help us to be transformed into who he made us, beautiful, beautiful process. Is he worried that at times we’ll be far from that and we’ll be doing things that are horrendously awful, and is that going to mean that he’s going to say, “I’m not having anything to do with you anymore. I’m cutting you out of my life. You’re not going to be with me after this life”? Those were all the things that I was taught that were motives for me not sinning, but to know, when I sin, he feels for me, the reality of what I’ve chosen and he reveals to me what that really is, that’s the work of the Spirit, to open me to the fulness of my potential for consciousness at this moment in my life. And I can see and know in my own life, things I thought were absolutely not a problem to do at all, I know now were so potentially destructive to me and to the people I love. I didn’t decide that I will not do that anymore, because I will not to do it. I don’t do it, because I don’t want to do it. I don’t find anything in it that makes any sense to me. We turn away from sin, because we see it for what it is. You can’t see it for what it is unless you forgive yourself for having done it and you pay attention to what your actions produced. Sin is based on a lie that what it wants you to do is definitely never going to produce what it promises. God, on the other hand, says, “I want you to experience and grow through your weaknesses. I’m there with you the whole time. I feel the pain that you’re in. I want you to feel it so that it is the training tool that God has given you.” Sin is necessary, because it is the greatest teacher, and without that teacher, or without responding to sin as a teacher, we end up wallowing in shame and anger, bitterness toward ourselves or toward others. The secret is to embrace it for what it was created to do: draw us closer to God, to each other, to seeing and feeling the beauty that each of us are. Amen.

Father, our weaknesses, our bad choices are so often the burden that we carry. Even though we believe you forgive us, we still carry the shame. Free us from that so that we can see the value of our mistakes as tools that draw us closer and closer to who you call us to be. Give us patience and radical forgiveness, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ezekiel 33:7-9 | Romans 13:8-10 | Matthew 18:15-20

Oh God, by whom we are redeemed and received adoption, look graciously upon your beloved sons and daughters that those who believe in Christ may receive true freedom and an everlasting inheritance. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

Religion evolves. Human beings evolve. The world evolves. We are not who we were many, many years ago, and one of the shadows of religion is that it tends to feel that it is the one thing that never changes, that always holds the same truths. And it may be that they hold the same truths, but how those truths are interpreted by those of us who listen to them could be radically different than someone in the Old Testament, because they were different. And so it’s not that the rules or laws ⎯ as far as what they basically are based on has never changed, but how we interpret them is very different. And I find myself in such a strange place after being a priest for over 55 years. I have felt more animosity toward my church, from my church members, brothers, Catholics, who are upset with the direction that she’s going in, or at least ⎯ either that, or they’re really disappointed. When they go there, they’re not fed and nurtured. And it seems so strange to me, because I was so enthusiastic about the Vatican Council and how it would change everything. And at the heart of that change, was so clear to me, that the church would be no longer seen as this hierarchical of officials running our lives, but the church was as it is in the gospel. When people gather together and pray for God’s will, that will has been empowered to change people. Just knowing it isn’t the same as longing for it, wanting it, asking God to give it to us. What we long for is what the opening prayer prays for, true freedom ⎯ freedom.

So let’s look at the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament, because preaching for the last 50 years on both has been really exciting. Before that, it was only the New Testament that Catholics heard on Sunday. But here’s the difference I see so clearly: the Old Testament is based in law, the power of law over someone else’s desires or wills. It fundamentally tells us what we’re supposed to do, so it’s based on authority, and then therefore, it’s demanding that we follow that. But then the interesting thing in the New Testament is the very thing that the law is there to change, people’s hearts so they’re not so destructive. The law simply gave people the right to destroy people who weren’t following the law. In other words, it’s about power over people, and when they don’t do what you are told, they’re destroyed. At least in the beginning of the Old Testament, it’s clear. When God saw a city filled with sin, he would just say, “I’m going to destroy them all.” And he would, and he did. So you have power over people. The goal, if they don’t do what they’re told, and that obedience is the goal, then they get the very thing they’re told not to do to people. Stop violating each other. Stop hurting each other. Stop destroying each other. It’s like the evil is there, and the church is using the same tactic as evil does practically by saying you have to basically be a person who is acceptable or being condemned.

So then you look at the New Testament. What’s the difference? Radical difference, it’s no longer focused on action so much but on who we are. So when I see the New Testament, what Jesus came to establish is this incredible, wonderful community of like-minded people who realize that they are called to evolve into something more than they are and that they’re invited to live in a world that does not return evil for evil, but instead of condemning those that are wrong, it accepts them, forgives them, and seeks to open their eyes. What a difference? If it’s really about becoming someone instead of doing what you’re told, I see this incredible sense of freedom coming into it, and I believe that’s exactly what God wants us to understand about religion. It’s communal, and the communal aspect of it is not everybody blindly following the same rules and regulations. I remember growing up in the ‘40s and ‘50s in Catholic cities, like Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis. We all did the thing we were doing, because we ⎯ we all did it, so we never questioned it. We couldn’t eat meat on Friday. We couldn’t do other things at Lent, the discipline of Lent by giving up things, which is all fine and good, but I never questioned any of it. I just did what I was told, and everybody else did. So it was a communal nature religion where it becomes a culture, and when you’re in the culture, you don’t question anything. And if somebody questions it, they’re dangerous, but it’s important, today more than ever, to really look at whatever religion we are a part of, or if we’re not a part of any religion, to look at what it is that we’re challenged to do, to become. What’s our spirituality? And I see so much that spirituality being described in a way in the gospel of a place where people gather together, likeminded people wanting the same thing, not wanting to be controlled, not wanting to be told what to do, not wanting to have someone in the place of authority that impedes your ability to live the life that you know, deep inside of you, is an authentic true life. What a wonderful idea. What a wonderful image, I think, of what the church could really be, or maybe I should say what it really is, because when you belong to a community that feeds you with all kinds of fear and anger about the way the world is and wanting somehow for all those people to be somehow punished and destroyed, when we attack them instead of longing to change them, we’re in this false, deadly, dark, unhealthy religion. But if we can look at it as Jesus describes it and feel the freedom that comes to a human being who knows that, in their heart, their major reason for being here is not to be selfish, as the Old Testament so clearly focuses on self-centeredness ⎯ do the law, or you die. What’s your motive? My well-being, my future, all about me. New Testament, how can I respond to the call of religion? What is my response to it, my responsibility? To free people, to give them a sense of their own value, their own dignity, their own worth, to free them from excessive, fear, shame and anger that comes with a rigorous legal system that you have to surrender to.

What a gift, to be able to live in this day, this time where not only are we reexamining every institution ⎯ who do you trust? Every institution seems to be ruled by people who have some self-centered motive. They serve the company rather than the customers. They do everything they can, and even lie, to be able to sell their product or do what they claim they will do, and they don’t ever perform up to what they’re supposed to be. All of that, we see it everywhere. So it’s obviously going to be seen in religion, but the thought that that same kind of self-centeredness lives in religion is a little bit frightening, and it shouldn’t, in any way, shape or from give us a feeling that religion is intrinsically the wrong route, the wrong journey, the wrong thing to surrender to. No, listen to the religion that is described by the one who came to move religion out of an unhealthy den of thieves, as Jesus would call the men of the temple, into this glorious kingdom of freedom and acknowledgement of beauty in ourselves. And when it’s not there, we gather together, tell each other what we see in each other that isn’t what we think that is really our nature, believes in us by telling us what we could be, and they believe in us. It’s so different than being cut out and condemned. It’s a great time for the church. Great decisions are going to be made, and I pray my church, Catholic Church, every religion understands fully the mystery of this great, great tradition, bounded not in the Old Testament but founded on the New Testament by love and not law.

Father, your Son came into the world to do something for all of us. We call it redemption, forgiveness of our sins, but Lord, you know that it’s more than that. It’s a transformation of our very essence and opening us up to the beauty of what it means to be a community member that’s loving and changing and growing together. Bless us with that kind of experience of religion, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
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21st Sunday in Ordinary Time
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20th Sunday in Ordinary Time
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19th Sunday in Ordinary Time
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Transfiguration
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16th Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Kings 3:5, 7-12 | Romans 8:28-30 | Matthew 13:44-52

Oh God, protector of those who hope in you, without whom nothing has firm foundation, nothing is holy, bestow in abundance your mercy upon us and grant that, with you as our rule and guide, we may use the good things that pass in such a way as to hold fast even now to those that ever endure. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

I want to begin my homily by going back to the very beginning, Adam and Eve. That original mistake they made, the original sin, is very interesting. It needs to be understood clearly, and what I believe they were doing was something that’s so natural to human beings in a lower level of consciousness. They wanted to be their own gods. That’s exactly what they said. They listened to a lie that said, “You can be just like God. You can be him. You don’t need him. You’ll be like him, autonomous.” And that’s a wonderful way of imagining one of the core spiritual struggles we have in this world. Are we in charge of our whole life? Are we the ones responsible for everything we do? It’s so easy, if you just listen to the Old Testament, to realize that God can give you pretty clear notions of what you should and should not do. The church is very good at telling us what to do and what not to do, and that’s helpful. But in a sense, it leaves out the most exciting, the most wonderful, the most beautiful, the most valuable thing that we have in our relationship with God, and that is his indwelling presence. He wants to be a part of us.

So let’s look at this gospel, because when Adam and Eve were sent away from the garden, they entered the earth, and there was a statement that God made to Adam. He said, “You’re going to be ⎯ work’s going to be hard.” And he, of course, used agrarian images. He’d be plowing the fields, and there would be thistles and all kinds of struggle and difficulty in raising plants, and then you’d just have the food, and you would eat it. And it’s not a bad image of just the way we can sometimes get into a way of believing or a way of thinking life is just a lot of work, a lot of drudgery. We’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that, and it’s difficult. And then we get a certain benefit from all the work we do. It feeds a part of us. It certainly takes care of our existence, but as far as our longings and our soul and our heart, it’s not very fulfilling just to be able to finish the task, though it’s enjoyable to do a good job. So what is it that this gospel then is talking about, when Jesus, knowing our heart so perfectly ⎯ he said, “What’s you’ve got to understand is that, in this world that I’ve given you, there is something hidden. It’s actually ⎯ you can find it in the very life you’re living, in the work you’re doing.” And every now and then, you might find something that you hit in your work, and usually it’s sometimes a dark time. And all of a sudden in that time, you discover something that you never saw before, a treasure, something wonderful, some insight that you have that life is good, life is full, life could be wonderful. It’s so valuable, because it gives you that ability to not get bound into a kind of dark drudgery of life. I hear people saying, “I don't know if I want to have children today, because the world is so dark and so conflicted, and we’re going to go through a horrible experience with the planet, and I don’t want to bring a child into this world.” Imagine saying that, and I know people say it. I’m not judging them for saying it. It’s an easy thing to feel, but where’s the hope in that kind of statement? And finding this treasure that Jesus talked about in the parable is finding something that changes everything, so much so that everything you have you let go of. All the things you were focused on you let go to a sort of soft focus, and you’re on this thing, this treasure. And that treasure is hard to describe, but I’m going to try. There’s also an image in this parable of a pearl. It’s beautiful. There’s something about the beauty of life. What I think Jesus is talking about is there’s a way of seeing the world where there is so much abundance and so much life and so much enjoyment of the beauty that’s all around us. That’s what I would call grace, grace coming into us.

Listen to Paul when he’s talking about our relationship with God. Go back to the way it was with Adam and Eve. They just thought they could be what God is and went on to do their work, but here Paul is describing what he’s learned from his intimate relationship with God through Jesus speaking to him. And he’s saying, “Look, here’s what you have to understand. You were known before you came into this world.” “I knew you,” God said. “I know you. I made you a certain way. I know exactly everything about you, and I’m going to do something. I am going to call you into life, all you into birth, and then what I do, when I call you into birth, I’m going to do something for you. I’m going to justify you. I’m going to take away everything that separates from you, in the sense that sin does create a kind of separation. I’m going to make sure that never happens. No sin of yours is ever going to separate you from me. So I’m going to call you into this world, justify you by forgiveness, and then I want you to be my glory ⎯ my glory. I’ll glorify you.” What is glory? Uranius said it so beautifully. Mankind fully alive, fully engaged in the work that God has given them, giving life to those around him, being fruitful. That’s the glory of God. That’s what he wants. He wants you and me to live in this world as we’re intended to, to be a little bit ⎯ this goes so strong ⎯ about saving people, and I don’t mean saving people by talking them into religion, all that. I’m just saying you’re there to have an impact on the people around you, and when you feel that that’s the essence of who you are and that you can feel what that feels like, because it’s so much a part of your human nature ⎯ it’s how you were made. You’re predestined for caring for people, and that can be done in so many ways. It doesn’t mean necessarily ⎯ somebody who’s doing something for humanity that has nothing to do with contact with a person is still doing something compassionate and empathetic, because they’re doing it for the good of human beings.

So then you look at Solomon, and David was the greatest of all the kings. He was amazing. Most kings, and Solomon included, never really fulfilled their obligations to God. They all turned away from him, so many of them, and that’s what happens when you get power and fame and all that. Human beings aren’t made for that, but what he does do in the beginning, he goes back to his humanity, and he turns to God and says something so beautiful. “Look, you’ve given me a job that I cannot do. I don’t feel I’m capable.” That’s what I would say when God says to me, “I want you to be compassionate and save the people. Help me heal people around you.” I’m too selfish. I’d rather just do something else, but when God heard that prayer from a human being, his response is the response he gives to us when we discover this treasure, and this treasure is his gift of his presence inside of you and inside of me. I don’t know what to say. I have too many responsibilities, all those things. I’m not capable of doing this work. I’m not capable of giving this homily. I’m not, but if I trust in you, if I believe in this treasure that I have, this energy, this life force in my heart resonating out of it to other people, I can be doing that, even unconsciously, without having to worry about whether I’m doing it or not, but it’s my intention. Solomon’s intention was what God was so thrilled with. Here is a human being, among all the human beings that want to be gods, who wants to do the work that I want to do.

And what I think we’re asked to understand in the mystery of the incarnation is that, when Paul says that we are made in the image of Jesus, that’s what he’s talking about. We think the image of Jesus is to be crucified. Well, there’s that work there, but we think it’s about being perfect. Well, we’ll be better. No, but the real thing that Jesus is is a manifestation of who we are and what our destiny is: human beings dwelling with this divine presence in an organ that can think, that can feel, that can talk to the brain and get it to do things. It can ⎯ this heart can resonate out of its very center, three feet of an electromagnetic field that can affect the heart and the feelings of another person. All of this science is showing us, and yet it’s underscoring so beautifully for me the big issue of what I think is in this homily. You have a destiny, and your weaknesses are not a block. Your agreement with this plan, your wanting to be who God made you to be, along with working, along with doing it, but you do this, and it gives joy. And there’s something about that joy that then opens you, I think, to the beauty of this whole thing. This world is beautiful in all of its mess and all of its conflict. There is beauty here, and life is full. A man fully alive, “A human being fully alive is the glory of God,” said St. Uranius. So think about it. Think about your destiny. Think about the call. Think about being forgiven and simply being called to pay attention. Become conscious of your brother and sister’s needs and just join your intention with God so that you can do something wonderful, something lifegiving to the people around you. Amen.

Father, open our eyes. Open our hearts, our minds, our will to your ways, to what you’ve promised, to what you have invited us into and want to work with us. Bless us with hope, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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16th Sunday in Ordinary Time
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15th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 55:10-11 | Romans 8:18-23 | Matthew 13:1-23

Oh God, who show the light of your truth to those who go astray so that they may return to the right path, give all who, for the faith they profess, are accounted Christians the grace to reject whatever is contrary to the name of Christ to strive after all that does it honor. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We’re listening to Jesus in this set of readings. It’s coming to the end of his ministry, and he wants so much for the disciples to understand who he is and why he is in their life. And he’s telling us some very, very important things. He’s saying something about their way of living that is going to be revealed, through their life, to other people so they can live as the apostles have learned to live, and they live with the presence of God. It’s hard to believe that Jesus was God, but that’s who he manifested so clearly. He was a human being so filled with divinity that he was divine. At the same time, he was human. That’s a mystery. We can’t understand it, but all you have to believe in is that he is the representative of who we are intended to be, not divine as he was fully but participating in divinity on a regular, daily basis. He is in us, with us, doing something for us. If I could do anything to change people’s minds about God, I would say, “Stop trying to earn anything from him or please him by doing things that you think he wants you to do. Rather allow him to be who he wants to be in your life, in my life. He wants to be a source, a way, a plan for how we are living our life.”

So let’s look at this set of readings by starting off with the idea of, in Isaiah, Jesus describing who he is, but he uses another word rather than ⎯ well, it’s not ⎯ it’s God revealing who he will be, and he’s saying that, “What I am is I am like rain, and rain comes down, and it does something to the soil.” Now, these were agrarian people who were listening to this. They knew exactly what he meant, and without water, there is no ability for a seed to become a plant, to become a wheat that becomes the bread. So what he’s really saying is, “I am something in your life that, without me, there will be no full life, and the way I want you to understand this,” he's saying, “Is that I am giving you an explanation, a way of living, a way of seeing that is key to your being in this world in the way in which you’re intended to be and which will bring you joy and life. Pay attention to what I am offering you, like rain, over and over again so that this thing called your humanity, the soil of the earth,” which is a perfect image of humanity, “will grow rich and produce something wonderful.” So Isaiah is prophesying something so clear, so powerful that sets the tone for the Old Testament, but the thing that’s interesting about the Old Testament is that it’s never able to achieve this goal of God being able to save his people. I’m not saying that God couldn’t do it, but the history basically is that the human beings that he worked with were not very docile or open or receptive. And over and over again, they turned against him, and then when you look at the whole story, the whole Old Testament, when you get down to the time that Jesus entered into the world, he came at a time when it seemed clear that everything that had come before him was not received or not able to produce what it promised. And there was the temple, which was the presence of God in their life, and it had become not a source of life for the people but a burden. And those who were there became thieves, taking away the life that they were destined to have. It’s an incredible indictment, not just on the religion at the time, but it’s a reminder that the Old Testament is not the full story.

The full story is Jesus, and so Jesus comes into the world to make a difference, to fulfill the saying, in a way, of Isaiah. Something is coming like rain, like moisture to dry, broken, hard earth, and that coming is God in the presence of a man called Jesus. We call it the Holy Spirit, the presence of God in someone, and when you look at the way in which Jesus is talking to his disciples or to the crowd, of course, but then also to the disciples, he speaks in parables, which are really interesting, because the parable is a way in which, it seems to me, that God is saying, “What I’m teaching you is not so literal. It’s filled with mystery. It’s filled with a deeper understanding of what’s going on. Don’t look at just the actions, but look at what they mean, what’s really being said by these actions of God in Jesus in the world.” And so he describes to his disciples that parables are key. It’s not necessarily that he’s only going to talk in riddles, but it’s everything that’s happening to you is filled with meaning. And your work, and it’s kind of an exciting work ⎯ I have great enthusiasm for paying attention to what I see and paying attention to what I hear, what I see other people doing, what I see myself doing and what I hear people saying when I say, “Pay attention to that and ponder it like you would any mystery.” It’s more than it seems. People are more transparent than they ever, ever realize, and there’s a way in which God gives you the wisdom and the understanding and the power to discern. That’s what he wants you to do. Discern through reflection of what is really happening.

We live in the final times. The earth before was never fertile enough for God to truly enter. In a way I’m saying, in a sense, that the Old Testament never was enough, but the New Testament is the essential ingredient to add to the desire that God had, that people will always be what he wants them to be, that they will follow his commandments. He wants that, but he doesn’t want it just out of a sense of obligation. He wants it out of a sense of knowing ⎯ knowing what they’re doing. “Don’t do it because I told you to. Do it, because you understand why it’s so important that you do this.” So what he’s saying to his disciples in this parable about a sower who sows seeds, he’s talking about God the Father and his work, and what he’s saying is, “We’re offering, God is offering, through me,” in particular he is doing it through Jesus. “I’m giving you something that will enable something incredible to happen, and that is what he calls a fruitful life, a full life, a life without excessive shame and fear and anger.” That’s our promise. That’s what’s been made fertile in us, the potential of that kind of life, and it was never there before Jesus. It was never there before redemption. We’re redeemed earth, redeemed soil. We’re redeemed in the sense that our hearts have a capacity to understand, not our minds, our hearts.

There’s something about seeing and hearing without judgment or condemnation, which is much of the theme of the Old Testament, but with mercy and understanding and compassion that radically changes your ability to see and to hear what’s really going on. It’s true when you listen to others. It’s true when you listen to yourself. It is true when you see yourself doing things or see someone else doing things. If you’re looking at it with judgment or condemnation, you will go nowhere, but pay attention. Listen, and you will find something beautiful in the fact that there’s a person, that is valuable to God, working out their salvation in ways in which you may be called upon to be an instrument of bringing them something that is like rain, like water, like nourishment so that the thing that they long for to grow and deepen inside of themselves will take root and grow. What an amazing gift God gives us, to be rain, to be truth, to be his presence, to be like him in the world. Just think of what it would be like if you treat everyone, self-included, not with judgment and condemnation, criticism, comparison, but simply with this thing that God is revealed in Jesus to be, compassion, understanding. It’s wonderful. It’s filled with wonder, and it’s your inheritance and mine, and it’s up to us to open our eyes and to listen and to be able to see it for what it is and then to live it. Amen.

Father, your gift of your presence is beyond our imagining. Help us to see as you see, to hear what you hear, to know the truth that we are engaged in is going to bring the fullness of life to ourselves as we offer it to one another. Bless us with this wisdom, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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14th Sunday in Ordinary Time

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13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
2 Kings 4:8-11, 14-16A | Romans 6:3-4, 8-11 | Matthew 10:37-42

Oh God, who through the grace of adoption chose us to be children of light, grant, we pray, that we may not be wrapped in darkness of error but always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

In ordinary time, we’re going to relive the experience of one of the evangelists, one of the writers of the gospel, their experience of this moment that they had with God in history, these three years and then beginning their work as moving from disciples to apostles. A disciple is a learner, someone who’s listening and learning and spending time with someone. An apostle is the one who’s sent forth to do it, and so you’ll notice in this particular gospel of Matthew, it’s the first chapter that we’re — this tenth chapter, rather, is when Jesus is calling his disciples to do their work, and he calls them apostles. “I’m sending you forth.” So what I’m asking you to imagine with me is here is Jesus sending his disciples into the world to do their work. He is no longer with them physically, will not be with them physically when they begin. He is, in this particular passage, with them, but what he wants them to understand is the essence of what it is they’re going to be doing. And if you go back to that earlier part in the gospel, you see what God is asking the disciples to do seems like an impossible thing. “Gentlemen, I want you to go into the world, and I want you to heal the sick, raise the dead and bring life to people and somehow heal leprosy.” Now, leprosy is a beautiful, not a beautiful, but an effective way of describing sin, leprosy, something that distorts us. It deforms us. So when Jesus is giving that responsibility to the disciples, I don't know what it would be like, but if you would hear somebody say that to you — but in a way, Jesus does say it to all. “I want you to go into the world, and I want you to heal people and lift them out of darkness, lift them out of a place that we might call death.” So the main thrust, it seems, the ministry that Jesus has given to his disciples and he’s giving to us, sending us out into the world, has everything to do with this set of readings. So let me see if I can describe it for you, give you a sense of what it is you’re empowered to do.

The first story is about a prophet who comes to a woman’s house. He comes often. This woman was obviously very impressed with this prophet Elisha, not Elijah. It’s close. I tend to mispronounce Elisha a little more just to separate him from Elijah, but anyway, she loves this man’s truth. She loves spending time with him, and so she says to her husband, “Let’s create a space for him in our house.” Well, just think of the image that is. Here’s a woman touched by the truth. She wants to create a space in her home, in her very soul, in her essence for this truth to take root, and so she creates a room for him. And when that room is there, she has been longing for something in her life, and it’s to create new life. And so she is like the symbol of all of us, longing to make a difference, longing to create life in the world, and so she has no son. So he said, “I will give you a son.” So here’s the prophet, who represents the truth, coming into a person who opens their heart to him, and when he dwells with them, he has a reward for their hospitality. You will welcome a prophet. You receive a prophet’s reward, and the reward is truth. And the truth is something in her that produces life. So the symbol is she has a son.

Now, if you follow this passage from Kings, it’s interesting, because one of the next things that happens is that, as he returns again and again, he comes back, and the son is born. But then she sends word to him one day, and she said, “My son is dead. He’s died. Come and heal him. Bring him back to life,” another aspect of what the truth is able to do. And so he sends his servant. “This is my rod, my authority. I’ll send it through somebody else.” That didn’t work. So he goes, and he does this miraculous — bringing this man back to life, and what he does is he lies on top of him, his lips to his lips, his eyes to his eyes, his hands to his hands, his feet to his feet. It’s a powerful image of someone containing some energy, some life force, and he’s giving it to another person. He just doesn’t put his hand toward him, or he just doesn’t say the words, “Be healed,” really fascinating image. So let’s take this image of this figure, a prophet, as the image of the truth — the truth. What does it do? Opens eyes to see what is real, what is true. Produces life, because it overcomes darkness, and what is darkness? Sin — sin.

So the second reading then focuses on the opposite of this great gift of light and truth, and that is sin and darkness. And it’s interesting. St. Paul is talking about this. What he’s saying is that Christ went through something that we have to go through, and it’s a death. And the death we have is the death that is — we all it change, being reborn, being remade. What is it that this change involves? Well, it’s a moving away from darkness. So what is darkness? Well, darkness is the absence of truth. What is the absence of truth? A lie. How did sin enter into the world? It was a lie. A serpent is there, and he’s seducing Adam and Eve into believing something that’s not true. “If you rely upon yourself and you rely upon your own decision-making qualities, if you want to know what’s right and what’s wrong and be the center of your life, well, eat of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” It’s so interesting in that story, the minute you buy into a lie, something in you feels odd, feels strange. You feel estranged from some source somewhere, and that’s exactly the effect of sin entering into the human race, was a sense of distance from God. And the distance was, “I’m not worthy. I’m not good enough.” The minute you say, in your relationship with God, “I am going to earn his affection. I’m going to earn his reward of eternal life. I’m going to work for it, and I’m going to get it. It’s going to be my task, and I can feel really good about having accomplished it,” that is the greatest of lies. It’s not something we are called to do by a command from God to become holy and to do all these good things. That’s probably the most insidious lie that’s out there, and it’s more about our human nature than it is about religion. But religion buys into it.

So what is it? What is it that God wants us to understand about this truth that you and I are called to engage ourselves with? And when we see it for what it is, it reveals something that has been hidden, and then we have this new life. So how do we imagine that happening? Well, it took redemption for it to happen. All through the Old Testament people have been listening to prophets trying to tell the truth, and they try to live it, and they never do succeed. And they’re punished, and then they straighten up. And then they forget about the punishment, and they fall back into sin. So the Old Testament is filled with people who are seemingly unable to deal with this thing called sin, darkness, another word, again, illusion, half-truths, lies. So what was needed? A Savior, a Messiah, someone who comes that makes a big difference. What is the difference? Well, without going into exactly how redemption takes place, I want to talk about how it impacts us and how and how we’re to participate in it. And it’s the most important thing to understand. By the second paragraph of this gospel, it’s so beautiful. When Jesus sends his disciples into the world to do work that seems way beyond human nature’s possibility, that’s the first piece of truth I want you to ponder. When God is asking you to love, to forgive, to give life to people around you, to be a source of wisdom for them, he is not asking you to produce that wisdom or to produce that capacity to be a healer. It’s not something you do. It’s something you receive. So listen to Jesus when he’s just given his disciples this incredible challenge to go out into the world and to heal it of darkness and illusion and lies. He said, “If you receive me, whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.” So Jesus is saying, “You watched me make Eucharist. You watched me make my body and blood into something that I’m asking you to take in and dwell inside of you.” It’s so clear that the thing that was not possible in the Old Testament that is possible in the New Testament is a life force that’s been given to you and to me, and that life force is the truth, life, enlightenment. And when it comes into us, if we receive it, then we become a prophet, and we receive a prophet’s reward. What’s a prophet’s reward? Well, when you give life to someone, when you are a source of life for someone, when you feel the dignity and the value of being a person participating in this life force, you’re going to feel good. You’re going to feel full. You’re going to feel like there’s meaning and purpose, and the reward of the truth is light, enlightenment and life.

Whenever religion or anyone tells you that you’re no good and that you have to work harder and that you have to clean your act up and you have to do everything you can to make sure that you are pleasing to God, they’ve missed the point completely, because the main issue is how do you humbly receive the wisdom, the tree of life, light, truth? How do you receive it, and then when you receive it, how do you allow it to flow through you? And when it flows through you, you’re going to have everything you’ve ever wanted — everything. So what I’m trying to say is, when Jesus is saying to his disciples, “If you love Mother or Father more than me, if you love son or daughter more than me, you’re not worthy of me. Unless you take up your cross, you can’t be worthy of me. Whoever finds life will lose it. Whoever loses life —” This whole — the word in there that I want you to pay attention to is worthiness. It sounds like merit, doesn’t it? “If you take up your cross, if you go through some really difficult, horrible experience of pain and suffering and humiliation, then I might consider taking care of you.” No. Taking up your cross is going through a radical transformation. It feels like death. We’re not asked to go through a crucifixion like Jesus went through and be humiliated by everyone. That’s not the goal of Christianity. The goal of Christianity is to go through an experience that is so transforming that at the other end of it you are somebody really different. You are resurrected. You have new life. So the image is that we are engaged in work that is revealing the truth to us. Our eyes are opened, and we change. But the process of being changed by the truth is not just simply like being told — you know something you think you know, and you’re told, “No, that’s not it, and it’s something else.” You go, “Oh, okay. Now I’ve got it.” No. No, every time you’re living in a lie, you have a pattern of behavior in your life, a way of living, a way of seeing, a way of judging people, a way — whatever. And when the truth comes in and you find out, “Wait a minute. I’m not here to become the best believer. I’m not here to become better than somebody else. I’m not here to impress people with what I can do and who I am. I’m here as a servant, and that kind of change, if your pattern of life has been to produce something beautiful for someone else in your life and to win affection and attention, that’s a radical shift. If it doesn’t command death, I don't know what I can call it. You need to die to all those patterns. It’s really difficult, but it doesn’t demand that you do it. It demands that you allow it to happen. You allow God’s truth and light to come into your life, and it has its own strength and power. It will change you. It will change you.

So the image of being worthy is more like God is saying, “If you go through this, you’ll be worthy of me,” meaning, “You’ll be of worth to me. You’ll be valuable to me.” You’re already valuable in the term of God sees you, sees me, loves us as we are, unconditionally. We can’t imagine what it’s like to be loved that way, but that’s what God wants us to feel when he says, “Receive me. Receive my love.” We have this sense of our dignity, our value. When someone loves us, it’s an amazing experience, and in turn, we’re willing then to become whatever that transforming love creates. And what it will create is someone who is there to be an instrument of bringing this same mysterious, new life to another person, and so if you can feel it with me in saying Jesus comes into our life and says, “I want to dwell inside of you. If I’m inside of you, my Father is inside of you. If we’re inside of you, then we are the source of the wisdom and the ability and the capacity you have to change the people around you. And you are so — it is so important you do that, because then you are really valuable to me.” It’s almost like God is saying, “I need you to take care of the people around you. I want to take care of them, but I need you to receive me to be able to do that for them.” Does that sound more exciting, more wonderful, more life-giving than being a person who turns out to be the best person in the room and has everybody’s admiration and everybody says, “You’re so great. You’re so wonderful. You’re beyond anybody I’ve ever seen”? The ego loves that. The heart can’t even fathom it. What the heart wants is to be of value, and to know that you are a source of bringing light and life and healing and lifting someone out of the darkness of depression and fear, you can do that if you receive. Whoever receives is the key. That’s the work. The lie is perform. The truth is receive, and what an amazing difference that makes. So we are all apostles. We are all called to be instruments of God’s grace to the world, and it’s not about work. It’s about a gift and receiving it.

Father, open our eyes to see you as you are, to know your intention, your plan, your desire to use us, fill us with all the gifts that those around us are in longing for and to give us the enthusiasm and the excitement about being a channel for you. And let us feel the joy that comes from watching those around us that we love enter into a place of greater wholeness and light and peace. And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

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12th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Grant, oh Lord, that we may always revere and love your holy name, never deprive of your guidance those set firm on the foundation of your love. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

A couple of weeks ago, I was with a friend, and we were talking about life, the way the world is, what we’re afraid of, and somehow the question came up, and it was from him to me. He said, “Do you believe in evil?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Well, I never have believed in evil.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, there’s evil in the world, but that’s because human beings are weak, and they don’t really do what they’re called to do. And so evil is just a sign that human beings are weak.” I wish that were true, because I really know, as I listen to scripture and watch Jesus in the world, that evil is a power, a strong, negative power that wants us to be destroyed, not harmed, destroyed. And what’s fascinating about that is that we look at the story, as mentioned in Romans today, that when the world was created and God first encountered human beings and spoke to them, it was not God and Adam and Eve, but it was God, Adam and Eve and a representation of evil. It’s not really called the devil, not really called evil, because it’s really not, in its core, evil. It is the part of human nature that is at the core that we are the center of our universe, and the sin of Adam and Eve was not just disobeying a commandment, but I think that’s how most in the Old Testament thought about it, because you look. They had 613 rules and laws to follow. So being a good follower of God was to do what you’re told. No, the truth is there is something in us that evil knows is there and uses to its own ends of destruction, and that is the temptation that the animal that was most cunning said, “You really need to know that you can be gods. What God wants you to be is equal to him. He wants you to be in charge, you to be the one that makes all the decisions.” And that seed of independence, autonomy from God and trying to be who only God can be in our life is the heart of evil, and it always leads to some kind of destruction.

So before the law, sin was in the world. It’s very interesting. It says, “Sin was in the world and reigned as the way that people treated each other, in a sinful way, a way that is to destroy and to abuse and to take from.” It was the way human beings were from Adam to Moses, and the Moses event was when God decided, “I will tell human beings who they are, their nature. I’ll explain to them that they are made differently than they seem to feel they are, and the difference is they are not made to be the ones in charge or in control.” But there’s a beautiful plan that God has for human beings that we together unite in a kind of ecology of oneness where each person is there for the needs of another person, and the joy that they have in giving life to other people is what makes the world worthwhile and what makes it important to do. We are here not for ourselves but for those around us, but when we take care of those around us, we have done the most beautiful thing for ourselves. So sin is in the world. Evil is in the world, and it has a face. The face is power over people. The Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God has been given to the world through prophets, teachers, God speaking to other people, and they tell them what God said. But then there came a moment when he did something extraordinary. He became one of us, entered into the world and said, “The fullness of the plan of God is that you do not need to be in conflict with a power greater than yourself.”

Evil is greater than human nature. It has power over people, and so what Jesus is saying, “There’s a Spirit that can be given to you. It’s God’s presence in you. I’m going to show you what it looks like. I’ll come down.” God himself comes down, becomes a human being and then manifests, through the humanity that he created, what divinity looks like in somebody, not telling them what to do but awakening them, awakening their hearts to a wisdom that Eve wanted and thought maybe she could get by saying, “I’d like to be like God.” But she had no idea it meant not being like him but being in him and he in you. What a difference. The power that we have is never going to be residing in our ego, in our will. It’s always in our heart.

So what you see so clearly in Jeremiah is, when anyone is asked to proclaim this truth, they’re going to be in trouble. And Jeremiah was very young when he was called to be a prophet, and he was enthusiastic about it. He loved ⎯ God said, “I will teach you how to tear down and build up.” He knows, “I am given a power to conquer someone.” Now, that’s going to feed his ego big time, and it did feed most of the egos of the prophets. The prophets didn’t always agree with what God wanted them to do, but in this case, you see him realizing that this power that he has to speak a word that is different gets him in deep trouble. And this story is about his first major conflict. It’s the first time he’s revealed as a prophet, and whatever he was teaching, whatever he was saying, the word got to the temple priests, and one of the head priests there went after him and said, “I’m going to kill this guy. I’m going to get him.” And he's saying, “People are believing the temple, and they’re watching me differently, and they’re starting to check me out and report on me.” So this is wonderful to think about. When Jeremiah thinks this way, he’s saying, “I know you’ve given me power, and I’m going to win this thing. So I can’t wait to see you take vengeance on this blank-blank person. Kill him. Destroy him. Please God, I want to watch it. I know you’re going to do it.” And it’s so interesting. Jeremiah is actually saying, “I don’t like this guy wanting to kill me, so we will kill him.” So what Jeremiah doesn’t realize, he’s fallen into the same trap that evil creates in people, that when someone is different than you are, somebody isn’t the way you think they should be, you’re going to do something to demean them or even to destroy them in some sense of ruining their self-worth or whatever you can do. But it’s power over people is the goal of evil, and when evil talks a human being into using its own tactics to destroy evil, it’s laughing its head off, because it’s saying, “See, I’ve created in another person a desire for destruction, and that’s what I’m about.” That’s what evil is about, to destroy that which is here. And what is here? It’s called the kingdom of God. And what’s it for? For everyone to realize that there’s something going on here where we are together being informed and then reformed into a people that understand that the fundamental reason we’re here is not for our own profit but for how we contribute to this enterprise called life. Jesus came to teach us how to find life. Isn’t it interesting? Evil, when you spell it backwards is live. Evil is bent on the opposite of life.

So we look at the gospel. So what do we need? Well, if you’re going to be a voice that’s contradicted by another voice, you might be afraid that that voice has more power than you have and it might overcome you. And when you think about today, when we’re asked to speak a truth, there is not an easy reception on the other end that says, “Oh, how interesting. Maybe let me see what you see that I don’t see so we can see something together better.” No, there’s a kind of revenge and anger out there about people that think differently than they do, and they want to destroy them, demean them, give them ⎯ create in the minds of others that they cannot be trusted. So what we’re looking at is the most important, I think, teaching to start this ordinary time, that we are in a battle. The battle is really important, and if we think that there’s something wrong with the world, when we’re in conflict with good and evil or light and darkness, we’re not even really doing the work. There’s nothing more important than chaos in order to change, and that’s where we are. We’re looking at a world that frightens us, because we don’t know who to believe or where to turn for whatever it is we need to do to make the world better. Well, we don’t necessarily need to work to make the world better. Politicians, the church, maybe we think they should do it, but then we’ve lost trust in them. But no, it’s our individual work, and it’s finding a way to reconcile ourselves with those around us. But here's the key: I believe the most devasting thing that evil, as a negative spirit, most harm they create is when they go into you and into me and they start talking and they start criticizing and demeaning and laughing at and telling us we’re worthless. That’s where it has all the power. Love is the antithesis of this work of evil. So our challenge is to name it for what it is, not to want to destroy the people who have it, to want to destroy its power over them. And what is that? Cut them out? Punish them? Exclude them? No, love them, forgive them, seek to awaken them. That’s what we’re here for. That’s the work, but not to face the evil is naïve and to be careful that we don’t use the same tactics to get rid of it and then to bask in the wonderful theme of this gospel. We have nothing to be afraid of. “You will win. You will conquer this. It has no real power over you anymore now that I am in you and with you.” And fear dissolves. Amen.

Father, you’ve revealed to us that evil is so powerful when it’s hidden, when people don’t recognize it and blame just human nature for not being what it should be, but the truth is it’s a power so strong that, without you, we are vulnerable. So open our hearts to a conviction that you are in us, guiding us, empowering us, not only to speak truth but to endure the rejection that comes with speaking truth. It’s your way. It’s your plan. Let us submit, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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11th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Exodus 19:2-6a | Romans 5:6-11 | Matthew 9:36—10:8

Oh God, strength of those who hope in you, graciously hear our pleas, and since without you mortal frailty can do nothing, grant us always the help of your grace that, in following your commands, we may please you by our resolve and our deeds. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Somehow I’m struck today with the idea that I’ve been looking at these stories over and over and over again, 56 years of preaching and teaching from really a very small part of what the Bible is all about, in terms of the readings that are chosen for the liturgy, but one thing it’s consistently called to my mind is the way in which this story evolves slowly. And that slow evolution that we see in the relationship between God and his people is a very, very good way of understanding our personal relationship with him in our own personal lifespan. In the beginning, it’s clear that God needed to speak to his people. He needed connection, and so he took them out of a place that they’d got themselves into because of their human nature. It’s pretty clear that we, before we kind of figure the world out, we get into a lot of trouble, because we don’t really see the whole picture. And so God is slowly revealing to human beings the relationship that he has with us and begins, first and foremost, by the simple invitation on his part that he wants a relationship with human beings, and he wants it to be personal, and he wants to reveal himself to them. And so you see him doing the thing that is basically an archetype for the whole story of our relationship with God. He takes us from a place of slavery, bondage, not being able to do what we want, not being able to become who we need to be, and says, “I want to tell you that you are special to me. This group of you, I want to start with a small community, and you are special. And I’m going to take care of you. I just want you to come with me, away from where you are into something brand new.”

So the story begins, and then as you see it unfold, you realize that, in the process, God took them to a place where they were asked to perform for him. They had to follow his rules and regulations. If they did that, he would stay with them. If not, he would leave them, but then they were still helpless. As the next reading of Romans starts out, in their helplessness of being able to follow what they were supposed to do for fear of punishment was never enough, so they found themselves still struggling. So there had to be something more given to them, and that was called redemption, because the sin that’s in us is always isolating and separating us. And so he said, “I’ve got to do something to break down this separation that people feel with me, because they fail, and they can’t seem to keep my commandments. So I will do something. I will enter into their life and radically change the whole system. They no longer have to earn anything from me. I have a covenant with them I will never ever break.” And then when Jesus comes, the fulness is a message, and he’s looking at the crowds, and he says, “My heart is moved,” because they’re still troubled and abandoned. That’s so much an experience that most of us have even now, today. The world is troubling, and we don’t know that there’s anything there for us that’s going to take care of us and protect us. We feel like we’re abandoned by systems that were there to protect us and keep us safe, and so we’re lost. Then he says something so clearly. He said, “I am going to send people out into your midst, because I’ve discovered that I can’t save you at a distance. I have to come in the form of a human being.” And that’s what he did when he became the Savior of the world, but he did that as a way of saying, “This is what I need you to be for me. I cannot and will not and do not intend to save these people directly just through me but through me in you. And so I have to tell you that I’m giving you the same power that you saw in Jesus.” And when you think about it, you say, “Well, I haven’t felt that power that much. Come on. I still struggle with things, and I can’t make things perfect.” But no, what he’s simply saying is, “Look, I’m sending you these disciples. This is the way I’m going to work from now on. I’m going to send people to you who are different, who have an ability to do things.” When he describes the things that they’re asked to do, it’s amazing when he asks those to pay attention to what he’s going to give to people. It’s too much in a way. He says, “You will open the eyes of the blind. You’ll help people be free of demons. You’ll raise people from the dead. You’ll heal every disease.” Do you know anybody that’s doing that right now? Yeah, I think I do. Maybe not in that direct way and maybe not in that literal way, but raising people from the dead is not necessarily different than lifting someone out of a dark, deep depression. And opening people’s eyes is not anything more, maybe, than being a model for them so they can see who they could be that they might have what we have, because they see it in us as something attractive, less troubled, less abandoned. All kinds of ways he’s doing this work, and that’s the task, to not only be open to the way in which God works through the people around us but also how he works in the circumstances around us, in the direction we see the world going.

If you really have a broader sense of history than just right here and now, you’ll realize that every dark, horrible time creates something new and exciting and different. Change is violent, in a sense. It’s difficult and hard on us. When we see people around us giving in to that spirit of abandonment and troubled and anxious and dark, we are crying out, in a sense, for others around us to reach us and speak to us and bring us something that we need. It’s believing in a plan, which is a covenant plan, not a contractual plan. He is saying, “No matter what you do, no matter how far you go, I’m going to work as hard as I can,” and that is a lot to say, when God says as hard as he can, “In the lives of other people to touch you and free you and work with you.” That’s both exciting, when you think about the day-to-day things you’re experiencing, not only from the perspective of what you might be receiving, but from an even more exciting perspective of what you might be giving. And do you think you have that power in you, from you, in you, alone in you? No, that’s where we get bogged down. We’re not used to allowing power to work through us without it being connected to us. Our egos are just too quick to grab hold of that and say, “Wow, I can do anything.” We can’t do anything, but we can do everything we need to do if God is in us. And that’s always the heart of this message of God speaking to his people, from the very beginning of the call of Abraham until this very moment. He’s been working on this relationship with us where we’re co-workers in the vineyard, and we’re making things happen. And if you look at the broader picture, we are better off now than we’ve ever been, even though there’s a lot of division and a lot of problems. Problems are not the problem. Problems are the solution, because in working through them, that’s when God shows himself more powerfully than in any other time. Good times are wonderful. Peaceful times are absolutely essential. Happiness is core need, but struggle is equally essential, equally important, and it’s the meat of this work we have as spiritual creatures in this world. It’s the drink. It’s the food. It’s him in us. That’s the key, and without it, we stay abandoned and hopeless. Amen.

Father, help us to remember always that your plan for us is not so much that we grow in a personal perfection but rather we enter more fully into the participation of you saving the world. Bless us with this hope. Bless us with this kind of sense that there is meaning in all that we do, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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The Body & Blood of Christ
Exodus 34:4b-6, 8-9 | 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 | John 3:16-18

Oh God, who in this wonderful sacrament have left us a memorial of your passion, grant, we pray, so to revere the sacred mysteries of your body and blood that we may always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption, who lives and reigns with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

I want you to think for a few moments about Jesus the man, like us in everything, weaknesses, doubts, fears, anxieties, and for 30 years he spent time reflecting and studying and wondering about life and about who he was and about what he was here for. And then it came time for him to have this burning desire inside of him, this desire to teach and to preach and to open people to something that he knew now and was convinced of, and that is God dwelling inside of him. He was God, but he never acted as if he was God. He acted as he was, a man filled with divinity, and so we have to suspend some logical, “How does this happen? How does that work?” Suspend all that, and stay with the image. And the image is this presence of God inside Jesus gave him the ability to do everything that he did, teach everything that he taught, perform every miracle that he performed with one intention. “I want people to understand who this God is and what he wants from them and what he wants to give them.”

That first reading talks about the early time that God called a people together and took them on a journey. It’s the archetypal journey of going from slavery to freedom. We are called into a world where we are not burdened by a law and rules and regulations that go against what we really want. No, we’re on a journey transforming us so that the things that we’re called to do are not commands we have to follow but the only choice we believe is the right choice. We begin to live in the truth that the law calls us to live in. And so in those early days, what it was about was God had to work with us where we were, and we were pretty low on the scale of consciousness, and so basically it turned out that God was taking them on a journey. They didn’t know where. They had to trust in him, and so the beginning is do you trust in God and the plan that he has for you. He’s going to invite you into that plan, and so what they were experiencing in the plan is that it was not something that was comfortable or easy. What they left seemed to be more comfortable at times, and so they have this resistance consistently through this journey. We don’t like this process. We don’t like evolving and growing and changing, and so what we sense in this is there is this way in which he says, “Look, I want you to trust in me on this journey, but you’ve got to trust. That is, I’m not going to zoom you to the goal and say, ‘Now here it is. Now do you believe in me?’” No, he said, “I want you to trust in the process.” And so one of the things he promises to do in this journey of ours is to feed us and to make sure that we have what is essential for life: food and water. You can see the images in these things as we look at the whole story of salvation history. Water is all about cleansing and about quenching the longings in our heart, and food is about having the strength and the power to do what we’re called to do or to endure what we’re called to endure.

So in the very beginning of this journey that we share with God, he revealed to the people that he is there to nurture so that we can do the work, do the work. And what is the work? Well, Paul brings up something interesting. Nothing is more essential to the teaching of Jesus than the whole notion of his body and his blood being offered to us on a regular basis. That is the thing we need. That’s the nurturing we need in order to do the work we’re here to do, and so Paul is very aware of that. And what he’s saying is something that goes beyond just saying, “We are here to receive from God his presence, and it nurtures us and it feeds us.” But then Paul adds, “Know this work of being fed and nourished is something we have to learn to participate in.” And if you’re participating in it, it doesn’t mean that you’re feeding yourself, but then you’re realizing that you’re being fed with that which gives you strength, and this blood that is so clearly an image of being there for other people, forgiveness, having a stance towards the needs of others, these are things that we are fed, but then we have to feed them to others. So the idea of God giving us what is necessary, he then says, “And if I’m doing that with you, and I’m doing it for everyone, but I’m going to do it often through another person. I’m going to be using you to be my body and my blood to other people, because I am in you, and you share what’s in you.” When you think about all of that, it’s hard to grasp what that really is like, and we believe, as Catholics, in the Eucharist. We use it every day in our ministry to communities. We celebrate it, and then yet what we realize is that, according to the statistics that are out there, asking the average Catholic, “Do you believe that this bread is really the body of Christ? Do you believe this wine is really the blood of Christ?” Supposedly only about 30 percent of Catholics believe in transubstantiation. What do they believe in? It’s a beautiful, rich symbol, a symbol. There’s nothing wrong with having symbols that point to a reality, but why was Jesus so insistent in saying, “Unless you believe in this, you can’t have life.” And what does he mean by life? He means that ability to be engaged in the life that God has created for you and for me, to believe that all of it is interconnected, that we’re part of something much bigger than we are, and we’re living out something that is moving toward life and growth and change and something wonderful. That’s hard to believe in sometimes.

So what do we have to do in order to be more in touch with this incredibly core issue of our Catholic faith or Christian faith, Jesus living inside of us as Spirit, the Holy Spirit, God the Father Spirit, his Spirit in us, flowing out of us, doing the same thing that Jesus did on this planet? Now, if you’re waiting for signs, that’s a little dangerous, because I don't know how Jesus dealt with his humanity and the ability that he had to make God’s presence felt through him through signs and wonders and miracles and driving out demons. I don’t think any of us could endure that kind of egocentric food without getting caught up in it. So it has to be done in a way that is not so literal, but at the same time, it is absolutely real. It is his body that we take into us. It is his blood that is coursing through our veins. How else can we imagine God in us, that he’s ⎯ we can imagine that he’s in our heart. He stays there, but he’s in our flesh. He’s in the essence of who we are. What a beautiful image to believe in, and the thing that keeps us is our logical mind that says, “Well, if it’s bread, it can’t really be the body of Christ.” Even miracles around the blessed sacraments, the reality of it is the host bleeds, or somehow the host takes on a quality of flesh, as if to say, “If we believed it really was the body of Christ, by experiment, by science, we would believe it.” Well, I don’t think so, because if you look at science now, science is in a very different place than it was, say, 50 years ago. Quantum physics has changed our whole idea and understanding of what matter really is, and we find out that matter is not made up just of atoms but of tiny particles. And these tiny, tiny particles have the ability to do things we never thought was possible, because a particle can be both something that you can measure and see and weigh, and it can also just be energy, just power, just a force. Reality can be both material, and in a sense, we would say non-material to our eyes. That’s not super-unusual, unnatural. It’s the way the world works. If the world works that way, then the idea of this presence of God in the world that is, to us, invisible, has every right to be there in a sense. Science says, “Yeah, there’s a Spirit in the world that is goodness, that is him, that is God, that is truth, and it’s as real as the person you’re looking at or the chair you’re sitting on.” And that probably doesn’t really work to say, “Well then, I believe,” because even the disciples had a hard time believing.

In fact, it’s encouraging to me, when you listen to all those stories after Easter, how many times Jesus had to say, “I was with you. You saw this. You saw that. Why do you still not believe. Believe, believe.” That’s the key. Can you believe that this issue that Jesus made such a big deal about, “You’ve got to believe that I’m in you. My Father’s in you. The Holy Spirit is in you. We’re working with you. Everything is working together. You’re on this path. Without that, we can just spiral down into something very dark.” So make a choice. Believe in Christ’s presence. Believe in the food that we find in each other that is him, the nourishment, the power to forgive, to love. We find it through other people, because he’s in them, and he flows to us, and he’s in us. It changes my life. It has changed it, and I hope it changes yours. Amen.

Father, everything we long for, everything we ask for, you promise to work it so that we will receive that gift. Help us to trust in your promise. Never let it diminish our desire to ask over and over and over again for all that we need to live the life you’ve called us to live. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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The Hoy Trinity
Exodus 34:4b-6, 8-9 | 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 | John 3:16-18

Grant, we pray, almighty God, that we who have come to know the grace of the Lord’s resurrection may, through the love of the Spirit, ourselves rise to newness of life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We’re about to begin what we call the ordinary time of the year, and so during these last many, many weeks, we’ve been focusing on the heart of the message that we find in this mysterious book called scripture, the story of God’s relationship with his people, an invitation for us to enter into that experience in our own life, a relationship with God that is real, powerful, effective and transforming. And so it seems appropriate that, as we end this, we’re looking at, okay, here’s a feast that’s focused on simply who is God. How do you describe him? What’s his name? And the interesting thing about the God that we believe in is that he’s a Trinitarian God. That’s a really interesting thing, and I want to focus on it, because it’s a way for us to understand that the essence of this figure is so far beyond our full understanding that we have to at least approach it from three different sides. Yet we know that somehow the ultimate goal of every human being is to know this God, not just by information but through, first, experience. And then ultimately, the goal is that one day we will be with him, and we will see him face-to-face. We will see his face, which is so interesting to me, because it implies that we’ll see the way that he sees us, and the way he sees us is confusing at times.

When you look at the story of salvation history, it is the most amazing compilation of book after book, chapter after chapter that gives experience after experience of this God with his people, and it’s in time, meaning it started close to 4,000 years ago. And who we were 4,000 years ago is not who we are today, so there’s a part of this whole thing that demands a certain way of reading it, a certain way of understanding it. We can’t take it literally, as if every phrase in the scriptures is what God would say to the people today if the situation were somewhat similar. I love this first reading from the book of Exodus, because God is telling us who he is. He’s using words, and he said, “I’m a gracious God. I’m a loving God. I’m a forgiving God. I’m there for you.” And Moses’ response is, “Well, if you are that and you’d like to join us, we can certainly use some help, but we’re pretty stiff-necked, and we’re pretty difficult to deal with. But if you would like to, we would like you to help us. We’d like you to come with us on this journey.” And the book of Exodus has this image of a God joining a people who are longing for something they do not have, and what they don’t have is freedom. They want to be freed from slavery, from that which keeps them from being who they really are, free, open receptive, the gifts that are around them and to use those gifts as a form of developing who they are and then using their evolution of higher consciousness to help other people. That’s the plan, but at the same time, you go back to the book of Exodus — I was reading the same chapter that this is from, and there was a phrase in there, and God was telling them that they needed to do certain things if he was going to walk with them. And one of the things they had to do was keep the Sabbath, and that was not to do things on the Sabbath that would distract them from concentrating on who God is and spending time with him. And he simply said, “Anyone who doesn’t keep the Sabbath, I will kill them.” I thought, “Wait a minute. That doesn’t really sound very gracious or loving or kind.”

It’s so easy, in a way, to take anything in this story out of context to give you an image of a God who isn’t really who he is, and I would say that everything in scripture is pointing to who God is and recalling how he’s worked with us over centuries. But it’s not the source, the primary source that we go to to find out who he is. The only way you can really know who God is is to experience him, to have him — allow him to somehow reveal himself to you personally, and he does that. He does that over time, and if you look at salvation history as an image of the way God works with human beings over a long period of time, it’s easy to see that it’s exactly the way God works with every individual over time. In the beginning, he’s the discipline of your parents. He’s the one who tells you, when you’re two years old and you can’t do it, “You’re going to have to do, and if you don’t, you’re going to be punished,” or something like that. You can see the kind of simplicity of people back then. They were like children, in a sense, compared to us today, and then you see them moving away from rules and laws and regulations into something much more intimate, much more personal. Then you see the New Testament. Imagine the Old Testament is God working with people when they’re really, really limited, in terms of their ability to understand much beyond justice.

So let’s look at the role of God the Father in the beginning, and the role of God the Father in the beginning was to enter into people’s lives and help guide them on a journey toward freedom. And one of the things that would make them free and enable them to grow was to live in community, and one of the things that was necessary for them to live in community was to be just, to be fair — an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, not an eye for ten eyes or a tooth for ten teeth. No, it made sense in the beginning, as they worked together in a community that, if someone did something wrong, you could do it back to them but only in the same proportion they to you, and that was a real step forward. That was a real movement toward understanding the way in which God intends us to live together — in justice. And he tried to lead us into a place of freedom by finding people who could guide us and show us the way. There were patriarchs. There were prophets. There were priests. There were kings, but whenever God works through the authority of another, the human nature of that other gets in the way, because nothing is harder on people than giving them power, in terms of helping them to really be there for other people. It’s such a temptation. We know it. Anyone with authority can so easily use that authority over another and rob them of their dignity and their worth. We see it everywhere, especially today in race relationships. So that’s a stage we went through, but then you realize there had to be another stage.

That was God the Father, and now we’re going to look at God the Son. God the Son enters into the world to do something more than the Father could ever do. He has to model for them something that goes beyond justice, and what he’s modeling is a thing called love. And the word in the New Testament is forgiveness. Another word for forgiveness is full, radical acceptance of what is, what is true, to see goodness for what it can accomplish, to see evil for what it destroys, and the more we see both of those things, the more we’re imbued with an experience of one living in the world, manifesting this thing called mercy, called love, called no judgment. It opens us up to a whole other way of interacting with each other. It’s so interesting when God says, “One thing I want you to do —” he said this through his son. “Stop judging each other,” and I think to myself — I’ve said that to people. “God does not want us to judge.” And then they’ll quote the creed that we say on Sunday. “And God is the judge of the living and the dead.” It’s so interesting. You’ve got to understand judgment in this way. Judgment is not discernment as to whether something is live-giving or death-dealing. That’s called discernment, but judgment has to do with value, people’s value. And to judge someone is not valuable, not worth saving, not worth working with, not worth being saved, that’s what we can’t ever, ever fall into, and yet that’s what justice tends to lead to. Sort of like the people who harm us, they should not only be dealt with justly, if they cause pain, they should be in pain, and the mindset is there’s something ugly and horrible and bad about these people, like bad people don’t deserve love, affection, forgiveness. That’s judgment, and the most amazing thing that Jesus came to do — it’s another dimension of who God is, because we have God the Father, then God the Son, then God the Spirit. So I’m trying to make a distinction between each of their roles in our lives, particularly in time now. I’m talking about the way they’ve been revealed to us, because it’s one God. It’s one person, but when the time was right, we had God the Son, God the brother of humanity, the one who came into the world to reveal the fullness of what justice leads — what justice began, and that is mercy, understanding, compassion, empathy. And when that’s engaged, something moves from people living together in a fair, just way to people interacting with each other where there’s a flow of something, a life-giving flow. It’s called mercy. It’s called forgiveness. There’s another word. It’s love. When you move from justice to love, you’re into a whole new category, and that’s the evolution of what God is trying to be in our life. He went from a God of justice to a God of mercy, but being a God of mercy wasn’t enough either. There needed to be another stage, and so that’s the stage we’ve just gone through in celebration of Pentecost.

And what I realized in that feast is what we’re saying is that this God who is both just and now merciful is also this mysterious thing called light, life, and that light and life is truth. And so what God is ultimately designing his relationship with us to be is one that moves into this mysterious place where his indwelling presence enters into us and changes us. We’re transformed, and that transformation leads us to be not just aware and conscious of what is true and what is real and what is life-giving, but we become the source. We’re actually resonating those gifts. It’s not that we’re doing them necessarily. That’s one thing, but you can have people doing good things for bad motives. So doing it is part of it, but there’s something much deeper. And that’s this mysterious world of the Spirit, the transforming power of God, and where does that lead us? It leads us to the place we are now, where we’re living in the age of the Spirit. And it seems to me that that’s where we should be focusing on who God is. It’s one thing to say, “My God is good and gracious, and he’s there for me. He’s willing to support me.” Okay, that’s God the Father, the creator, the artist. He sees what he made, and he sees it as beautiful and valuable. And then he says, “I want you to understand how it is that you’re going to live together, and you’ve got to start with justice. But then you move to this wonderful thing called mercy.” And mercy is so much more than letting your brother off the hook, of not condemning him. No, it’s being aware of who God has empowered you to be in this world that we live in, and this is the place we’re living now. This is the age of the Spirit. This is the fullness of God. It’s like you hold all three of these together, but the Holy Spirit sometimes is the one that is not dealt with as much as God the judge or Jesus the brother who is forgiving. But the Spirit is the fullness of who we are and the destiny that we’re here to fulfill, and I wish I could describe it to you in a way to say, “Do this, and you’ll feel it.” No, it demands you are open to the reality of this figure God as a person, as not an idea, not as a historical figure, but it’s somehow saying, “I know you’re here. I know you’re alive. I know you live in me. I know you’ve taught me all these things, but I want you to be a part of my life. I want it, and I say yes to it, and I’ll accept all the confusion, all the craziness of the world. It’s darkness. I’ll live in that with you, and I will know that somehow in all of it, in every single thing that goes on, you will use that as a catalyst so that I, each of us individually, when we respond to things that are happening in the world, have the ability to respond in the Spirit.” And the Spirit is the thing that gives us this enormous, transformative power.

It’s interesting. We call the first person in the Trinity God the Father. Jesus is our brother, and the Spirit is our advocate — our advocate, our lawyer. Isn’t that interesting, that the fullness of the relationship that God wants with us is that he’s created us, he now loves us in mercy and forgiveness, and he’s there to protect us. From what? What does a lawyer protect you from? A misuse of the law. The law, if you break it, you’re condemned, but the law is also something that Jesus came to say, “I’ve come to destroy its power over you.” So we break the law. Jesus broke the law all the time, not the law of love or the law of forgiveness but the legal law, and so it’s so interesting to also see this dimension of this resonance in us of God working through us to save the world, also, free of the limitations of so many of the rules and laws. It doesn’t mean that we can get away with doing anything negative. It just means that we are here to be such a mysterious instrument that no set of rules, no set of organized ways of dealing with life is going to fit. We need wisdom, and wisdom goes beyond law. And that’s the beauty of this incredible gift of the Trinity, but nothing is more important than finding and sensing and realizing its fullness and live ultimately in the Spirit.

Father, your greatness is too much for us. All that you’ve planned, all that you have invited us into seems beyond our comprehension and beyond our abilities, and yet you continue to call us into places where your power works through us beyond anything we could ever do on our own. Open us all to this great gift of your presence in our life. Help us to be encouraged and enlightened and empowered so that we can accomplish all that you ask us to do, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Pentecost

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Ascension
Acts 1:1-11 | Ephesians 1:17-23 | Matthew 28:16-20

Grant, we pray, almighty God, that we, who believe that your only begotten Son, our Redeemer, ascended this day to the heavens, may in spirit dwell already in heavenly realms. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

I’ve been a priest for 56 years, just had an anniversary, and I think about what I’ve been doing those years and what’s the most important thing that I’ve accomplished. And I’m looking at it all and saying the one thing that I have been doing that has been consistent is ⎯ certainly administering sacraments to people as a Catholic priest has been an incredible joy, but the real work is not in doing that. That’s something that God does through me so obviously indirectly. But the work of dealing with scripture, struggling with it, listening to it over and over and over again, that’s where the work has been, and that’s where I think I have spent my time as well as I could possibly spend it, because nothing seems more important to me that you understand this story, because it’s your story. We’re to live it out. And we get to a very important part of the story. The Old Testament and New Testament is often considered two books and two different stories, but they’re actually one story. The testament, the inheritance that we receive from God is his story. It begins with God creating some human beings, two beings. Whether they were created that moment or they evolved over time makes no difference. The evolution of the human species is something that’s really attracted me, and it makes sense that that’s most likely what God had done through the plan that he had from the very beginning, that God planned to create this world. He did it sort of naturally, and as it continues to evolve and grow and each one of us evolve and grow, the direction is always in one direction. It’s always toward truth ⎯ truth.

If the fullness of the story is in Jesus and Jesus is depicted by John the evangelist so beautifully when he says Jesus comes into the world and he is, for the first time, the full explanation of what is real. He is truth, and the truth is something that, when we hear it, it ministers to us. It awakens us to see what is true and what is real, and it is filled ⎯ that truth is filled with hope, but we know that there’s an oppositional power, so to speak. There’s something that works against the truth. It’s interesting that the first sin committed in the great story of Old and New Testament, the first sin is the sin of disobedience on the part of the angels that wouldn’t respond to God’s plan, but then when it came to the first sin of humans, again, it wasn’t so much disobedience. It was believing in a lie. The most cunning of animals was there and said, “Oh, no, no, no. What God told you is not true. What is true is that you want to be like gods. You want to be in charge. You want to know what’s real.” Interesting. The real struggle is between truth and lies. We see that all around us today in the world, and people are always saying, “I don't know where the truth is.” And there are people who get caught up in the most amazing lies and conspiracies of what’s going on, and always when you’re dealing with people in a lie, then almost always it seems it has a negative ring to it, a negative feel: the world is awful, we’re all going to hell in a handbasket, nothing’s working, there is no hope.

So what is the truth that God wants you to believe in? Well, on one level, it’s believing that Jesus is who he says he is, that God created the world, and he came into it, and he saved us, and then he returned to the Father. Well, to believe that is important. I would agree. But it’s so interesting to me, what we listen to in the gospel, which is not about the ascension but about the resurrection of Jesus, and the ascension in all the scriptures ⎯ well, in the scriptures, other than in Luke, it’s ⎯ well, in all ⎯ the four evangelists, they talk about the resurrection happening the same day that Jesus ascended into heaven. It’s only the continuation of Luke’s gospel where he continues and describes something it’s so crucial to believe in, that Jesus didn’t rise right away and return to the Father. No, he stayed for a long time. Forty days is 40 elements of length. It’s a mystical time, 40 years in the desert, 40 days of Jesus in the desert. The wanderings and the temptation were all under 40 days, but interesting that, in this image, you see that God comes back and wants to make something clear. And this is what I believe he is trying to say because of the line that’s there in the gospel that says, when they watched this event happening, Jesus leaving, they were concerned, and they doubted. What did they doubt? Did they doubt that he was who he said he was? Could the disciples possibly doubt that Jesus was the man who could do things beyond any other man, that he was able to heal and he was able to raise people from the dead? He was a miracle worker, and they also believed that this power over death was amazing, because he could bring a friend back, and he himself didn’t die when he was crucified. He came back. All of that makes total sense. I don’t see how they could doubt that. So what were they doubting? They were doubting what truth is, a path of life, a way of life. They didn’t believe, and it’s still hard to believe, what it is that God is inviting us into when he gives you and me a body and a will and a heart and said, “I want you to spend some time living in this world as it is and do something for me.” And what does he want? He wants us to manifest a truth to everyone, and the truth is really beautiful. It’s something that I could describe like this: God has come into the world to oppose the power of evil. Evil is a lie, and what’s the lie? We’re on our own. The world is negative. It has all kinds of problems. When things aren’t going right, that’s a sign that they’re only going to get worse, and as they get worse, it means it’s all going to end up in darkness and destruction. And there is fear, and there is revenge and anger against those who are perpetrating lies. What he gives us is something that absolutely dissolves that. It’s the awareness that we aren’t simply here to remember what Jesus did back then, but we are to receive something that he is now giving you and me that is often untapped, unknown, unrecognized, hidden. You have God, the same God in Jesus, inside of you, in your heart. Paul says, “Open your hearts, eyes so that you can receive a wisdom that leads to a revelation of everything that you’re engaged in in this world.” The revelation is you are the same truth incarnate that Jesus was and still is in you, and as you live out this life, believing in that power within you, you are like a priest. You are a minister. You are an apostle. You’re a disciple, and you are not teaching something about something. You are being something for them. You are a resonance of life and hope and truth. Truth is we’re here for one reason only, to minister to each other. The lie is no, no, you’re here in this world to take care of your needs and your wants and your desires, and when those are on the lower level of our consciousness, you know what happens? They never work. It never satisfies. You want money? You never have enough. You want pleasure? You never have enough. You want power? You never have enough. That’s a sign that every lie is incapable of fulfilling us, yet the truth is so there, right in front of us that the thing that really works for us is being engaged in this amazing, powerful source within us that invites people out of that lie into the truth that they are cared for and loved.

We live in a country that is so Christian in its roots, its constitution. What’s the first thing the constitution says basically? The government has a purpose. It’s to serve the people. In Christianity, the presence of God, what’s its purpose? To serve humanity. Most of us grew up, at least I did, before the Council, before I understood about the priesthood or the faithful, that we all share this mysterious, wonderful presence of God inside of us, and it works through us, and we can feel it. And yet it happens, more often than not, without us even realizing it, but we believe it. Somehow that ⎯ I don't know. Somehow I didn’t ⎯ it was like I was supposed to serve the church. I was supposed to do things for God. I was serving him to get him to love me. What a lie, and yet it seemed to ⎯ it pervaded my upbringing as a Catholic. We were an elite group of people that are specially preserved from evil by God, and our religion was the only religion, and we had a kind of mystical, secret society, and our liturgy was mystical and of another language, and we always witnessed something that we were supposed to participate in by making first ourselves pure and then without any sin. And then we could maybe hope that this God that came into us wouldn’t condemn us but would maybe love us. And now we gather around an alter filled with an awareness of God inside of us, and together with a priest, though he has a role that’s higher than ours, we are making Christ present. And then we walk out of that church, and we have him resonating out of us. Do we have to use words and explain to people what we believe? No, we just have to live and say and teach the truth.

Do you know how healthy the world would be if everybody just told the truth? Do you know what it would be like in a relationship? You do know what it’s like in a relationship when somebody you realize is lying to you, what happens to the flow between you. It’s severed. You can’t trust them. What an interesting focus for us in this age we live in to simply cry out, “I want the truth. Please give me the truth, and whatever truth I believe in, let me always live it out as a truth that is motivating my intentions and my actions without me having to do super-selfless things or go around and set up protests against things that are wrong.” Yes, many people are called to that, but that’s ⎯ the real issue is can I carry a living presence of God, that was in Jesus doing his work, and I believe that’s in me, and that if I believe in it and it reveals to me the power that it is, I am filled with the one thing that lies seem to destroy quicker than anything else. And that’s hope. “I don’t believe that things are going to work anymore. It’s all so dark and dirty and self-centered, and I want to destroy everything out there that isn’t what it should be.” Nothing is further from the truth. To destroy evil is to become evil. To have compassion for evil, to feel sorry for the victims of evil that do horrible, horrible things is the truth. We’re all susceptible to evil, and when one is, we look at them not as the source of evil but as a victim. That’s the only way you can love someone who’s done evil. So we have this great hope. We have this trust, and that’s what the Holy Spirit is sent into us for.

So this moment in the scriptures is when God really changed the world. No longer does God live in the temple. No longer does he just live in one person that walked this earth. No, he lives in you and in me and in our hearts. And if we believe, as I long for you and me to believe, that it’s stronger than every lie out there, then the confidence we have will overcome the contagious way in which those who talk about the end coming in a negative way, saying the world is so corrupt it’s going to be destroyed. They have a sense. They have a truth that makes sense to them. Otherwise they have to deal with this mysterious thing called God in me doing the work slowly and things getting much worse before they get better. So what a gift we should celebrate today than this returning to the Father in some mysterious way was the thing that closed the full testaments. God is in you. God is the truth. Share it with the world that is longing, longing for hope. Amen.

Father, your gift, your gift of truth is not an idea, not something we can put into a sentence but a person. Bless us with an awareness of this gift that dwells within our hearts and allow us to use it in the way you intend to bring light into darkness, hope into despair, health into that which is sick. And we ask this is Jesus’ name, amen.

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Sixth Sunday of Easter
Acts 8:5-8, 14-17 | 1 Peter 3:15-18 | John 14:15-21

Grant, almighty God, that we may celebrate with heartfelt devotion these days of joy, which we keep in honor of the risen Lord and that what we relive in remembrance we may always hold to in what we do. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This sixth Sunday of Easter is, in a way, the end of the teachings that started in the beginning of Lent when we saw Jesus entering into the world and getting ready to deal with the task that he had been asked to achieve by God. He was tempted and tested, and he proved that he had something in him that was going to enable him to be focused and to do what he was called to do. Next Sunday we celebrate his return, ascension to his Father. So what I love about the opening prayer of this liturgy is the beautiful way in which it describes what the scriptures are. I don’t know what life would be like without scripture. How would we know who we are or what we’re here for? And that beautiful image of we are reliving it as we remember it, what does that mean? If you remember a story and you’re reliving it, then it must mean the story that you’re talking about is your life. It’s who you are, why you’re here. People ask all the time, “What’s the truth? What’s true?” Well, the truth is this story. I don't know what we’d do without the Bible, without scripture. Religion is obviously grounded in it, and Christianity and Islam and Judaism all, basically, are founded on the story of Abraham, the beginning of this incredible revelation of God to his people. So it’s so important that you and I, if we’re going to be people of the truth, know the story, because whatever story is in us is the story we’re going to live.

I want to go back to sort of the essence of this story with you. The basic story begins with the whole notion, or let’s just say, it begins with a very strong theme of evolution. Human beings are engaged in a work, a life, and if it’s true, they will be on ⎯ what I see so much, when Jesus describes himself, since he is the truth, it is a way of life. Jesus says, “I am the truth, the way and the life.” I think what he’s saying is there is a truthful ⎯ there’s a truth, a way to live life here on this earth so that it is what is intended to be for you ⎯ for you and for your continual life after this life. And to turn that into a test of whether or not we obey the commandments of God just is to ruin the whole thing. You have to look at the whole story, the big story, and what it really does reveal is that we have been created, this earth has been created by God. Maybe three and a half billion years ago, a bacteria started forming in some warm water, and the genius of God is that that very thing that happened at that moment slowly evolved into the world as we know it. To believe that that’s the way God works is not to fly in the face of a denial of his power by saying he didn’t make people out of clay and then breathe life into them. That is another ⎯ it’s the same story. He created this, but I love the evolutionary theory, because it underscores who we are in this world and why we’re here. We’re here to evolve, to change, to grow.

So it’s interesting that, when God created the world, he also created angels, and that’s a big part of the story that often is not really paid attention to. Why is it important to talk about angels? Because they are beings with power, and God created them. And the story is that he explained to them one day that his plan was to create, out of this little bacteria, this thing that would grow and change and develop over millions of years, and it would become like the angels. The animal would become like them, and God would take that beautiful evolution of animals into humans. He would take it and guide it and lift it up to where it would be just a little less than the angels and join the angels forever. And Lucifer, the greatest of the angels, the thought of people less than him being a part of his life, he just couldn’t handle it, and he said, “I don’t like this plan. I’m opposed to it.” And if you don’t believe that, then you don’t believe in evil. You don’t believe that there’s a power out there that doesn’t want God to accomplish the task of inviting us into a process where together we complete our evolutionary cycle. That’s what this world is about, completing the work of our own particular path of growth and evolution to a higher level of likeness to God, and isn’t it interesting? Jesus created us, but then he did something that’s really very special. He didn’t ask trees if they wanted to be created. He didn’t ask angels, I don’t think, if they wanted to be created. They didn’t exist, but he’s asking us to participate in the way in which he has planned for us to grow. And we’re against another force. “Don’t grow. Stay in a lower level of consciousness. Stay in that more animalistic form of wanting nothing but the world to serve you.” And God is going to bring us out of that, but I think ⎯ and this makes sense. He said, “I want you to be a part of your own evolution. I want you to feel that you have had a hand in what you end up being.” It’s an amazing gift and a responsibility, but what dignity that is to give us that. And that’s one of the ways to experience this time on this planet.

The average age right now in this country is about 79 years you’ve got on this planet, and what are we here for? To evolve just like the entire New Testament/Old Testament story. Watch as God slowly evolved, who he is in our life, so that when we get to the fullness, which is where we are now, that he’s telling us the most mystical, wonderful things. He’s saying, “Look, I’ve come into the world to tell you something about your humanity. It is so potentially close to who you should be, and I will enter into you. I’m not going to tell you how to do it. I’m going to partner with you.” When Jesus is leaving his disciples, it’s like he’s leaving a time when we saw and experienced something that made it clear, God’s plan, and he’s saying to them, “Look, I’m not leaving you. I’ve come to establish a relationship with you, and I’m going to continue it with every single human being that comes into the world. I’ll be with them, and we’ll slowly, together, work on their own evolution. And as we grow and change, at the end, you will know that you too were part of what you are.” That’s what human beings want.

When you look at the story of Adam and Eve, they were given a garden, and he said, “Just tend it.” And Adam and Eve said, “Well, I want my own garden.” And that’s what they did. They said, “I want to be more like God, and I want to create. I’ve got a creative spirit. I’ve got a desire to figure things out. I want to build things.” And so God said, “Okay.” But the interesting thing about that moment in Genesis, it’s really about the moment when human beings were at a point where they were able to become their own guide. And what was it that they discovered at that moment? Well, they were told not to do something, and they did it anyway, which is not something that would be a big deal to somebody with their low, low level of consciousness. No, they felt something. They felt shame. That’s the issue. At that moment, when God entered into them, they had evolved enough, their brain was enough developed that they could feel something, that there was something inside of them that was destined for truth and obedience to the way things really are. And they chose not to do it, and somehow they knew that, when they didn’t submit to the plan, to the will of God, they felt separated from him. That’s sin. That’s the work of the dark angels. That’s the work of evil, to keep us out of the real work we’re here to accomplish, and we don’t have to do it alone. And we do live in a world, in the words of Peter, that is going to be not welcoming the truth. And it's interesting that all the men that Jesus worked with and taught, they all were executed by the world who said, “We don’t want this truth at all,” except for one, John.

So what is our story? How do we relive this? We relive it in a world that is antagonistic toward truth, the way of life, and what’s is the difference? What’s the resistance? One is the world is here for me, and I use it, and I abuse it. I take from it, and it feels great. It’s a low, almost animalistic way of living, yet we evolve, and we change into beings that are not on our own figuring this out, but we’ve allowed a Spirit to enter into us. It has spoken to us. It has told us that it’s in us, and then when it’s in us with humanity and divinity together, we evolve to the highest level of a human being, and our entire life is there for service. Another core thing to believe that is often hidden by the evil of the world is that God is not here, God is not in your life to be served but to allow him to serve us. So important. Unless we allow him to love us, to serve us, to be the source for us ⎯ and we know that without him we can’t do this work. That’s the work that we have with God, and when we surrender our egos to that power in us that is beyond us but part of us, so mysteriously connected, that Jesus has taught us that God the Father is in us, Jesus is in us, the Holy Spirit is in us. That’s the fullness of God, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and when we’re in touch with that, we grow, we evolve but not without tension, not without struggle, not without suffering. And what is suffering? It’s accepting the fact that there’s a force against the good that we long to create with God. Once you lose that story, once you don’t see that story unfolding in you, then there’s no hope ⎯ no hope.

I love when Peter is saying, “When people look at you and you have God in you and they’re looking at you and saying, ‘What have you got? You have something I want. You seem to have a hopeful spirit about this corrupt system we’re caught in.’” He said, “Be gentle. Don’t say, ‘You don’t have it. You’re stupid. You’re not worth anything.’” No, just be gentle, because they’re going to attack you, and let them attack you for being a source of life for them. That’s fine, and it’s going to be tough on you. But don’t ever lose hope that you are reliving the story that began a million years ago when animals that were walking on all fours started walking. Bipeds started, and they evolved and developed into this whole wonderful event called salvation history. And you are never alone. That’s the story, and you have work to do. What it has to do is erase the image of heaven and hell, though there’s a reality there that there’s a price if you don’t do this work. But just think of it not as something that you’re doing to earn a place with God. You’re doing something that you’re always going to know and feel was partly your work. You helped create the being that you are by listening, surrendering, accepting. It’s a wonderful story, and it has a beautiful ending of being so in God and God in you that actually, when you let go of your body, there is only one, you and God face to face. That’s the end of the story. That’s the hopeful, wonderful end. Amen.

Father, teach us the story. Help us to integrate it into who we are and how we live. Your promise is beyond our expectations. Help us to trust more in what you have shared with us and who you are in us than who we are in our own humanity, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Fifth Sunday of Easter

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Fourth Sunday of Easter

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Third Sunday of Easter

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Second Sunday of Easter

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Easter Sunday
Acts 10:34a, 37-43 | Colossians 3:1-4 | John 20:1-9

Oh God, who on this day, through your Only Begotten Son, have conquered death and unlocked for us the path to eternity, grant, we pray, that we who keep the solemnity of the Lord’s resurrection may, through the renewal brought by your Spirit, rise up in the light of life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

What did Jesus do on the cross? Why did he have to die, and why was his death so important to the human race? It’s clear that one of the things that Jesus did was to expose evil for what it is and show it, in its true light, as something that has to destroy that which gives life. Jesus is life. He is the light of the world. He is the way we’re supposed to live, and yet evil that existed in the world, in a way that was more powerful than human beings, had done its work to separate people, isolate people, put people at odds with other people. Evil has one single intention: to destroy the plan of God. And what is that plan for you and for me that’s revealed in this death and resurrection is he wants more than anything else for us to be empowered in a way that evil no longer can have power over us. Evil is stronger than human beings, but God is stronger than evil. And until the death and resurrection of Jesus, that strength wasn’t shared with human beings as it is now.

Since the death and resurrection of Jesus, we have been empowered. And how does it work? Well, I don’t think it’s hard for us to look at the world today and say, “There are things going on that seem so destructive and wrong, people using their power to take away freedom from other people, people hating each other because they think differently, wanting to attack each other because they think their way is the only way.” It’s all showing some kind of really negative energy that has got to be destroyed, and I say that by wanting to say so clearly, it has been destroyed. And so what’s the name we give to it? And it seems so simple, because 90 percent of what Jesus taught throughout his whole life was on one theme: forgiveness, being in a state of mind, a state of our hearts where we want nothing more than reconciliation. We don’t want to have revenge or retaliation or destruction any longer. We want unity and oneness, and that is a promise that God has placed in our hearts. But unless we believe it’s there, unless we want it to be there, we limit its power. Forgiveness is a way of life. It is recognizing something that has been promised by God that he is stronger than anything else that would be a source of destruction. And when you watch people destroying each other or trying to destroy each other, when you feel that that is the way things really are if we would give that power to the enemy ⎯ Judas is a very interesting player in the whole Easter story. The word to betray is to give someone ⎯ to give in to the enemy, and Judas is a real interesting figure, because you look at him, and one of the things that he was caught up in is lying about who he is. He posed as the caretaker of the money, and yet he was not doing that. He was sucking things out for himself, and he was caught in evil. When Jesus gave him communion at the Lord’s Supper, Satan entered into him, and what did Satan do to him when he entered into him fully? The only thing that happened that we can see so clearly is that he went ⎯ Judas went and hanged himself. It is an attitude that, when we’re in it, it ultimately seeks to destroy. To name that darkness, to name it is so important, and to name it and then to know what the way out of it is, and it’s so simple. Don’t become like the enemy. If the enemy wants to destroy you, then you want to destroy the enemy, and when you try to destroy evil, it backfires. When you try to destroy another person, because they’re not who you want them to be, separate from them, reject them, we’re playing into the game.

The opening prayer of this liturgy so clearly said there’s something that needs to be unlocked, and Jesus unlocked it on the cross. He gave in to evil, not that he said it was good or that it was right. He just gave in to it in the sense that he refused to be like evil itself. He did not retaliate. He did not want to destroy those people destroying him. He loved them. He forgave them. He stayed one with them, and in that process, he infused life into them. We can infuse light and life into our enemies if we choose not to retaliate against them or not to want them to be destroyed but want them to be transformed. What a gift, a gift that seems oversimplified in some ways, but then in other ways, it is so powerful. Stop resentment. Stop hating. Learn to accept, and learn to love, and learn to bring life and light. That’s the mystery of Easter.

Father, we give you thanks for our redemption. We don’t fully understand it. It’s hard to grasp, but I know somehow that the power of evil that you’ve allowed to be part of our life is no longer able to overcome us. And we have within us the power and the strength to use it for good, to learn and to grow and not to become what it is. You’ve saved us from a life of destruction and drawn us into a life of great goodness. Bless us with that awareness that we can live it every day of our lives, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Palm Sunday

The Passion According to Matthew

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FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT
Ezekiel 37:12-14 | Romans 8:8-11 | John 11:1-45

By your help we beseech you, oh Lord our God. May we walk eagerly in the same charity with which, out of love for the world, your Son handed himself over to death. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

Today’s gospel completes the five major teachings we find in the season of Lent. In the early church, these gospels were used, because people would be baptized on Easter, and so in a way, you could say that these were the gospels chosen for a person who was entering into a life with God would have to understand these before they could be baptized. And they are powerful teachers. And one of the things I want to start with is that we see very much the notion in these set of readings a progression of how we are to understand our faith, and by understanding it, I don’t mean figuring it out or describing it perfectly. It’s a mysterious way of being in the world. It’s mystical, and it starts off with just describing who it is that Jesus is, a human being filled with divinity who comes into the world, who pockets his divinity, in a sense, and then goes through a process that we all go through in order to fulfill our destiny here. And Jesus’ destiny was to be there for other people, invite them into being who they really are.

The Old Testament was very, very clear and, in a way, very over-simplified and not very complex about the way we would relate to God. He will give us a rule, a law. We will do everything he says; 613 laws pretty much covers everything you do during the day, so I know I’m doing what God wants when I follow his rules and regulations. If I break those, he’ll punish me. So I don’t want to be punished, so I have a motive to do what he wants, and then when I die, I will go and live with ⎯ the bosom of Abraham was what they thought, but let’s just say that they would go to a better place.

It's not that simple, and so what does God reveal through Jesus? He brings someone into the world who is God, and he does this by a miraculous birth so that we know that Jesus is not simply a human being but uniquely connected to God. And what we’re taught throughout the New Testament is that Jesus is God, and of course that gets very confusing. So back to my image of the danger of oversimplifying our religious life, our spiritual life as a simple choice between good and evil. Jesus awakes in us a new nuance into the somewhat binary world that we live in, in that it’s not about good and evil. It’s about darkness and light, truth and lies. Interesting how different that makes things, because we look at this first story, and what we see in Jesus, the God/man ⎯ now, when I use the word even God, be careful, because the essence of God is not that he is a male father figure. He’s not male; he’s not female; he’s not a dad. He never named himself. He only invited us to begin to know him by using images that we already knew and take them to a new level, but one of the things that’s interesting about God giving himself a name. He said the best name that I think we should all think we are, and he says, “I am. Who am I? I am who I am.”

So let’s take this image of Jesus coming into the world, who is fully human, fully divine. The union between the two is the major teaching of this set of readings. God is not separate from you. He is in you, and he is not a male figure who’s a daddy, but he is being fulness. He is being. And when you look at yourself ⎯ I don't know if you do this, but I look in the mirror, and I say, “Well, I was a young man. Now I’m an old man.” So my image of myself is I’m an old man. Or do I think I’m a white man, therefore I’m not a black man, I’m different or that I’m short or tall or whatever? Think of it. We have a label for ourselves that is so limiting and really kind of insane when we look at what God is trying to say to us. It’s that every one of us is a reflection of who God is. We all participate in beingness of being human. To see each other as human beings created by God, filled with Spirit would do away with all kinds of racism and illusions and lies that we’re told about other people. So we start off with an image then of what it means to be human. We’re human and divine, and then we think about, “Well, what are we here for? To obey everything that God tells us?” No, Jesus reveals to his disciples on that second Sunday, we’re here to be enlightened, to be the fulfillment of the Old Testament and not just to be enlightened but to be a light that enlightens other people. Darkness is illusion, is lies. We lie about who we are. We lie about other people. We lie about what the world ⎯ the world will tell us things about itself. It’s not the world. The world is a place for beings to exist and to be engaged in a relationship with one another so intimate and so connected that the only way we can sort of begin to describe that is that we are light. And this light that is given to us, this truth of who we are is like a lifegiving water inside of us. We thirst for it. We long for it. When we see ourselves as isolated and separated and less than or more than, we’re in an illusion, in a lie, and none of that satisfies us. What does satisfy us? And so we’re told that what God has come to do in our life is to give us this understanding, this lifegiving water, which then opens our eyes, and when our eyes are open, the gospel today makes so much more sense. Then we have life.

Look at the first reading. Way back in the Old Testament, God was using these images of light and life. He’s looking at the Israelite people, and he’s saying, “You live in your humanity. You think you’re human. That’s all you think you are, a person, but you’re so much more than that. And what I want to do is pour something into you, an awareness, a Spirit of understanding, a kind of wisdom that you, when you’re only human, you are like dried up bones in graves. You’re not really fully alive. So what I want for you to be is more in tune with the fact that I’m putting my Spirit in you.” He said it at the very beginning. “I’m putting my Spirit in you.”

Then the second reading is Paul talking about living in the Spirit. God lives in you. God lived in Jesus. Jesus is the model. God lives in us. If you see that, you’ll see life and light. So today’s readings are really wonderfully in ⎯ how would I say this? They have the quality of awakening us to something that is so essential, and if you look at all five of these gospels, you can’t miss it. And so what is Jesus doing? He is doing the very thing that human beings are made to do. We are ⎯ we are beings made to bring life into other beings, and that life is something that is absolutely indestructible. It never dies. It never fades. It always is there. So once he’s opened the eyes of the blind and seeing God more clearly who he is, we see him as the one who destroys death. There is no more darkness. Only there is always light in darkness. Notice the difference between the image of good and bad and light and darkness, because light can life in darkness. You can light a match around a circle of people in total darkness, and you see they are enlightened, but there’s still darkness all around them. The world is filled with light and darkness, death and life. And when Jesus is in this beautiful gospel, you see him, at one point, weeping. The shortest line in scripture, “Jesus wept.” He only wept two times in his life. What did he weep over? One was the temple, and one was this moment when everybody around him was wailing and crying, and the people that he loved the most, when he wasn’t there to accomplish the task that he hoped they would know he could do, they kept saying, “If you were just here, this wouldn’t have happened.” Martha, “If you were just here, this wouldn’t have happened.” And maybe his weeping and his deep ⎯ he was perturbed, which is a deep anxiety. Maybe he’s just, as a human being, thinking, “They still haven’t gotten it. I’ve been with them. I’ve shown them this. I’ve done all kinds of miracles. They simply won’t look at it. They can’t see it.” And maybe he just felt the wave of, “It’s not going to work.” As a human being, he could say that, because he’s human. And so he shouts it. He shouts out, “Lazarus, be a symbol for these people of who I am and what I am in them when they have me in them, and it’s you’re no longer tied up.” I love the image at the end of this gospel when Jesus is looking at Lazarus, and he’s all wrapped up in all these kind of things. And he doesn’t say, “Someone unwrap him.” No, “Lazarus, you now are an image of who all these people are, and you have the ability to unwrap, untie all those things that keep you from being who you are. You are a being. You’re neither male or female or old or young or tall or short, and you connect with every other living being.” Think of that. Our destiny is to be belonging to one another. How can we condemn or judge or criticize someone else when they are ourselves? Why would Jesus say, “When you forgive your brother, you’re forgiving yourself?” This oneness is the key message of the gospel, being conscious, aware. I am who I am. I am in everyone, and they are in me. And in that process of that union and communion, we become, together, who God intended us to be, his body. It’s called the church, not a building, not a denomination, but people filled with Spirit. Amen.

Father, we so often don’t really see who you are, and we see religion as a burden, something that keeps us from being who we want to be or what we want to do. Just free us from all the lies that we’ve been told about who you are and who we are so we can be free to truly enter into this communion, this union with you and with each other, with nature. It’s what we’re made for. It’s the only thing that can bring us the joy and the peace of the thing that you taught us to believe in called the kingdom of God. Amen.

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FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT

1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a | Ephesians 5:8-14 | John 9:1-41

Oh God, who through your word reconcile the human race to yourself in a wonderful way, grant, we pray, that with prompt devotion and eager faith, the Christian people may hasten toward the solemn celebrations to come. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The opening prayer always sets the tone for this set of readings, and the first two readings are always there to somehow amplify something in the gospel, because the gospel is the source of the truth that I long to awaken you to see. In the opening prayer, it’s clear that the role that God reveals himself to have in your life and in mine is somehow to awaken in us a way of being connected to him. He wants to reconcile human beings to himself. He wants a union and communion with us, and for some reason, his plan was for him to create us and then for us to grow, in our humanity, ever closer to who we are called to be, more like God. And as we become more like him, there is more opportunity for us and for him to meld into one beautiful way of existence. Humanity filled with divinity, that’s what the goal of the Old Testament was in order to prepare us for that incredibly beautiful connection.

So we’re looking at the first story, and it teaches us something really beautiful and simple. God sees differently than the way human beings see, and we are human. So our humanity is, in one sense, you would say it’s really a burden, because we’re just slow to catch on. We’re slow to understand. We live in illusions and false truths, and so it’s clear that we struggle. But what he’s saying is, “Here’s the thing.” And it’s like a prediction of how we will be one day. God sees to the heart of things. He sees the essence of a person. He sees why the world is the way it is, and we’re going to have that one day. And so God in this story simply allows a king to be chosen, King David, by insight given to Samuel. He’s the one, the unexpected one. He’s the surprise, in a sense. He’s not the oldest, which is normally who would be given some kind of authority and power. He’s not the tallest. He’s short, and yet he’s the one. God sees only what man longs to see.

So then we go to the next reading, and we see something about the way we are empowered to see. When God created the world, there was darkness, and he created light. But it’s interesting. He didn’t do away with darkness. He created light in darkness, and so the darkness is a part of our life. It is something when we’re in a place where we can’t figure things out or when we are just in a place of questioning or wondering or even just doubting. So we’re supposed to be able to live in both places, in light and darkness, and darkness is where we don’t really do things as well as we should. We make shortsighted decisions that cause us great pain and struggle, but the light is always, in the scripture, to be equated with the presence of Jesus in the world. And what he is is truth. So Jesus has come into the world to reveal to you and to me the truth, and one of the things he longs for the most is the hardest thing he asks us to do. It’s not just to see things as God created them to be. It’s not to figure out who he is or to unlock the mysteries of these readings. No, his real challenge is for you to know who you are, who you are, and to look deeply into the darkness, and the darkness is what is in us that blocks us from being in union with God. So we have this dynamic set up from the very beginning. As soon as human beings came into the world and they were given dominion over everything, everything was for them, and they would care for everything. And then darkness enters, and they are confused and make a bad choice, because they believe a lie. And believing the lie is where we get into trouble.

So if you want an image of what is light and what is dark, in terms of the scriptures, it is what is a lie and what is the truth. That’s the distinction, and the interesting thing about this wonderful long but very beautiful gospel, it’s read every Lent, and it’s the story of a blindness that is absolutely incapable of seeing light. It’s really terrifying when you think about it, that God has given us such free will that, when we’re presented with an absolute clear reason to believe, we don’t. And why wouldn’t we? Because it demands something, and what does it demand? We change. We have to become something different. So let’s just try to glean from this gospel passage a message that’s directed to your heart, to your essence, to who you really are. It’s first about an indication of who God really is. Jesus is God. Jesus represents God. He gives us an insight into how God thinks and how God works, and it’s so clear that Jesus in his ⎯ all of his miracles, they’re therapeutic. They’re always helping human beings to be more what they were intended to be by God. So we’re always seeing the work of God in your life and in my life as a way of evolving deeper and deeper into who we really are.

So we have Jesus in this gospel passage, as he did so often, seeing a need, seeing something, and he would then ⎯ I don't know. There was this intention in him that was so intense so that he would want always to heal what he saw that was broken. So he seeks a blind man, and his disciples ask a very obvious question, because the belief given to those people at the time of Jesus was that every sin that a person committed was being punished in this world by some infirmity or some disease or some bad luck. And so there was always punishment and reward. That’s all that God was able to do for the people, and most of the people were living punished, because their life was less than the life, let’s say, that the Pharisees claimed to have, because they had a life that was beautiful and easy. They had a lot of good things, but their hearts were so far from God. And yet they were able to look at those who didn’t have much, and they weren’t interested in helping them. They were even told not to help them, because they were sinners, and they weren’t worthy of anything from God until they fixed themselves through the work of the temple. Think of that as an image of religion that’s terrifying, that God would really be the God that some religions claim he is when he does not want to be around those who are longing and needing help, restoration, becoming fully who they are.

So what is the truth that God is teaching us in this gospel passage? It is this: the truth is that human beings have the capacity to have absolute proof that God would give to them, who they are and why they’re here and show them that he is the one who can change their life. And he is willing to do it, he can do it, and people will still look at that and say, “I don’t believe it,” because it makes them aware of their darkness. God wants to show you who you really are. And when we see people around us, we see things, we become those things. As children, we see people acting a way. We think that’s the way you should act. So seeing is really important. We have to see things for what they are, because we become them. We see God as a judge who isn’t interested in us when we’re not really worthy of his time and attention. That’s the way we are. We become like that. We do that to other people, but the gift of insight can only be given and received ⎯ can only be received rather by a heart that’s willing to face things that are not the way they should be. They’re not who they’re supposed to be. They’re faking it. They’re phony. They’re not real. They’re not honest. That’s our challenge, to face those things, that darkness and at admit we can’t fix it, but there’s someone in us already that says, “I’ll do it for you.” Do you believe it? Have you seen it? Because it’s there.

Father, your call, your heart’s intention is that we become who you created us to be, that we are gifted with whatever it is that we need. It’s there within us, and it’s our work to uncover it, to support it, to live it and not to live in an illusion that we are not who we are. Bless us with this kind of self-awareness. Give us the gift of who we are so that we can better serve you, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT

Transcription Coming Soon.

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SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT

Genesis 12:1-4a | 2 Timothy 1:8b-10 | Matthew 17:1-9

Oh God, who have commanded us to listen to your Beloved Son, be pleased, we pray, to nourish us inwardly by your word that, with spiritual sight made pure, we may rejoice to behold your glory. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

There’s a connection between the theme of this set of readings and one of the temptations that Jesus endured from the evil one. It’s about trust, and Jesus made it very clear that you should never, ever test God to see if what he promises is really going to be worth believing in, having confidence in. So this set of readings is about trust, and the first figure we look at is Abram, which turned into Abraham. And the fascinating thing about Abraham is that the thing that is happening to Abraham, even the temptations of Jesus, these are all things we experience. So what Abraham is promised is a place that’s better, that’s full, that’s rich, that’s wonderful, the land of milk and honey, and sometimes in the whole Christian tradition, the Judeo-Christian tradition, the whole thing, the whole story, we can get caught up in everything in this life is getting us ready for a life somewhere else, in heaven, out of this world. But that’s not really what the scriptures are saying. They’re talking about something that can happen now. They’re talking about the kingdom of God, and whenever Jesus is talking about the kingdom of God, he’s talking about a way of life. And think of it not so much as the way the world is, but what is your world like? What is the world you live in? Is it a world of abundance, or is it a world of scarcity? Is the world growing and becoming, or is it one that is deteriorating and being destroyed? What do you trust in?

So Abraham trusts in something that is, in a way, beyond imagining. He’s longed for, waited for a son, Isaac, and the one thing about having that was proof that God could be trusted. So he had that to rely upon, and then God asked the most unusual thing. He said, “I want you to destroy your son. I want you to sacrifice him, kill him.” And it’s as if this story is really making clear how deep the trust was that Abraham had in God. It was unshakeable, even to do something as horrific as killing the thing that he longed ⎯ the person he longed for most in his life. And what’s interesting about it is the fact that, when he was getting ready to do it, scripture says, he reasoned that God would bring his son back to life. He didn’t think he was going to destroy his son, which would go against his very nature as a father, as a human being. No, he trusted in a miracle, something he couldn’t understand or figure out how it could be, but he thought, “God can do anything.” And that’s the kind of trust that we’re presented with in this set of readings. And it’s a gift. That’s what’s most important to understand. You don’t figure this out with your brain. You don’t use logic. You don’t use statistics. You don’t test it. So Lord, please, out of the love you have for us, place your trust in me. Trust me to trust you.

To look at the second reading, Paul is saying to the people, and this could be said to us today, “Bury your share of the hardship.” He’s talking about the hardship for preaching the gospel, but it’s also the hardship of the way the world is. The world is antagonistic to the gospel. It is opposed to it. It does things that the gospel forbids, and so he’s saying, “I want you to bear with what is going on, what is evolving, because I want to give you something. I want to give you a light in the midst of all this that brings life,” a light that brings life, hope, trust. So we have this moment in the history of the life of the disciples in the gospel, which was really the beginning of the most profound test he could ever put his disciples through. Everything they worked for for three years was going to look like it completely fell apart and was destroyed. The message of Jesus was stamped out, removed. So Jesus has just revealed to his disciples that he is going to have to die, and they understood what that would mean. And then he would rise from the dead. They had no idea what that meant. So they were confused, and certainly they were afraid to ask questions about it, and Peter even said, “This is a terrible idea.” But then Jesus knew they needed some kind of affirmation, something that would help them trust, a light. It’s a way of saying, “There’s a way of seeing the world where you can really trust in it.” So he takes Peter, James and John into the mountain, and he is transfigured before them. He is a light to their life, a light that enables them to deal with darkness, and so as he’s resonating this presence that he is, this gift that he’s going to give them ultimately when he fills them with his Spirit and they can see the world as he sees it. He becomes like the sun and like light, and they’re looking at this. And Peter’s response, who’s always the first one to speak, and he usually gets it wrong, thinks, “Let me make some tents so Moses and Elijah can have a place to sleep, and you can have a place to sleep, and we’ll all be here together.” No. No, this isn’t that literal, Peter. Jesus is revealing that he is the goal of everything that Moses was trying to teach, the Ten Commandments, and every prophet like Elijah that was trying to get people to live that way. To reveal how you should live and to demand that you should do it is certainly something that is important and is important in most people’s lives, and sometimes that’s as far as they can go with their own evolution and their own growth. But here Jesus is revealing something more. He is greater than Moses and greater than any of the prophets, and what makes him so great? Instead of telling them what to do and holding them to do it by threatening some kind of punishment, he said, “I want to give you a way of understanding, a way of seeing.” And what he’s doing is he’s revealing to them the very mystery at the heart of everything that is going on in the world, and that is we’re going to be dealing with things that are destructive, things that are negative.

We’ve gone through a period of history that is unprecedented in terms of the amount of knowledge we have, and some of that knowledge is very exciting new ways of understanding how the world works. But there is also a shadow to all that revelation of information, and that is that every single thing we know, every institution is filled with corruption, not only corruption, but corruption is everywhere. It’s in the church. It’s in medicine. It’s in politics. It’s in family life. It's in individual’s relationships, abusive behavior. All of it’s there, and we see it so clearly, and it’s easy not to trust, to say, “It’s all going negative, and what we should simply do is just shutdown and let it go and let it be destroyed and what a shame.” If it was that neutral, it wouldn’t be so dangerous, but it’s more than ⎯ when you don’t trust that the world is moving in a way that is positive, you don’t believe that ⎯ to see that which is not what it should be is one of the greatest motives for changing it. Evil has always been there, but we didn’t think about changing the system or checking into the system to see what was really going on. We didn’t have any way of doing that. Now we know. Now we see, and instead of saying, “Oh, let it be,” no, there’s something inside of human beings that then become filled with fear and depression and darkness ⎯ fear and depression. Fear and depression is a result of a lack of trust, and trust is a light that enables you to deal with everything that is happening. God allows evil in the world so that we will change, so that we will grow, so that we’ll see that there’s something that needs to be better. Without an awareness of when things are broken, how can you ever fix them? So we’re looking at the brokenness of everything, and what does it leave us with? Fear, depression or this mysterious thing called trust, trust that God is serious about leading us as he led Moses to the Promised Land. Let us be led into a place of promise, a place of hope. It is God’s will, and I long to trust in it and invite you to do the same. Amen.

Father, with you, without your insight, without our knowledge of the plan that you are asking us to surrender to, we are lost. We are so often caught in fear and darkness. Bless us as you blessed Abraham and made him a blessing, an example of trust so that we can find the peace and the oneness of all things. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT

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SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

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SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

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FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

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SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Isaiah 49:3, 5-6 | 1 Corinthians 1:1-3 | John 1:29-34

Almighty, everliving God, who govern all things, both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

I want to begin my reflections, as I always do, with the opening prayer, and what we pray for, what we long for, and it’s so clearly something we need, and that is a sense of wellbeing, peace. And the only way we can find peace is not so much to make a world free of sin or problems or destruction or evil but to make peace with it, to somehow know it has a purpose, it has meaning, it has a reason for being there. And I want to go back to an image I use over and over again, and that is the partial revelation of the Old Testament. It’s not the fullness of who God is, and it’s all based in justice. And justice is a good thing. The world should be just and fair. It isn’t always that way, but it would be good. We love that kind of image of finding peace when there is justice always administered. Those who are good rise to the top; those who are bad are pushed to the bottom. But that’s not the message in any shape or form of Jesus. He radically changed all of that, and peace is no longer found in a kind of perfection but rather in a participation in the most amazing invitation on the part of God. And that’s where he looks at you and he looks at me and said, “You know what? I formed you, the way you look, the race that you belong to, the place where you are, the time in history that you’re participating in, my work. All of that was my plan for you, and it’s not by accident.” It’s not ⎯ nothing is by accident. Everything, God would say to you, is part of his plan, and so what he's inviting you and me to do in the New Testament, the fullness of the message, is to believe in one single thing: what is, is what must be. And that has to do with you, your actions and the world.

So let’s look at that for a moment. I want to go back to the Old Testament, because there was a person there that I always find very fascinating, because he feeds my ego, and that is the rich man who came to God and said, “Hey, I have done everything really, really well. I’ve kept every commandment. I have paid attention to you. I’ve tried never to treat anyone unfairly. I’ve been just in my dealings with it. I don’t want another person’s life. Mine is perfect. But it’s really interesting, Jesus’ reaction, and it’s he’s filled with love for a person who’s trying to save themselves by their actions. He really does see it as something good, but it has a very bad after taste, a terrible side effect. And that is pride and judgment against other people. So when the rich man says, “I’ve done everything well. I’m pretty wonderful.” He didn’t say those words, but I think that was the intention. And God said ⎯ Jesus said ⎯ or, excuse me. Jesus said to him, and this is in the New Testament, not the Old Testament, but Jesus said to him, “You’ve got one problem. Let go of your possessions.” If you look up possessions, what it means is not ownership. That’s different, but the thing that you have that makes you feel better than someone else, a bigger house, a bigger car, a bigger job, a bigger whatever, a bigger talent than most people have, those are things that God gives to people, and we are never to compete.

So the clear image I want to work with from the New Testament is the image that we do not gain our own salvation by what we do. We participate in this extraordinary work of God using you and me to enlighten other people. We’re not here just to become some perfect being focused on us and our actions, but we’re communal. We’re here to have some impact on other people, and that’s a wonderful role, and we don’t always think of it as something that’s our responsibility. When we look at the world, we often condemn everybody that’s bad and try to hope that those that we think, think the way that we do, that they’re doing the right thing, and there’s something so much more than simply evaluating what’s going on in the world. We need to understand that God has given you and me a certain destiny, and the destiny includes to make ourselves into ⎯ or to have God make us a light to the nations, a light to the circle of friends, a light to your family, a light to your partner, your spouse. It’s wonderful that that’s the challenge that’s before us. And the minute we try to think of it as being perfect, we’re in trouble, because it’s very clear that there is something about our nature that was never promised before the coming of Jesus, and that is not only do we have this destiny from God, formed in the womb to be able to accomplish this by participating in something, not rules and regulations but a presence, a presence that’s in you and in me.

Look how John the Baptist recognized Jesus. There are many, many people that came along that said they were Messiahs. That’s even true today in a way. Somebody comes along and says, “I’m going to save the world. I’m going to save everybody.” But the thing about the Messiah that’s so unique and so important, and he’s a model for us, is that he didn’t do what he was doing because of his humanity, which we all have. We have the same humanity that Jesus had. He struggled with understanding the fullness of who God is inside of him. Otherwise he wouldn’t be human. He didn’t always want to do what God was asking him to do. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be human. So what we see in John’s description of Jesus is something happened to him. The Spirit, the Holy Spirit, came down upon Jesus and entered into him and dwelt in his heart. That’s a very, very beautiful image of who we are in the eyes of God, not Jesus himself literally but like Jesus, filled with a gift, not full divinity but a participation in divinity, particularly in the need and the want and the desire of God to bring light, truth, wisdom to other people.

So when we ever get caught up in the rich man’s problem of wanting to be perfect, we have to, again, watch out for the many other side effects, one of which, of course, is that you condemn everybody that’s not as good as you are, because you resent the fact that they might claim to be in God when they are not perfect. And there’s a kind of, unfortunately, well-known experience that people have with having religious people be condemning people that are not of their religion, not doing what they’re doing, but the relationship with God is not solely because of the denomination that we live in. It’s a more personal thing. It’s about the promise that God made to you, a personal promise that everything about you is exactly what you need to be, and there will be sins that you deal with that are specifically your weakness, and you will grow by dealing with that sin, not through perfection but through mercy and forgiveness. And in some cases, you will live with the same sin the whole existence that you have on this earth. St. Paul had a problem, a moral issue that he begged God to take away, and God said, “No, your grace is enough for you,” or, “My grace is enough for you.” It’s a beautiful image of God creating you and me imperfect so that we can live on this planet with the understanding of imperfection our brothers and sisters ⎯ and can recognize, when we meet them with mercy and forgiveness and understanding, we are spreading a light, a light called peace. It’s okay where you are. It’s okay to be who you are in this moment, and yet it is not simply about this moment. And it’s not simply about you. It’s about your participation in a gift called salvation, and when you feel it as a gift, and you know it comes to you from God, you’re going to naturally resonate it. It just comes out of you, because you’re a man of peace, a woman of peace, a child of peace, and it brings such hope to the world that often gets caught up in the need for perfection.

So we’re beginning our ministry of Jesus in this ordinary time, and we’re going to look at Matthew so carefully. And what he’s going to teach us is going to lead us into the two things that are mentioned in this set of readings that stand out. You’ll receive grace ⎯ that’s redemption ⎯ and peace. That’s everything as it must be. God bless you.

Father, your wisdom is so clearly manifested in your acceptance and understanding of our human condition. You never ask us to be more than we are, more than we can be, yet we stand, often, back and look at ourselves and see so many things that could be better, and we get consumed with our imperfection. Help us to know your will for us. Help us to accept everything that you ask us to deal with, and let us find peace. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT 

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FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT 

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This program originally aired on November 24, 2019

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TWENTY-SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Habakkuk 1:2-3; 2:2-4 | 2 Timothy 1:6-8, 13-14 | Luke 17:5-10

Almighty, everliving God, who in the abundance of your kindness surpass the merits and desires of those who entreat you, pour out your mercy upon us to pardon what conscience dreads and to give what prayer does not dare to ask. And we ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

The music by Ryan Harner is just always so interesting to me, because it seems to lead me into a deeper understanding of what I want to say, and I pray that it does the same for you. We used to have a lot of songs on the program, but now we have this more meditative thing. And I like it. I think it’s really helpful, because I have an intention when I’m sitting at this microphone. And I want to talk about that for a few minutes, because I’ve been going through some things that have been really interesting, questioning my authority to speak the way I do, and you can maybe even hear it in my voice. It seems like I’m not as comfortable as I usually am with who I am, which is not a bad thing at all. It seems to fit the readings, but I’d like to say something about our relationship. I was with some friends that are going on retreat the other night, and one of them came up to me afterwards and said that he had been listening to me for 20 years. I immediately felt this connection with him, and I thought to myself, “I don’t know how many of you out there have been listening for a long time.” But it just strikes me that, in many ways, some of you — there are a lot of those people, and I just feel like you’ve been listening and responding positively to what I offer. And it just makes me feel so valuable and loved and safe, which are three things that I think every human being needs, and I thank you for that kind of affirmation that I feel. I don’t need to talk to you so much. It’s just I know it’s there.

And I was also struck by the fact that, when I get up to preach, and everybody gets up to preach, the scriptures are so interestingly wide open to all kinds of interpretations. And now that we read from the Old Testament on a regular basis, I realize that there’s a side of God in the Old Testament that’s a little bit terrifying. It seems that he’s really disappointed in human beings, that he’s not happy with the way they turned out when, at the time of Noah, he was ready to kill everyone until an angel pointed out, “There’s Noah, and he’s got this little ember inside of him. There’s something good in him,” because God had said, “Their hearts are filled with darkness and hate and evil,” a terrible thought. So what I’m looking at then is this whole idea of, when I get up to preach, or anybody does, there’s almost any way we want to take the scriptures and use it. We can talk about an angry, judgmental, condemning God, and we can also talk about a loving, inviting, forgiving God. Which is he? Well, obviously if you follow the story completely to the New Testament, he is the former. He is a lover. He is a servant. He wants nothing more than for you and me to grow into the unique person that God has created us to be. That’s the goal. That’s our vision — our vision.

So I know that each of us who get up on Sunday mornings, or wherever we are every day when we’re preaching, have it as an intention to give to the people what they need, and I pray that we’re open and God uses us. Sometimes we need to be harsher. Sometimes we need to be kinder. But what I feel my ministry has called me to at a time that is seemingly perfectly depicted in this set of readings, we need comfort. God came to give us comfort. So we look at the world as it is today. I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I think a lot of people are having trouble sleeping. Whenever I mention to somebody that I’m having trouble sleeping, they’ll say, “So am I,” and they give me their tip. I have more tips than I can use, but the interesting thing is that there is a time, like the one we read in Habakkuk, that we’re experiencing right now. There’s a lot of misery that we see, a lot of destruction, a lot of violence, strife, discord. So what do we do with all of that? It’s easy to see that the world is not in a healthy place, but what I want to say so clearly to you is it’s always been the way it is. It’s just that it’s not been so clearly seen before. Everything that is hidden is being revealed, and that’s positive. That’s amazing, that we’re in a period of time where the things that have been going on in secret, in the dark, the way people have been treated by other people, the abuse, all of that keeps coming out and out. And we might say, “The world is worse than it’s ever been. This has never happened before.” I’ve never been afraid to go to a mall and think that I might be harmed by someone who is confused and deranged, but that’s the way we live right now, and that’s what we have to accept. And one of the things that I love about this particular passage from this rather obscure prophet, Habakkuk — we don’t know much about him, but he does say the most beautiful thing. “Write down clearly — when you’re in this world that you look at it and it doesn’t seem to be a healthy place, write down a vision.” And the vision is so beautiful. It’s the one I just mentioned. Our God is a God who, if I listen attentively to the opening prayer, and that’s one way to really set a homily in the right direction, we prayed as a church, and there are millions of millions people listening to these readings today. And there is God saying, “Look, I came. I’m in Father Don, and I have a desire. And my desire is that he pour out my mercy upon you, pardon what you think is awful about you, and give to prayer the power of taking care of you in the midst of your not being able to care for yourself.” You hardly can dare to ask that if you’re feeling full of shame and unworthiness.

So it’s time to focus on the vision, and here’s the key. It’s exactly what it’s supposed to be, exactly. This vision of you becoming fully who you are and living a life of giving, loving and having the Holy Spirit, Jesus himself, God the Father living inside of you is such a beautiful, powerful vision of our way of waiting for the vision, because he’s saying, “It will be fulfilled. You will never disappoint.” And you think it’s delaying. Wait for it. It’s not going to be late, and if you have real integrity, meaning if you have the truth living inside of you, you’ll know that you are called to believe that, to believe. So interesting this thing called faith. I always wonder where did it come from. Where do I get my faith? I feel like, at times like now, maybe I don’t believe in myself as much as I did, or maybe I don’t believe that the world is going to be saved like I always did or something like that. And that’s, I think, a really healthy place to be so they can make it clearer to you what you really do believe.

So listen to Timothy’s words. “This faith that you have, it’s in you. It’s this ember. It’s this thing inside of you that God saw in the people when he said, ‘I won’t destroy these people.’” And so God has given us this gift through the redemption of the work of Jesus on the cross, and we have this gift given to us. And what it is, it’s the Spirit that’s powerful, loving and able to control our thoughts and our feelings so that we don’t get caught up in something that is just a normal emotional response to things that aren’t the way they should be. It’s a normal response to be nervous or afraid or want to do something. That’s all healthy, but when those things are out of our control, when they are just things that seem to be in the world and we see the division and the discord that’s being caused and we want it to stop, we can’t go into their lives and stop them, but we can stop it in ourselves. That’s the wisdom that comes from a time like we’re in. Look at the effects of division. Look at the effects of people having ideas that are not opinions but truths and are threatened by someone who doesn’t have the same truth, who doesn’t believe the same truth. It’s a time to reflect. It’s a time to think about all of that and to recognize that we are sometimes ashamed, ashamed of our testimonies, as Timothy says. And that doesn’t mean — I think that what that means is that he’s saying don’t be afraid of looking at yourself and saying, “I have these doubts. I have these fears. I have these worries.” It’s okay. Don’t be ashamed. Look at him. Look at — Timothy’s in prison. What did he do to get in prison? Maybe he shouldn’t be in prison. Maybe it was his fault. Who knows? Maybe he felt it was his fault. But bear it all. Share in the hardship, and you know that, when you share in that hardship, you are receiving, in a mysterious way, the strength that only comes from God. So I love the image of this reading, which stir up, use the Holy Spirit. You use God inside of you to help you to stir this flame of faith inside of you, and the flame of faith is your capacity to be a loving, forgiving, inviting person into a world of truth, oneness, wholeness. And when it’s the darkest, it’s the most important that you be that and trust in that.

And then we look at the wonderful gospel, and this is just — I love this gospel, because it’s like the apostles are looking at this plan that God has for them. And it does include a dying to the self, a dying to the ego that likes to control and likes to force people to do certain things, likes to force you to be somebody, not because of grace, not because of whatever gift God is going to give you and let you use it for the good. No, it comes from a kind of negative spirit of demanding, judging. Demanding, judging, that’s not the Spirit of God, even though we see it in the Old Testament. But that was another time, and we have to be so careful of what it is that we listen to from this incredibly complex and wonderful story. This story is our story, every man’s story. Did you ever wonder what it would be like without the gospel, without the Old Testament, New Testament, all of it? Where would we go to find truth? And yet it’s not a kind of truth where you can sit down and say, “Okay, this is what everybody needs right now.” It’s a truth that’s dynamic, living and active inside of each person, and each person is going to get what they need. What I love about my relationship with you, these conversations we have every Sunday, or whenever you listen to the podcast, it’s really a beautiful thing that I feel that I am being chosen by you, and you listen to me, because perhaps you really do need what I’m saying. And what I’m saying, I want you to believe in a gentler God than sometimes is presented, something so beautiful when you’re in stress or in doubt, that there’s a God that wants to comfort you and say, “There’s a thing I’m going to give you, and you’re not going to feel it all the time. You’re not going to be assured of it all the time, but it’s called faith.”

And so the disciples are looking at him and saying, “Okay, I know I’m supposed to believe in the way that you’re describing your life, Jesus, but —” Can you imagine what it was like to be a disciple? I guess the disciples were close enough to the theology, let’s say, of the temple, and Jesus was doing crazy things. He was disregarding rules and laws that were considered to be absolutely necessary to do these things if you wanted God’s favor, and he would flaunt those in some ways. Then he would talk about a dying that was different than anything they could have imagined, and they may have just thought it was all about a physical death. But it’s not about a physical death. It’s about the death to a part of you that is more reflective of a God in the Old Testament working with people with much less consciousness than we have today and somehow demanding that they change. And if they don’t, fear is used as the means of getting them to not do what they’re doing. It’s not a changing of heart, or it’s not a transformation of who they are. But it’s more of a power over them, and maybe people need that at sometimes. I’m sure they do, but not you, not me, not now, not so many people, in my estimation.

So here we have this beautiful image of increase our faith. So how do you do that? It’s so beautiful. The Lord says, “Look, it’s a gift. I gave it to you. It’s sometimes like a little ember inside of you that isn’t really a raging fire yet purifying you of your doubts and your insecurities.” Sometimes it’s just this little thing, but when it’s in you, you still have this power. You can do the things that human beings can’t do. No human being can tell a tree, “Hey, get up and move.” So it’s this faith that gives you the ability to do the impossible. So he says, “Here’s the deal. Faith is in you. When you don’t feel it, you’re going to be feeling like you need to be cared for.” But here’s the thing, this work of working with faith and helping you to deepen it by doubts and insecurities and all that sort of stuff, that’s what you’re here to do. It’s your role. It’s your service to yourself and to the rest of those that love you, and when you do that work, when you’re serving the process of transformation that brings you into the fullness of who you are, you’re doing your work. And you’re not going to be given some great award. You just have God looking at you, looking into your eyes and saying, “Yes, you’ve got it. You’re doing it. I’m with you. I’m comforting you. I’ll send people to you to comfort you,” as he’s done to me. And you’ll find life. It’s all about trust and hope. And hope isn’t saying, “I hope it works.” No, it’s, “I know it will work. I know there’s new life through suffering.” God bless you.

Father, we pray for wisdom, the mysterious gift of the Holy Spirit. Stir within us an understanding of the mysteries that we’re asked to live, to surrender to the processes you’ve placed just perfectly for us. And with that, we’ll find the trust that we need, your faith — our faith in you. Thank you for that gift. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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TWENTY-SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Amos 6:1a, 4-7 | 1 Timothy 6:11-16 | Luke 16:19-31

Oh God, who manifests your almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy, bestow, we pray, your grace abundantly upon us and make those hastening to attain your promises heirs to the treasure of heaven. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

If you’re like me and many of my friends, you look at the world today, and you become nervous and uneasy, because it seems that the very thing that is so important for human beings to be with each other is truthful and caring and supportive. Instead of seeing those things manifested, at least in the news, all we hear about is conflict, division, separation. One person’s lie they are saying is true, and the other person is saying, “No, it’s not.” And it’s back and forth and back and forth. So it seems to me that there’s never been a time when the message of the gospel is more needed, and yet there seems to be a number people, more than I feel comfortable with or feel good about, and that is so many people are leaving, at least, I know, the Catholic Church. And they’re saying, “I don’t know why, but I just don’t find anything there for me anymore. I don’t feel anything supporting me. I feel things are being asked of me that I don’t want to do and maybe don’t understand.”

So one of the things that I’ve been doing, as you’re well aware — I’ve said this many times — I now preach from the Old Testament, as all priests do, along with the New Testament reading and the gospel. And I sometimes — I’m very excited to do that. The stories in the Old Testament are so valuable in understanding exactly what redemption means and what Jesus came to do that was so radical, but even the readings today I feel something that’s there that I think bothers people and keeps them away if it’s what’s preached. And that is this God of ours in the Old Testament is not happy with human nature. He thinks it’s a mess, and the mess we’re in is the mess that will always be the tension in a good human being trying to be who God calls him to be. And one is that we’re there for other people. That’s the main message of the gospel. God dwells in you so that, through you, he can minister to his people. He’s not asking you to be what they need. He’s asking you to have something toward them, to feel something toward them. It’s a part of us that’s the most beautiful part of us. It’s often represented by the heart, and that is compassion and empathy, to feel with our brothers and sisters the pain that they’re in but not — and this is so important — but not to feel the obligation that what they need is your responsibility and your responsibility only. I’m afraid that comes across so much in the Old Testament that it’s so easy to preach on it, because it has such a fearful impact. And if you’ll notice, news stories that are the ones that are the most engaging with people is the ones about things going in the wrong direction. Life is awful, and people listen to that and want to know why. What’s going on? Whose fault is it? And they blame somebody. Well, the problem with the Old Testament is you see often God using language and stories that really do underscore that he is not happy, as I’ve said, and the first reading we’ve just listened to is one of those.

It’s describing what I think is often the way we are when we’re very young and have just come into an awareness of who we are, and we’re free, away from all rules and regulations, and we get very, very self-centered in terms of comfort. We love great food. We love great parties. We love music. We love wine and scotch and bourbon and tequila, and we do everything for ourselves. And when God points that out, which is nothing other than our lower nature — it’s who we are when we first come into the world. It’s something we have to grow out of, but you have to be in it before you know you have to grow out of it. So you begin to feel this kind of self-centeredness, and as you evolve more — I’d say it doesn’t happen until your 30s basically — you begin to feel the emptiness of that. And the emptiness of that is what God is trying to talk to when he talked to the people in this first reading from Amos. The prophet was talking. He’s saying, “Look, this is not going to feed your soul and who you really are.” But rather than go into all that, they just say, “If you continue to do this, if you feel no empathy about things that are collapsing all around you, then you’re going to be kicked out of this thing. You’re going to be lost and rejected, and you’re going to be empty and condemned.” That’s what it seemed to feel that it was saying.

Then you look at the gospel, and there’s a really strong image of what I think sometimes is the image that God — that we think religion is supposed to be. And that is, if we have a good life and everything works, then that’s not good, but if we have a bad life and everything’s bad, then we’re going to be saved, or we’re going to reach where we need to be. Now, think about that for a minute. It’s too much emphasis on us, on our ego and what we do. The thing that God wants more than anything, anything else, is for us to be transformed, remade, a new person. That’s so clear in the New Testament, but in the Old Testament — I mean in the New Testament, but in the Old Testament we see this, now, this story. We had one story about how selfish we are when we’re having a good time. So I guess religion is against good times, and now this one is a rich man who has everything he wants, compared to a poor man who is not just poor but has this horrible life of a beggar and sores, and it’s a miserable life. And somehow, the one who has the miserable life, we are told, is favored by God, and the one who has the rich, full life is not favored by God. It looks like God is not only against parties and having a good time, but he’s against any kind of success that the world promises us. And that’s just oversimplified — oversimplified, because this whole story is about openness to realization of who you are, and when you see the part of you that is self-centered, self-focused, completely tied up with yourselves, meaning you’re at a very low level of consciousness, there’s a sense that there’s something really wrong with you. You’re bad, and God hates you and won’t take care of you and won’t do anything for you. It seems like throughout the Old Testament God is saying, “I’m irritated by you. You don’t realize it. I’m trying to break through. I’m trying to get you to listen to me. The life you’re choosing is ending up as destructive.” So the only way God can work with people on a much lower level of consciousness is saying, “Look, if you’re all about yourself, then I’ll tell you what you’re really worried about. I know you’re worried about yourself, so I tell you, if you stay in this self-centered role, you’re going to have nothing.” And it’s depressing, but here’s what’s so beautiful. This situation, which is so clearly in the Old Testament before a very important event called redemption, God doing something radically different, it’s — that whole moment of Christ coming into the world changed the entire Old Testament, in a sense. There’s so many passages in the Old Testament that fit so beautifully who Jesus is and what Jesus came to bring, but he came to bring you a new creation. He’s going to make you — awaken you to what God intended you to be, a compassionate, understanding and caring person.

And so that’s what this, I think, this gospel or the second reading is about. It’s about, when you realize that you’re here to pursue all these things — devotion, be patient, be loving, be gentle. But the key thing in that second reading is you have to make the noble confession in the presence of many witnesses. So it’s basically — the question there is you need to come to a point where you’re self-aware enough to know that you’re going against your nature, and doing that is leading you into destruction, and you’re open at least to see it for what it is. And you hate it, and you regret it, and you don’t like it. That is you’re ready to make the noble confession. It’s what draws somebody from a congregation to an altar call. It’s what calls people in the Catholic Church and communities that are heavy in the beautiful area of rituals. Baptism seems so, so crucial. In fact, for years, centuries, the church said if you weren’t baptized Catholic, you couldn’t be saved, and that’s oversimplified. Of course it doesn’t mean that. It means that, unless people go through what baptism represents, they can’t find life.

Just think of it that way. God wants us to enjoy and engage in this life in the way he intended us to do it, and when we don’t, there’s a dark darkness to our life. Let’s not focus on heaven and hell. That’s there, and they’re real. But focus on, when we’re here, God wants us to be engaged in something that gives us life. And so how did Jesus do it? What is he asking us to make a noble confession in? What’s interesting about this gospel also, because I’m thinking about how many times you read something and it makes you feel guilty just by reading it, when Timothy says, “Look, hey, I charge you with keeping the commandments without stain or reproach,” that means do everything right. There’s nothing more devastating to a person who’s struggling with selfishness to say, “Not only are you selfish, but if you don’t stop being selfish, the result is I’ll condemn you, because you have to do it perfectly.” It’s called performance anxiety. Then I went back and read that sentence, and it doesn’t say to keep the commandments without stain or reproach. It says, “Keep the commandment without stain or reproach.” What is the commandment that we’re called to believe in, trust in? When Jesus looked at the law with its 613 rules and people said, “What is this all about,” Jesus would say, “It’s about love. It’s about empathy. It’s about compassion for your brothers and sisters.” And when you grow through your self-centeredness, when you see it for what it really does and you see the dignity of who you are, then you’ll start to change. And so what did Jesus have to do to save everybody? He came first and foremost to empower you. That’s one thing. Well, maybe not foremost but one of the things. “I want to empower you, because when I ask you to do these things for me, to be there for other people, I’m not asking you to do that on your own, out of your own energy. I’m going to dwell inside of you. I’m going to live inside of you, and I’m going to give you this ability to do this kind of caring and compassion.” And it doesn’t mean fixing a problem. It means understanding it and feeling one with the person. That’s what they need. They don’t need to be fixed. They need to be understood, and they need to face the fact that they’re doing something to themselves. And the last thing they need is to be condemned and judged. So what does Jesus do? “I forgive all of your sins.” All the times you look back and say, “I was so selfish,” he says, “I overlook that, because I know inside of you there’s this potential for doing something. So don’t ever feel like I’m condemning you, judging you, demanding that you be perfect.” And that’s what religion sometimes comes across as, and it’s why you don’t want to sit there, when you already feel guilty about who you are, being told, “You are who you are,” without much hope, other than your will to make yourself better.

The mind and the will is never going to change us into who God wants us to be. It’s going to be our hearts, and if you’re going to be a compassionate, understanding person, the only way to start that is to see through your selfishness and then to recognize you’re loved, loved, loved and forgiven in spite of that. All he wants is for you to change and grow, and he’ll help you do that. That’s so different than being judged and condemned and set back, cut out, because we don’t use our will enough, and we don’t use our mind enough to figure out this is logic. “Don’t do bad things, because you will get bad results from God.” It’s not true. God in the Old Testament pointed out why sin is so destructive, why selfishness is a dead end, and the only way out of that is to stop judging yourself and others for what they’re not and try to feel the pain and suffer it with each other, because that’s the transforming gift of God’s grace, to use his presence to be changed into a new person.

Father, we find always your preference for the poor. Sometimes we think that’s about money, but it’s really about a disposition that we should have naturally of knowing that, without you, we are not able to do anything, become close to who you want us to be. The ego doesn’t like to be dependent. The heart loves it. So please, God, bless us with an understanding of who we are and what we need, and let us trust in you as we trust in ourselves. Both is essential for a new life, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Amos 8:4-7 | 1 Timothy 2:1-8 | Luke 16:1-13

Oh God, who founded all the commands on your sacred law, upon love of you and our neighbor, grant that, by keeping your precepts, we may merit to attain eternal life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

The gospel ended with an interesting comment or statement about service. There’s something in human nature that is meant to serve. We can either serve God or serve mammon. We can either serve ourselves or serve others. My point is I think mammon is a really interesting word, because you look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and it says it’s another word for money. But then if you read on, it talks about in medieval writings, mammon was considered to be the devil, evil. It was basically focused totally on itself, and greed was a major part of it. So I think to myself, in this spiritual journey that you and I are sharing, we may not have a lot of problems with money in that sense of using it to make money off of people in a way that’s unfair and unjust, though we do see a lot in the world today of corporations somehow falling into that trap of making sure that they can get as much money as possible for the least amount of product, and that’s kind of considered good business in some ways. But I want to talk about something not so much about money, dollars and business or shekels or grain. I want to talk about another kind of mammon.

It’s a kind of spiritual mammon. It’s when you put yourself in a situation on your spiritual journey, and you’re looking at yourself carefully. And no matter how hard you try to find in your life things that are good, you keep coming up with the things that are wrong, keep focusing on what’s wrong. If you focus too much on what’s wrong, something goes haywire, and the thing that goes haywire is there’s this thing in human beings that, when they’re criticized, when they’re judged, they cannot just think about themselves as somebody doing something wrong, but they can consider themselves as something’s wrong with me. It’s called shame. So the idea of being judged is really risky. If we’re going to do self-judgment, we have to be filled with mercy and understanding. That’s exactly what we find in the person of Jesus, so compassionate, so understanding. He lived on this planet with us. He knew what it was like to struggle as a human being. He knew that in a way — not that God doesn’t know these things, God the Father, but nevertheless, it was an experience that we have of a God learning what it’s like to be human. And it increases his capacity for empathy, care and desire to see change, not condemnation.

So I want to talk about spiritual pride. I guess that’s what I’m talking about, that we can get ourselves in a position where we’re never really good enough. Remember the rich man who came and said, “Look, I do everything, everything right.” And Jesus looked at him and smiled, actually looked at him with love, saying, “This is great. You’re really trying, but you’ve got one problem. Why don’t you give up everything you have and then come and follow me?” And I think the man thought it was about his money or his wealth, though he didn’t really talk about that. He just said that he was very, very, very good. So I think what that lesson is, is that there’s something in us, when we focus too much on being good, being perfect, being without stain of sin or whatever we do, it more likely comes about where we can’t do the job as well as we thought we should or could do, and we get worried about performance and all of that. That’s what he was asking the rich man to let go of, all of his possessions — possessions. So interesting. Performance can become a possession, meaning how I perform is exactly how much I’m worth, and by performance, I mean living out your life in the midst of other people. It doesn’t have to be giving a homily. It can be just being a parent, being a friend, being something, but if you’re looking too much at the performance part of you, you’re going to run into a real difficult problem. And that’s where it gets into something I would call spiritual pride. Let’s look at it more carefully.

Now, we’ve only been listening to the Old Testament every Sunday for the last, I don't know, 55 years. Before that, as you well know, or those of you who are not Catholic might not realize, but we were only listening to a gospel and an epistle, just 52 of them for the entire year. It’s easy to see, when having that small of a source to preach from, that maybe homilies became routine. They knew them by heart, and probably they were more likely to then just give good advice or teach things that the church was teaching about sacraments and about laws and rules and things like that. So I wonder about the depth of the preaching before we had the Old Testament, because it has changed my mind so much about this whole relationship I have with God. And it even has been, I think, in a sense a worrisome thing to me if I can’t integrate it correctly, because there’s something so clear about how upset God is when we do things wrong.

So if you remember last Sunday’s reading, there was Moses coming down with the tablets, and he saw all the people going back to their old ways, and he was upset, but then God really got upset and decided he was going to destroy them all, kill them all. “I can’t stand these people. They drive me nuts.” That’s God speaking to sinful human beings in the Old Testament, and now we have another passage from Amos. He’s a prophet, and he knows about the corruption in the marketplace. And so he’s saying to them, “This is something you’ve got to stop. You’ve got to stop cheating people. You’ve got to stop using your position to suck life out of people. You’ve got to learn how to help people, not hurt people.” And then he says at the end that the Lord, and this is Amos speaking for God, will never forget a thing that you’ve done. And earlier in the passage it says, “I will never forgive you.” I don't know if you’ve ever had anybody say that to you, but it’s a horrible feeling. “I’ll never forgive you.” So why am I bringing these stories up? Well, it seems to me that, if you read a lot of the Old Testament, you’re going to see this angry, angry God at the beginning. Granted, Adam and Eve didn’t exactly shine as examples of obedience, but they were asked to leave the garden, and it seemed kind of cruel in a way, except I think, if you read it carefully, you’ll see that Eve, who’s motivated actually by wisdom when she made the mistake of following the other creature’s voice. She did want something good, but she made a bad mistake in what it was going to be. And so they’re in bad shape with God, in a sense, and then the two children, Cain and Abel come along. And then one of them — Cain kills Abel, and there’s this evil in that family and things like that. And so you see God responding negatively. He doesn’t forgive Cain. He punishes him with a mark so that he lives the rest of his life alone. So over and over again, these stories — and the one in the time of Noah was when he’s looking at all he’s created, and this is the most troubling one for me when I first read it. He looked at everything he made, all the animals, everything, and just a few lines earlier in the scriptures he was saying how beautiful and how wonderful everything is. And now this same God is saying, “I want to destroy all of them. Kill them all. Destroy them.” What? Why? Because they weren’t who God wanted them to be.

Now, there’s something in these stories that I think have a clear teaching for a very low, low level of evolution of understanding for a group of people who don’t understand their hearts yet. They work solely out of their minds and their wills, and they need to be threatened, and they need to be punished. And so you get so much of that in the Old Testament, and it’s really hard, in a way, not to carry that over, not to carry it into the New Testament without realizing it’s working on me. “God does not like me when I fail. God is disappointed deeply in me.” And there’s something even in the very unsophisticated person. In a sense, when God says that to them, they feel something. One of the most devastating of all feelings, I think, is shame. And so you hear the first response of human beings to having disappointed God is shame, hiding from God. “I’m not worthy. I’m no good. I’m valueless.” That can come upon us without realizing it, not even realizing maybe where it comes from, but it can come from an indication deep inside of us that we’re not living up to what we should be. And it creates this anxiety and this shame, and then shame is the most interesting of all things. It needs to be fed. It needs to be encouraged, and so you find all you do is look at your mistakes.

So then you look at the gospel, and there’s this wonderful story about a man who basically is doing the wrong thing, and Jesus looks at him and says, “You know what? Watch this guy. Watch what he’s doing. He’s doing something really smart, smarter than the people out there that are not listening to me and not trying to do what I ask them to do. I can’t reach them. I threaten them, and they still won’t listen to me. But this guy on his own, with his mind and his will, he comes up with an idea. “I know what I can do. I’m being fired. So I know my life after this is going to be very difficult. I don't know what to do. I can’t dig. I’m too proud to beg.” So he basically says, “I know what I can do. I can use my position now to befriend the people that we have been abusing with our over-inflated invoices, and I’ll make sure that, when I’m let go of, I will be welcomed.” What’s the man doing? He’s not serving his ego. He’s not serving himself. He’s not looking for money. He’s looking for relationship, a relationship. “I want to connect with someone so I will be in a relationship that sustains me.” That’s pure wisdom to a mind that especially is not in any way, shape or form very much evolved.

So then you look at Paul, and he’s giving this wonderful advice. First of all, here’s what he’s saying. “All the time you should be working for someone else, praying for them, doing things in your heart for them.” When you pray, you are intending something for someone, and when you are not condemning, not judging but always trying to give somebody something that will help them see through what they’re doing. When you do the opposite of what God did — and the reason God did it was to prove that it didn’t work. The condemning people and judging people is never going to change them. It only leads them deeper and deeper into darkness or ignoring God, because it’s too difficult. Jesus came to change all of that, and he did it by this: he wants you when you’re at your worst and you’re feeling you’re no good, unlovable. And you own that feeling, and you say, “Maybe it’s because of what I did, or it’s just the way I’m thinking.” And then he looks you in the eye, and I love this part about Jesus, reveals who God really is. He looks in your eye and says, “You’re an absolute mess. You’ve done some bad things, or you’re beating yourself up too much. It’s wrong, but when I see you, I look at you. I love you now more than I ever have, because you’re honest. You’re facing things, and you’re not able to fix it.” That’s real forgiveness. Being loved as you are is essential. Without it, there’s only darkness.

God, the Old Testament is filled with images of a God that is terrifying to so many of us, a God that just looks and judges and condemns, but that was to awaken in us the dramatic change that you have made possible through entering into our life and living in the form of a human being and teaching us what it means to be forgiven, to be loved, to be held, to be safe. Fill us with that awareness. Take away our anxiety over trying to be better. Let us accept ourselves as we are, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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TWENTY-FOURTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Exodus 32:7-11, 13-14 | 1 Timothy 1:12-17 | Luke 15:1-32

Look upon us, oh God, creator and ruler of all things, that we may feel the working of your mercy. Grant that we may serve you with all our heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

This is such a rich source of wisdom, these readings. I don’t even know where to start, except I want to obviously start with Exodus. One of the things I’ve found about the Old Testament — and the Bible’s a weird book, in a sense, because you can almost go, and if you’re going to use one-liners, you can make God into anything, a tyrant, an angry, punishing God, a sweet, loving God who adapts to the needs of his people. But nothing seems more important than to realize the ending of the Old Testament story, the full revelation of who God is in Jesus, and the Jesus who appears as the incarnate God is absolutely completely rejected and misunderstood by almost everything that the Old Testament taught. So you get a feeling that we went through a long period of time as human beings were evolving and becoming more conscious of who they were. They were learning about a God almost in stages, from a God who was like all the other gods, tough, angry, intolerant of sin, demanding sacrifices, to a God of mercy. And the one place that the Old Testament could take people during that time was from a place of no laws, no rules to a place of the law, and it was the Ten Commandments. So that was the major, major moment in this story of God the Father working with the Israelite people on the theme, which is throughout the scriptures, how do you move from slavery to freedom. Slavery to what? Slavery to rules and laws. How do you get past that and learn? Through a process of mistakes, sins, problems, who you are, who God is and what you really want, what you really want in your life.

So this first story is so beautiful to me, because it shows that there is, in these early days of Exodus, there is a God who is very much like the other gods. The God Yahweh, the one who says, “I’m the only God,” says, “I’ve just been so worn out by these people. They’re just driving me nuts. They don’t stick with me. They complain all the time. I don't know what I’m going to do with them.” In fact, I love some of these stories, because they make us feel that God is just so like us. But anyway, he’s ready to kill them all. He’s ready to kill them all, and every time you see God changing his mind in the Old Testament, it’s always a change from one thing to another. It’s a change from punishment to mercy, punishment to mercy. And the genius of Moses in this story is that he reminds God of a promise that he made, and so in a way, you could say, in the anger that God felt about the way the Israelites went back to their old ways, what they were really expressing — what God is expressing is his frustration with them, and he really didn’t want to do the destruction. It was just a reaction of anger, and when he’s reminded, “Hey,” Moses says, “You promised these people. You can’t break a promise. How could you bring your people out here and break a promise? What would that look like?” A beautiful story about the evolution of the Old Testament God into the New Testament God.

Now, one of the things that the Old Testament is filled with is — New Testament is too — is the issue of sin, and so in this story, you can see that, when sin was committed, it separated God from the people. Remember, in the first book of Genesis, third chapter of Genesis, when we see sin entering the world through the sin of Adam and Eve, the first reaction of human beings was to feel shame, shame. And what is shame other than a feeling that you are separate from your true self, separate from God? There’s something wrong, something out of balance. It’s a beautiful image of the work that Jesus’ mercy had to accomplish in order for you and me to continue to grow and change. I grew up in a church where sin was the worst thing you could possibly do. Every time I listened to a lesson about anything but morality, it was, “Don’t sin. Don’t sin, because when you sin, you separate yourself from God. And if you separate yourself from God, then there’s nothing, and you’re alone, and it’s dark.” The thing we prize the most, without even realizing it, the thing that we hold onto the most is our relationship with God, and we know now, in the New Testament, God is a lover, a forgiver. He has no reason to ever hold back his love for you or for me, in terms of who we are, because of what we do. He can make that separation so easily.

The thing you do, when it’s a sin, is not really you. So you’re caught in some illusion, some half-truth. You’re seduced into it by someone else, as Adam and Eve was. But the point is, the frightening thing is you are separated from him by your sin, and if that’s really pushed and pushed and pushed inside of you, then the gospel is just what you need, because first of all, the first two images are beautiful images about value. When you value something and you lose it, you’re consumed with trying to find it, and there’s such joy and enthusiasm when you find it. “Where’s my cell phone? Where’s my keys? Where’s this? Where’s that? I have to have it. I have to have it.” And you just go crazy, and yet there’s such a joy in finding it. So he uses, with the scribes and Pharisees, a real attack on their moralism. They think, if they do just what God asks them to do, they have to do nothing more. Follow the letter of the law, and where their heart is, it doesn’t matter. That’s their greatest sin, but even that didn’t separate God from the Pharisees. So you’ll notice that, whether it’s the sheep that is lost or the coin that is lost, there is something that drives people that care for something to keep it, keep connected, keep it one with us.

And then my favorite story, the next one, the younger son and the older son. The one thing about this story that I love so much is that the older son is so representing of the Pharisees. He’s done everything that he was told to do. You can kind of feel, when his brother went off and had a really good time, he resented it. He was angry that he was being celebrated even though he didn’t pay much attention to the fact that he had a conversion because of his sin, but it was all of a sudden this older son was entitled. And when people follow the letter of the law, they can actually fall into that trap of saying, “Listen, I do everything I have to do in order to please God. The rest of my life, which isn’t under the guidance of rules and regulations of the church is mine to use any way I want.” It almost comes to that, but the worst thing that comes with that is, when we do something wrong, when we do sin, something happens to our way of seeing the thing that we sinned in or the problem we had. It’s like the young son, who squandered everything. What he realized was that every sin is a lie. It is a promise that — it promises something that can’t be kept or can’t be received, and so what he finally realizes is the way the life he chose, even though he felt it was his right to do it and he wanted to do it and it felt good to do it, he realized it was empty, empty, empty. And that’s the most beautiful image of why sin exists in the world.

If you have in your mind the desire to stop sinning in all situations, you could never grow and mature as an evolving Christian. Sin is essential. Sin is important, and the thing that is most deadly about it, the sting of sin is death. And the death is not just necessarily like going to hell. No, the death of sin is that gnawing, shameful feeling that you’re not in touch with God any longer, and that is more than we can handle, because I say to you over and over again, the God that lives in you is such an essential part of you for your well-being that, if there’s anything that keeps you from him, that’s dangerous. It leads to darkness and depression. So we have to believe in this thing that so often I don’t think people believe it, that every sin they ever commit is already forgiven — already forgiven. And the other way to say that, and it may be a way that makes more sense, is that nothing that you do keeps you from being who you ultimately really are, and that’s the part that loves you. That’s the part that God loves.

So the challenge of these readings is a wonderful challenge to rethink who is real valuable in the world. Paul is a perfect example. Paul is chosen to be the witness to the mercy of God, the mercy revealed in Jesus of this God who loves sinners, loves them, wants to work with them. Sinners are the only people he can work with, because they have a longing for something that only God can give. And the longing for it is union with God in spite of my sins, called forgiveness. What a gift. So Paul is chosen. He’s a sinner, the worst. He persecuted Christians. He disbelieved in Jesus. He was a Pharisee of the highest rank in the sense of he believed all that, and to take somebody like that, who had gone through a life of following the regulations, rules and things like that and saw Jesus as a lawbreaker and as a disrupter of the power of the institution over people, it’s so easy to see why he is the perfect minister, because he knows what it’s like to be with God, to know his love. He knows the arrogance of thinking, “I don’t need his love. I have earned it. I do everything right. I am perfect in his sight.” But the satisfaction that the older son couldn’t have in the return of his father [sic] is such a beautiful image of the self-righteous ones who do not believe they have to do anything more than the regulations require. That’s a real division from God. Amen.

Father, give us wisdom, the wisdom that is so essential, the wisdom of knowing how you deal with us in our weaknesses, in our brokenness, in our stupidity even. It never diminishes your care and your love. Help us not only to feel that from you but to also offer that to our brothers and sisters as we seek to live the life of forgiveness that brings life and ends separation. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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SIXTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Genesis 18:1-10a | Colossians 1:24-28 | Luke 10:38-42

Show favor, oh Lord, to your servants and mercifully increase the gifts of your grace that, made fervent in hope, faith and charity, they may be ever watchful in keeping your commands. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

I want to begin with an image in the reading from the New Testament, the reading in Colossians with Paul, and one of the things I want you to feel with me is Paul was truly a Pharisee. And he was very much in tune with the thinking and the beliefs of the temple at the time, the place that Jesus made clear was not somehow connected at all to its roots of what it was intended to be. It had become not a place of life and growth and change but a place that robbed people of something. I would say it robbed them of the beauty and the fullness of who God really is. And so we see this figure, Paul, in this story having gone through the most extraordinary thing. He went through an experience. Think of this man who was dedicated to the rules and laws of the temple and was very actively working to destroy Christianity wherever he found it, into the sense of killing people that were following Christ. And then he has this experience of actually encountering Jesus, and he feels that he’s been spoken to by this figure. He has been spoken to by Christ, who said, “I want you to be my servant. I want you to teach and preach what I have come into the world to tell the world.” And he summarizes it in such a beautiful way when he said, “The mystery, the glory that we all hope in now is the mystery that Christ is in you, in me.” Now, think about that image. For a hardened Pharisee, for him to say and to realize that this radical shift from the temple being the only place where God dwelt to now God incarnate in this figure Jesus is the God that is the God in the Old Testament tabernacle, but now he’s in everyone and that everyone — the presence in everyone is an intimacy. And the intimacy engaged in the experience that Paul had was it spoke to him. Christ, God incarnate in Paul, spoke to him and changed his life forever.

So this is a strong, strong image of the New Testament, the new way in which God is working with his people, but everything in the New Testament is founded in the Old Testament. Everything that we see there is rooted in a core teaching, and let’s go back to the first reading then and look at that, because it implies something so clear about who God is and how he wants to relate to those creatures, those beautiful creatures that he made in his own image and likeness, how he wanted to relate with them. And he wants to have a relationship with them. He wants to be engaged in their life. I don't know if you know what a deist is, but a deist is a person who believes in God but doesn’t believe at all that God has any interest in what’s going on in the world. It’s like he created it. It’s the easiest way to understand something as mysterious as how this world came about. It was some divine figure that did it, but then a deist basically feels that then that was it. He’s gone, and we’re on our own. And I don’t ever — I haven’t ever met anyone that said they were a deist, but I have met people, when I talk to them about the intimacy that God longs to have with them and is interested in what’s happening in their own personal lives or in the lives of the people that are with them, and I talk about God’s concern for them and the struggle they’ve got. And they sometimes look at me and say, “Well, he’s not interested in that part of me. He’s too busy.” I remember that one line somebody said. “God’s too busy to worry about my life.” No, how can you say that the God who lives inside of you is too busy to pay attention to the place where he dwells? He’s engaged in your life and in my life.

And so the first reading goes back to the beginning of the Old Testament, and it’s clear that God, from the very beginning, wanted to have an intimate relationship with human beings. And so he comes into the life of this man, Abram, and he changed his name to Abraham. And he starts talking to him, and he does it through angels, these three men who came to appear near his tent. And he invites them in. They’re clearly images in the Old Testament of God’s messengers coming to him and saying something to him about a promise that God made to Abraham that’s now going to be fulfilled. So there it is, God entering into human nature, wanting to tell that person something about their future, about what God is engaged in their life to achieve. There’s a ministry that Abraham had, and what was he called to do? He was called to do the most amazing thing: to form a people, and to form this people to follow this God. And you know the story. It’s much more complicated than I can go into right now, but think of Abraham of the beginning of God revealing who he is to you and to me and to the entire human race. “I want to be engaged in your life. I need you, some of you to do certain things that are really important, and if you’ll listen to my messengers —” And the thing that’s so beautiful about this first reading is the enthusiasm that Abraham has for these strangers that are walking by. He insists that they come in, and he feeds them. He feasts them practically, makes this great dinner. It’s just an image, I think, of what is in human nature that we long for and want to create, a hospitality inside of us for God’s plan for us. The patriarchs were all that way. Moses was then called, and his work was to free people from slavery. Then Noah comes along. His role was to save the goodness that was in the human race by God destroying all the evil people in the world and saving just him. But look at these three major patriarchs and what they’re saying about who God is. God enters into your life to call you into a community of other believers and to lead them from slavery to freedom, which means to lead them from the overpowering rules and regulations of religion to an intimate relationship with God, and then somehow to bring the goodness that is in every human being — and sometimes it’s just a little spark left inside of a — what looks on the surface like a corrupt figure, and God enters into that tiny spark of life and builds it up and saves it and transforms it.

So God is speaking to us. That’s his plan. That leads us to the gospel because — it’s one of my favorite gospels. I don't know why I love it so much, because maybe I’m a lot like Martha, and I’m not so much a Mary. But when you take seriously the gospel and you want to do what it’s calling you to do, one of the first things you can think about is how you have to minister to other people. Depending upon your background and your family of origin and your psychology, who you are as you come into the world — some of us come in as real strong helpers, and if we’re not helping somebody, we think something is wrong. I’m certainly one of those people, and when you’re in that mode, you’re constantly working to make sure that you’re doing what another person needs. You worry about it, and you’re stressed about it, and it’s a lot of work. And I think there’s something in this story that I love talking about, because it’s almost like God is talking to all of us who are caretakers. And he’s saying, “Look, be careful. Don’t make life this struggle of trying to figure out how to take care of people or how to answer their needs or what you need to be for them or what you need to be for whatever role you have in the world. Kind of relax and listen to me more. Be still and let me talk to you.” An image of God wanting time with us is so crucial, and I look at the world today, and I see so many things that create anxiety and worry. If we’re the kind of person that wants to always make the world a better place, we look at it, and it seems like the whole thing is falling apart. Every institution that we’ve ever looked to, to kind of help us and give us support, thinking that we’re all working together to make the world better, every one of those institutions has been turned upside down. And what we see inside and underneath the core of some of those institutions is corruption, impurity, imperfection, and whether it’s politics or religion or medicine or pharmaceutical, whatever it is, there’s this anxiety that there’s something missing in the world that’s going to take care of us. And that makes us even more anxious about taking care of everybody. Now, think about that as a stress and a worry. And if you’re not worried or stressed about the way the world is, then you haven’t been reading the newspaper, and maybe you’re smart. But you look at what’s going on, the violence in individuals that have this power to walk into a school or into a parade and to just kill indiscriminately without any conscience, without any — this is frightening, to think about evil in the world being that literally present. And it’s like where are we safe? Where do we find a place? Whenever there’s a gathering of people, should be looking over our shoulders, looking for someone that looks mysterious or looking for somebody in a building up, looking down on us, wondering if they have a gun. All that anxiety, and the answer to that is to be still and listen to what God wants to say to you.

And this is what I think he wants to say, because I want to hear it, and I want to feel it. But he’s saying a couple of things really clearly. See if this helps. Number one, he’s saying, “I’m concerned about everything that’s going on in the world, and there’s nothing going on in this world that I haven’t allowed to be there.” There’s no evil in the world that is there without God’s permission, which seems strange in a way. Why would he allow evil to be present when he says so clearly in scripture, “I have destroyed the power of evil”? He has destroyed its power, and the only reason it’s allowed is because it has some mysterious role, some mysterious part in the unfolding of what this life is supposed to be for. And God is not worried about promising a life that is free of stress and pain and suffering as much as he’s interested in a world that has all those ingredients, and he allows them to be exactly what they are, when they are needed for you, for me so that we can be transformed by the world. That’s his promise. You’re here for a while, such a short while in terms of existence, and if we’re worried too much about the world having to be the way we think it should be, we’re working desperately to make it all better, we can be so stressed and worried when it seems to be going in another direction, which it’ll always be going in that direction, I guarantee you. At least in my mind it seems clear that there has been a continual evolution of consciousness, and the world is a better place than it’s ever been in terms of people’s awareness of what’s right and what’s wrong and what’s good and what’s evil. There’s more consciousness of all that than we’ve ever had before. So in a way, the world is getting better, but at the same time, it’s not better in the sense of freed from these things that create such anxiety.

So why are they there? Because they’re there as a sign to you and to me that we have to be crucified to them. What does that mean, crucified to them? Jesus saved the world by accepting not the way he wanted the world to be, not the way he hoped his ministry would end, not the way that we would have liked to see things work for him, where he became this wonderful figure that lived a long life and everyone loved him and he was so effective. No, it ended in this tragic, horrible rejection of who he is and a loss of the support of everyone around him except just a handful of people that were with him. And he said okay to that, knowing it would somehow — this act of his surrendering to the world in a way that wasn’t what he wanted but it was the way it was written, and he said, “I will go with that. I will stay with that. I will work with that.” And when he did that, he found enormous peace, and he gave into it, and everything changed.

How do we give into evil without looking and feeling like we’re neutral to it? We want it to go away. We want to change it. We want to do everything we can, but at the same time, if we’re anxious and worried about it being there, we think it’s somehow our fault if it’s in a circle of intimate friends where the pain is there because someone else caused it or whatever, and we’re supposed to fix it, we’re Martha. And Marys are people who take time to step back to pay attention and reflect, not to want it to be different but to want it to be something that teaches, shows us, opens us to whatever it is trying to say to you and to me. God allows things to be as they are, not randomly without purpose, but your world and my world, what you and I are living with and dealing with right now is exactly what God wants us to be dealing with. And if it causes anxiety and worry, then we’re in the wrong place. We’ve got to somehow embrace it, allow it, do everything we can to change it. That’s fine, but not losing hope or losing a sense of well-being, because once we do that, once we’re in that anxious worried about the past, afraid of the future, there’s no peace. And the opening prayer that we prayed in this liturgy was this promise that we ask God to fulfill, and that is make us fervent in hope. And the hope is not that maybe things will be better, maybe these things make sense, maybe they’re there for a purpose. No, I know they’re there for a purpose. I know they have meaning. I know they’re going to teach me something, and if I surround myself with it and allow myself to embrace it, I will find peace, and so will you.

Father, your presence is a dynamic force. It is something that’s alive and vital and intensely interested in being felt and heard and understood. So please awaken in us a receptivity to all that is so that we can take it all in, and then help us to discern how to read the signs of the times, how to read our reactions to those signs so that we can feel the transforming grace changing us, bringing us to a new inner place of peace. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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FIFTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Deuteronomy 30:10-14 | Colossians 1:15-20 | Luke 10:25-37

Oh God, who show the light of your truth to those who go astray so that they may return to the right path, give all who, for the faith they profess are counted Christians, the grace to reject whatever is contrary to the name of Christ and to strive after all that does it honor. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This particular set of readings goes into something so essential, so basic to our understanding of our relationship with God, with ourselves, with our neighbor. It delves into the very interesting and dynamic place where we everyday make decisions about how we’re going to act, what we’re going to do, what we’re going to say. It’s fascinating if you look at the way in which God has continually worked with people. He started his relationship with them in a garden, and the garden is so important in terms of setting the tone for what’s to come later. And to me it’s not a place of condemnation of the human race, saying there’s something deeply evil and wrong with them. I think that’s a misunderstanding. I think the truth is it’s something about revealing who God is and who human beings are and what the relationship is going to engage the humans in. It was a question of who is going to determine what is true, what is real, and God, from the very beginning, planned to bring human beings into the world at a stage in their development, which is way, way different than most any other creature that God has created. Human beings come into the world completely incapable of living without a human being, some force outside of them sustaining them and taking care of them and feeding them and nurturing them and then teaching them, training them on how to live. And we have this long period of time between when a child is considered to be an adult, someone responsible, someone fully formed, and then I guess, in a way, we think of it as age 18. The more I think about it, and I’ve lived a very long time, I think that kind of full adulthood, meaning being fully who you are intended to be, comes much later than 18, 19, or 20. Our brains are not even fully formed in terms of discerning what ramifications come from our choices until we’re in our mid-20s. So let’s just imagine that we need some kind of outside guidance for a very, very long time before we’re able to, in a sense, make our own decisions.

So law, regulations, statutes, rules are essential to our development, to our growth. So we see in that first encounter with human beings that there is something in human beings that is God-given that is intentionally placed there, and it’s something that resists the law, because the law is not to be the core of how we end of living our lives. We’re not to be told what to do, how to think, how to decide things from outside of us, but it has got to come ultimately from inside of us. And that inside of us is divinity dwelling in union, in sync with who we are. The movement is from an autonomous human being who needs rules and regulations and statutes and a person who is motivated by some force that is so incredibly mysterious and personal that we can’t even make a distinction between divinity and our humanity, so co-mingling and so perfect. It’s not like just God lives in me and then I go and find him in my heart. No, he is me, and I am him. That’s what spirituality leads us to, and in a sense, we need to not outgrow the need for rules and regulations but to somehow make sure that they are not the thing that motivates us, that guides us in making all of our choices. So the main thing that we learn from the Garden of Eden is human beings do not necessarily like being told what to do. But yet even in that moment, it wasn’t so much they didn’t want a rule or a law, but they didn’t know who to follow, which rules and laws, because in a way, they were told they were going to follow a law that was God’s law, that was not to eat of it, but then along comes this other force that says, “No, no. No, the other law is — no, if you — God doesn’t want you to eat of this tree, because it’s going to have a negative impact. So basically he’s jealous, and if you eat of this tree, you’re going to be like God. And God kind of likes to be the boss.” I’m really exaggerating right now, but it’s fun. Just imagine it went some way like this. Anyway, something logically in them said, “No, I’m not going to follow that law,” and they broke it. And then God said, “Okay, it’s clear to me that you need to be out there in the world. That’s what you want. You want to go out and make your own decisions, choose your own rules and regulations. Go for it.” And so he let them go, made clothes for them before they left and put an angel at the door saying, “Don’t come back here to try to eat of wisdom, the tree of wisdom, because you’re going to have to learn what wisdom is. You could have eaten it from the very beginning.” But the story is human beings were not made to go right to the fullness of who they are, but they started where they were in terms of their development and consciousness.

So we have this beautiful, then, image of this God who is a God who takes care of his people, and one of the ways in which he does it is he finally forms a community through Abraham. And then they get into trouble. Then they’re enslaved, and then they’re on this journey. And that journey is towards freedom, towards finding the place that is their place, their place of milk and honey. Now, if you can feel what I just said in terms of your own journey, you’ll know that, whenever we go back to these stories, as we do over and over again, they’re not — it’s not curiosity that brings us into these stories to wonder how God worked in the past. No, all these stories are loaded with an experience that people had that is our experience. We’re experiencing these things. So these are images that should stimulate in us an awareness of our own personal journey with God — with God to places in this world. We have a family of origin. A family of origin has certain statutes. The difference between a commandment and a statute: a commandment is a law that comes from God that is universal, always applicable, and the Ten Commandments are pretty simple. It’s all about right relationships with God and with human beings. First three, very clear, God is the only God. There aren’t other gods. There’s only one, and he wants you to spend time with him, so keep holy his Sabbath day, a day where you listen to and reflect upon what he teaches and who he is and what he’s doing in your life and in the world. And then the last is don’t ever use his power in a way that he would not approve. Don’t take his name in vain. Then the rest are about our relationships with each other, with those who give us life, with all our dealings with each other in terms of being truthful, being honest, caring for the rights of others, not taking life away from people. Don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t allow corruption, don’t let things be adulterated with corruption, and then stop envying other people. So it’s a beautiful, simple description of a law that is described then in the reading from Deuteronomy, because that commandment that I just described to you is already in our very being. It’s not up in the sky. It’s not somewhere else we have to go get it. It’s not anything other than you know it. It’s in your mouth, meaning they’ve memorized it — you’ve memorized it, everything. You didn’t have a book to go to. They memorized the commandments, and this is a foretaste of what will come later in the Old Testament where it’s clear that this law that is written on a tablet of stone will one day be written on your hearts. And that’s where we start this set of readings.

God has given you a commandment that is part of your very nature, and as you evolve and change, you’ll grow into it. But then we also have something else going on, and that is we have this sense of when we are engaged in any kind of community, like the Jews were engaged in a community — they had regulations called statutes. And that’s the — to make a distinction between rules, I mean, laws and statutes, laws are commandments that are so fundamental they can never be broken. But statutes change, and they’re the ways in which some corporations, some institutions, some family system will say, “These are the rules and regulations. If you live in this, this is how you act.” And those are statutes, and don’t confuse them with the laws that are written in your heart. But the statutes are interesting, because they are constantly calling us to a kind of disciplined life, and that disciplined life is something that is really important to understand, because the disciplined life can be an excuse for not doing the work that we are called to do. And that is to enflesh or allow the commandments, the Ten Commandments to become a very intimate, integral part of who we are, and statutes can get in the way, and statutes can take the place of the rules and laws. By statutes, I mean we have all these regulations, and the Jews had 613 rules and laws. And if you paid attention to all of those, you maybe had a sense that you were doing everything that God was wanting you to do, but the commandments got sort of lost. At least they seemed to be lost by those who ran the temple, because the Ten Commandments are about love, and the statutes are about control. And there’s a big difference.

And so what you see in the gospel is someone coming with this — and it’s a scholar of the law — who is to test Jesus. Jesus was the one who supposedly broke the laws. He wasn’t breaking laws. He was breaking statutes, and so he was keeping the laws. So basically Jesus said, “Well, what’s the law?” And he said — he gives them the commandments, and he says, “You’re right. Live by those.” But here’s the things that the statutes really get in the way of us being who we’re called to be, because statutes are not based in a truth that comes from God but in a need that the person whose running the institution has in order to keep order. So when you start living by statutes, you’re in trouble, or at least you can be in trouble, because the idea is, if you are going to be a part of this group, this company, this religion, whatever, and all these statutes are there, if you don’t follow these statutes, you’re kicked out. You’re separated from this operation. Now, when you think about that, if you substitute the Ten Commandments for statutes, things that are not really basic and core to human nature, and you start living in those, you’re living in a world that is extremely dangerous. And what it leads to is allowing statutes to stand and follow them even though they are destructive and harmful to human beings. That’s the danger.

So what Jesus then goes on to say, “Well, if you take all those Ten Commandments, you take them all together, there’s something they’re based in.” It’s called love, but I’ll use another word, mercy. So mercy is an ingredient that is in the law, that has the right and the responsibility to override statutes. What does that mean? It simply means that God has a rule, a law that is based in how things impact people, and things like statutes can be very comforting and give everybody a sense of where they stand. It makes things flow, and it’s the way business works. That’s the way the bank works. That’s the way the IRS works. Those are all statutes. Okay, we’ll follow them if you want to live in this country, blah, blah, blah. All that kind of stuff makes sense, except it comes at times when those statutes cause enormous pain in someone, and they simply almost destroy them, and they’re in pain. And so Jesus said, “There’s something based in that law, the Ten Commandments of love, that is mercy.” And you’re going to feel it once that law becomes integrated into who you are, and the feeling is compassion, because the Ten Commandments are fundamentally about honoring the dignity and the value of every single human being. And when that person is honored and held in esteem and something is taking that esteem and that value away from them, when they are causing them enormous pain and suffering and sickness and death and all that, there’s something in human beings who understand and have made the Ten Commandments part of their life, they’ll cry out, and they’ll say, “No, that can’t happen.” And they do that by not so much destroying the regulation or the statute, but they care for the person who’s suffering. That’s at the heart of the law. It’s all about caring for people, and the oil that he pours into the wound is the oil of anointing someone to be their fullness and to honor their own dignity, and the wine is forgiveness. It’s a beautiful image of what can happen to a human heart when it moves from regulations to the heart of the law, which is love and compassion. And you know what? When you feel that compassion, you see it in someone else, it’s so easy to start making the distinctions between what is core to human nature as needing this kind of rule and law of love and how dangerous and destructive statutes and regulations can be. And it gives you wisdom.

Father, your heart beats one with our heart. Your longing for those that you brought into this world will find fullness and life here, and when that becomes part of our heart, we are filled with this great gift of mercy. Help us to understand how to turn it into those ways that can help people not only endure the pain that they’re in but change a world that causes that pain. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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FOURTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Isaiah 66:10-14c | Galatians 6:14-18 | Luke 10:1-12, 17-20

Oh God, who in the abandonment of your Son have raised up a fallen world, fill your faithful with holy joy, for on those you have rescued from slavery to sin, you bestowed eternal gladness. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

As we take a journey with St. Luke and his memory, going through the evolution of what Christ has brought to the world in terms of their understanding of God and their religion and who they are and why they’re here and how they should work with these mysterious, wonderful images that keep flowing into our imagination from this new vision of religion that’s found in the New Testament — in all of that, it seems to me there is this exciting journey that we need to realize that this thing that happened in history between the Old and the New Testament happens in every single one of us. We enter into the world in the world of the Old Testament in a sense. It’s a world of clarity, a world of black and white, right and wrong, and what we see so clearly in it is an image that’s easy to grasp in a sense. We have a God who created us, created a world for us, brought this beautiful world to us and put us in it, and what he wants more than anything else is for us to live here in a way that will engage us in a way of life that brings fullness and happiness. That’s the relationship that we all start with, with God, and God’s desire to help us to live the life that we’re called to live starts again, I say, with clarity, black and white, right and wrong. He gives us direction by telling us, number one, that we are loved by him. We are his treasure. He’s our — we are his favorite in a sense, and we have his favor. And then he says very clearly, “I want you to keep this favor of me alive by you doing what I ask you to do. So if you will do the things that I ask you to do, because you don’t know yet what to do, follow my rules and my regulations, I will bless you. I will take care of you. I will nurture you and help you to live a good life. That is the theme of the Old Testament.

Look at the way the Old Testament shows the image of God in the followers of Judaism. It was God enters into their life, and he comes into their life by saying, “I want to dwell with you.” So he dwells in a place. In Jerusalem ultimately is where he is destined to dwell, and he comes on a journey with them from slavery to freedom. And he comes in the form of a tabernacle, a box covered with gold, and in that box is the image of God, in a sense, of the Old Testament. There’s manna from the desert, meaning this God’s relationship with you is one where he nurtures you, and he nurtures you particularly with wisdom of who you are and who he is. And so he gives you Ten Commandments, and those Ten Commandments are in that ark. And they’re the wisdom of God, how to relate to God, how to relate to each other. There’s also a rod, rod of Aaron, which was always a symbol of authority. So we have the authority of the law nurturing you. That’s God’s presence in Jerusalem, and it’s in the temple. And the temple is the place that is so precious and so wonderful, and this city is such a symbol for Jews even today. It is the place of God’s promise being fulfilled, and that shifts from the Old Testament image of the temple and the laws that it was demanding people to follow to a New Testament image, which God then knew people were ready for something radically different. And there comes the image of a God who reveals himself not as living in the temple, where only a few could touch — get near him and be in contact with him. No, it moves from a temple, as we said last week, to a church, and the church is the place where God dwells, and it’s a person. He dwells in the human being. Jesus comes to reveal the dwelling place of God is no longer in the temple, and the temple will be destroyed, and its system will be destroyed, morphed into something different and more effective and more powerful. And this image of God living in human beings has the same promise that God living in the temple did, that if you come to this place and dwell in this place, there will be abundance and fullness, and you’ll be comforted and find life and find peace. That was the promise of Jerusalem. Now it’s the promise of the church in a sense, and church is not the building but the person.

And so when we’re listening to Paul, as a bridge between the Old and New Testament, what he’s saying so clearly is he’s describing the time of the shift. And there were people in the Old Testament who saw the value of the New Testament, and they believed in what was happening, but they wanted these new converts and not just go and become something separate from Judaism, but they wanted them to be also bound by the rules and laws. One was circumcision, and they demanded that these new followers of this new image of who God is would be bound to the old ways that they were bound to. And it was rejected. You don’t need that old system in the new system. What was the old system? Doing what you were told, following rules and regulations and being punished or rewarded and being told that you were exclusively God’s personal favorites. I have to laugh to myself, because what Paul is saying is all that really matters is that we’re a new creation, something radically different, but I go back to — I grew up in the ‘40s and the ‘50s, and that was before the Vatican Council. And my image of my church was not much different than the way the Jews thought about the temple and about their relationship with God. When I was growing up, I was taught that Catholics were the favorites of God, that if you weren’t a Catholic, you did not have a chance for redemption. The Jews could not find salvation, nor could those outside the Catholic Church. And to me, I didn’t believe, I wasn’t even taught that God dwelt inside of me. I knew I could go to communion and receive him, but I didn’t realize that that was the celebration of the reality of God living inside of me. I just knew it was something I had to be sure I was clean and fresh and go to confession so I didn’t have any sin in me, because I couldn’t allow God, who was so good, to come into a sinful, dirty body. So I had to be cleansed, much like the cleansing rites of the Old Testament. And then again, I believed that God was in that tabernacle, and there were rules and regulations to follow. And it was Vatican Council that just sort of blew all of that apart, and then we enter into what the church really is. It’s about God living inside of people and they being in a relationship with each other where this life force flows between them, and the more it flows between them, it creates growth, change, evolution, development, understanding, ability to deal with mysteries beyond our imagining. And then comes this mysterious, magical transformation that can only be described as the fruitfulness of love where people are freed of demons, evil spirits, negative thoughts, self-loathing and are nourished, nourished with comfort and peace.

So let’s look at the New Testament reading, because it’s a perfect image, what I think needs to be seen as a perfect image of how different the church is that Jesus came to reveal, which was the evolution of everything in the Old Testament. Almost you can’t have the New Testament without the Old Testament. I don't know how you can begin religion without it being very clear that God is good; sin is bad; when we sin, we offend God; we need to do better. That’s the way normally we understand authority outside of us, and we have to go through that stage. But let’s look carefully at the way Jesus sent out his disciples, in pairs, to the places he was going to visit, and they were bearing the name Christian. They were bearing — well, they didn’t use the name then, but they were bearing this teaching of a new way of seeing God. And what’s so interesting to me about this, it’s like a marketing tool. But Jesus sends them out to places where, when then he goes there, they’ll say, “I met one of these followers of his, and that was really interesting, because when we were with them, I don't know, things got better. I felt things were being healed, and negative spirits were leaving.” That’s what they were called to do, and they came to do it in pairs, which means that they were representing the way the church now operates. Christ Spirit, God Spirit, Holy Spirit in you, in me, flowing between you and another person, and then they went with that, witnessing of that dynamic between them into people’s homes. And they had to go there in a way that made them dependent upon those that they would spend time with. They didn’t have anything with them. They didn’t have — not carrying anything. There was no pamphlets. There were no rules. There were no regulations, no sign-up sheet, no schedule that they had to follow. No, they’d just go as they are, two human beings loving and healing one another through the presence of Christ in each of them, and they were like lambs, loving lambs in the midst of places where there were wolves devouring each other, people devouring each other. So they went with nothing but their very essence, no money, no luggage, no change of shoes, and when they greeted someone, they would say, “I want to come and bring you peace. Are you open to peace? Is there anyone here that understands peace?” They’d say, “If a peaceful person lives here, you can go there.” But if there’s no peace there, if it’s all conflict, you’re walking into an environment where they’re devouring each other. The scripture last week was about biting each other and destroying each other. No, don’t go there, because it won’t work. But stay there in that house and eat and drink. Isn’t that interesting? When do you have the best conversations with people? When do you sit and relax and drop a little bit of your guard and start telling stories and everything? It’s when you’re drinking and eating. And so they’re spending time in the lives of these people, and they’re witnessing something that is so beautiful. And when you see two people that love each other and that are comfortable with each other’s faults and weaknesses, who are filled with forgiveness and love — and I don't know whether they had all of that, but they had part of that, because they weren’t yet redeemed. They didn’t yet receive the Spirit, but they were able to witness what Jesus was all about. And then it’s interesting. They say, “Don’t move around a lot. Stay. This isn’t going to happen in one shared day of reflection with each other. No, no. Stay with them, but then while you’re there, watch what’s going to happen and know that you are witnessing a way of life that heals people from that which is a disease.” And I love the word disease, because it means dis-ease, no comfort. “Stay there and try to comfort them with ideas and witnessing a way of life that does remove so much of the tension and stress, the hatred and judgment and condemnation and exclusivity, all that creates. And just tell them there’s something new coming, a kingdom of God.”

Jerusalem in the Old Testament was the place where God was, and that was what you were called to, a place and a way of life that was built into that system of the temple, which was rules and regulations. And the temple was the one place where you’d go to be freed of the judgment, and you had to pay for your sins. That’s the old kingdom, but this new kingdom is radically different. And it’s at hand. It’s coming. It’s called the kingdom of God. It’s in you, and when it’s in you, it flows between the people that he is in, and he awakens the divinity in another person. And when the flow of life begins to happen, then there’s a radical change. It’s called the kingdom of God. How different the Old Testament from the New Testament, but how absolutely integrated they are, how one leads to the other. I don't know how you can have the second without the first. You have to go through that process of knowing what it’s like to feel the burden of a law that demands you perform in a certain way in order to get God’s affection. You have to live with the burden and the guilt that that creates to know how freeing the new kingdom is, where you’re welcoming a God who dwells in you with nothing but forgiveness, understanding, compassion, empathy. And then when the world condemns you and judges you or when any force outside of you judges you and condemns you, the Holy Spirit is there, not as the nurturing mother but as this strong, feminine advocate, the Holy Spirit defending your case against those who would judge you and condemn you. It’s a wonderful new kingdom that we have to make sure we’re not living in the old kingdom but in the new kingdom.

Father, your longing, your deepest desire, your passion is for a relationship with us, and we weren’t ready for the fullness of it for a very long time. But now we are, so open our imaginations. Open our understanding, our capacity to hold mystery and, in a way, things that aren’t black and white anymore. We’re so addicted to that, to something simpler. Open our heart to the mystery of who you are and why you’re in us and what we can be with you. Give us maturity, growth, evolving into all that you intend us to be, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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THIRTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

1 Kings 19:16b, 19-21 | Galatians 5:1, 13-18 | Luke 9:51-62

Oh God, who the grace of adoption shows us to be children of light, grant, we pray, that we may not be wrapped in the darkness of error but always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We begin this period called ordinary time with a focus on one of the evangelists, and this year it’s Luke. Last year it was Mark, the year before, Matthew, and so I want to say a few words about his gospel as we proceed in looking at his reflections on the life and times of Jesus, the responses of the disciples, the responses of the people that were healed and transformed by him. And one of the things unique about Luke is he is the longest gospel and the one with the most detail, and you may remember this, that Luke is also the author of the Acts of the Apostles. So he not only recorded the period of time when Jesus was gathering together a group of human beings, his disciples, and hoping that they would understand and be able to follow in his footsteps, which they were ultimately, but their growth and change was mostly at the end when the Holy Spirit descended upon them and they put all the pieces together. Most of the time you see the disciples not figuring out who Jesus is. But the beauty of Luke’s gospel also is he has Jesus in a disposition at the end of his ministry where he is realizing that he has to return to Jerusalem. So for ten chapters, all the stories of Jesus’ miracles and teachings with his disciples takes place in the last part of his life. Now, how long that was, months, weeks, I’m not sure, but one thing that does, in a way, make sense to me is that, when Jesus died and rose, obviously the disciples knew the story was important, and they had to record it. They had to hold onto it. They had to teach it and tell people who Jesus was, and it would seem that the things they remembered most were the things that happened most recently.

So just remember, we’re looking at a Jesus in the gospel of Luke who realizes his life, his goal, what he desired is not necessarily what he hoped for. At least that’s my understanding and many’s understanding, that Jesus entered into his public ministry with a longing to transform the temple. He longed to break into their illusions and their addiction to the law and power over people and to open their eyes to see that this is not what God intended the temple to be, and he was teaching and preaching for years. In fact, he started his teaching at 12, and he ended it at 33. But the ending is so important, because the ending of the ministry of Jesus, if there was anything in his humanity — and I can’t imagine Jesus being anything other than the most human of human beings, filled with not sin but all the struggles, all the doubts, all the wondering, all the hopes, all the dreams, all that. If he didn’t have that, he wouldn’t be like us, and he was like us perfectly. We are like him, and so he had to struggle with things. And I would think that the biggest struggle he had was his goal of preaching and teaching and people understanding him and seeing the beauty of who he was and who God intended them to be. It just didn’t happen during his life The disciples didn’t get it. You see it in the gospel today. James and John, toward the end of Jesus’ ministry, which talked of peace and non-violence, and the minute there’s a problem with people not accepting Jesus, they want to rain down fire on them. Jesus says, “No, no. No, stop it.” Or in this gospel — it’s not in this passage or in this chapter, rather, of Luke — you see Jesus revealing the fact that he has to die and he has to surrender to something horrific in order to become who God wants him to be and to teach what God wants him to teach. And Peter says, “God forbid you should ever do that.” And Jesus calls him Satan.

So we have a very, very interesting context in which to listen and pay attention to this figure Jesus, whose goal, his sole goal is to share with people the inheritance that is theirs. And what is that inheritance? It’s pretty clearly stated in the Responsorial Psalm. “You are my inheritance. You show me a path to life, fullness of joy in your presence, delight at your hand forever.” God’s desire, his longing through the ministry of his presence in the human Jesus, who is also God, is saying, “I want to take you on a path that leads you to something that is filled with joy and delights.” Life is supposed to be good. It really is. So why is it we have seemingly so much pain and so much suffering? Well, I think it’s because that’s the way it’s supposed to be, because we live on this world for a time. And that time is called our path, and what God longs for is, in that path, just our time here — sometimes it’s 20 years, 5 years, 50 years. I’m up to 82 years. Whatever that time is here on this earth, we are engaged in something, and our way of engaging in it has a deep impact on the rest of humanity. That’s a very hard thing to grasp, but as you respond to grace and change and grow, so does all those, in a sense, participate in that evolution of consciousness. And when we fail, it holds back people, and so the challenge is for us to enter into this path and to know what it’s like.

So let’s look at two major themes we find throughout the Old and New Testament. One of the beauties of going back to these stories over and over again, you see patterns that you never saw before, and one of the biggest patterns you’ll see from the beginning of time and God’s speaking to us as one who longs to save us is that you are here in this world to learn something. And that’s how to move from slavery to freedom. Slavery to freedom, that’s our goal, and what is slavery best represented by? A law and a rule that has power over you, forcing you to do things out of an obligation, usually of if you don’t, you’ll be punished, and also some kind of carrot that says if you do what you’re told to do, not what you want to do, not what you feel you should do, but if you’ll do what someone else tells you to do, you’ll be rewarded. And that’s the greatest temptation on this path, because the challenge is not to surrender to a power greater than yourself that is of the world, of the flesh but to surrender to an inner voice, who you really are, who God intends you to be. So along with this journey from slavery to freedom, there is the calling you see in the gospel of — or throughout scripture, Old Testament, New Testament, of God entering into someone’s life and calling them to be a witness for him to others of how to do this journey from slavery to freedom.

And so you see in the first reading, Elijah asking Elisha, “Come, I want you to leave the world you know to a world you don’t know.” Does that sound familiar? God called Abraham. “Leave what you know. Go to what you don’t know.” Called Moses. “Leave who you are and take on a new job.” In every case, he gives them an anointing, empowers them to do it. So if God is giving empowerment to people who are being called to a new life, a new way of seeing things, that obviously means it’s difficult. It’s really hard, and there’s a pull to the old ways if you’re invited to new ways.

I want to tell you a story that may seem strange at first, but listen to it carefully. One of my first memories as a child was in Chicago, and I think I was three years old or something. I moved there when I was very young. I think I was a year old. We lived in, I think, Park Ridge. There was an apartment complex we lived in. It was big, and I remember being outside. And the thing about this building that was unique to me, because well, everything’s unique to a three-year-old. But there was a door and then another door. There was a space between outside and inside, and if you were in that space, you weren’t outside anymore, but you weren’t inside. And I remember — it’s so weird. I remember looking around and saying, “Well, wait a minute. I came inside, but I’m not inside. Where am I? I’m in this space that’s not — it’s not out, and it’s not in.” And I realized that there’s something — there’s a name for that space. It’s called liminality. It’s a liminal space, a threshold, and it means that you’re not where you were, and you’re not yet where you’ll be. And it’s a time of being unsettled, uneasy, uncomfortable. And you’re feeling a pull in two directions, and you don’t know which way to go. Well, that is a perfect example to me of what is happening in these readings when you hear Jesus — first God in the Old Testament, Jesus in the New Testament. “Listen, I’m asking you to come on a journey. I want you to forget about the old stuff and come with me.” “Well, I want to go back to a little bit more of the old.” “No, you let go of the old.” “Well, there’s relationships and ways I’ve been with people.” “No, let that go. Come, and come with me on this journey. But you won’t yet know what that journey is going to involve, and I’ll promise you that what you’re letting go of that’s difficult to let go of is not worth hanging onto if you knew what you are being called to.” That’s the Christian message. That’s the God message, Old Testament, New Testament. You come into this new place.

Well, what is it? What’s it like? All we’re given in this set of readings is two images. One is flesh, and one is spirit. What’s flesh? Flesh is a word used in scripture to describe the world as it is without the infusion of divinity. It is a world that’s self-centered, that tends to be violent, that tends to be self-oriented to the point of self-destruction. It’s filled with shame. It’s filled with anger. It’s filled with fear. It’s the world that we all experience in some way. If you don’t experience that, I don't know where you grew up or how you grew up. But you come into this world, and in some way, that world of the flesh is there. If it’s not there, then you can’t do the work you’re here to do. You have to have an experience with that. That’s why people look back on their histories and their family of origin or their culture and look at things that they received or maybe abuse that they incurred, and they find, “This is so unfair, and why did all this negativity happen to me?” No, no. You have to take that activity as the stuff of your journey from one way of being in the world, the flesh, to being in the world in terms of spirit. So flesh is the negative side of humanity that devours. In the words of Paul, “Stop devouring and biting each other. Stop consuming each other.” That’s the world of the flesh, but there’s only one thing that can describe the world of the spirit. It’s love. If you’re talking about love, you’re talking about freedom, because all love is, is an experience of radical freedom. If there’s anything about being torn apart by negativity and having that negativity move you to acts of negativity, because you’ve experienced it, because you’re ashamed of yourself, and somehow when you have a history of something in you that’s not acceptable, you feel shame. And one of the ways in which shame works in you, it continually bites and eats away at your self-image and your value and your worth. And that’s the world of the flesh. So how do you make this transition? Well, what you do is what Jesus, in that very place between the innocence and enthusiasm of Jesus as a boy teaching the temple people, all that — think of that as when he was free and able to do what he was doing. And then he finds himself in this place where the world is crushing in on him, and he was tempted — he must have been tempted as a human being not to go through this process of having everything that he longed for taken away from him. And he had to have feelings of resentment, but he wouldn’t do that, because he knew that the spirit is not about that but about love and about life.

So the challenge for you and for me is to say, “Yes, I will go on this journey.” And the thing you want to be careful of is watch out for the situations, the organizations, the institutions that somehow feed that negativity of the flesh and tell you that they have power over you and they can demand things from you that you really don’t really want to do, but you have to do them if you’re going to be acceptable, or if you don’t do them, you’ll be condemned and judged and shamed. That world is what you have to know is part of your experience on this earth, and you live with an awareness of it as you move away from it. But the frightening thing is it’s comfortable, because it’s familiar, and it’s clear, black and white. And the other is more etheric and not easy. So we start this journey with Jesus on his liminal walk between these two worlds, and we listen, and we learn that the outcast, the one who’s been hurt, the one who’s been damaged is the one Jesus is most interested in. And that’s the part of all of us that’s been damaged by the law and slavery or whatever it is, and he wants us into the place of freedom. So be with him and me as we walk this journey to get to the place of spirit. It’s where God dwells, and God wants a world that’s beautiful, because he created a beautiful world for you. He wants a world filled with love for other people, because he told us, “That’s the most important thing that I’m giving you is the power to love another person. They are more important than you.” And the last, the spirit, infuses energy in you and a capacity to accomplish this great task, moving in the right direction and finding the goal of the path.

Father, our inheritance is a life of fullness, joy, love, freedom. Help us to feel, when we are robbed of those gifts, that there is something that you are calling us to expose and to work against and that we’re going to be the ones who can be not only freed from the shame and guilt of the world of the flesh but can lead others out of the darkness of that world into your everlasting light. We ask this through Jesus’ name, amen.

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THE SOLEMNITY OF THE MOST HOLY BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST

Genesis 14:18-20 | 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 | Luke 9:11b-17

Oh God, who in this wonderful sacrament have left us a memorial of your passion, grant us, we pray, so as to revere the sacred mysteries of your body and blood that we may always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Today’s feast marks the end of this particular period in the liturgical calendar that we follow as we listen to the stories of scripture placed together in a formula or in a form, you might say, that reveals the unfolding of this wonderful, incredibly interesting and fascinating story about God revealing himself to his people. If we go back to Ash Wednesday, which was some time ago, we see that we’ve prepared for this season of Easter by going through a period called Lent, and during that time, we’ve reflected upon the process of preparing — how God has prepared his people for the fullness of the message. And then we came to the fulfillment of this message in Easter Sunday, and then after that, we have been studying and reflecting upon the results, let’s say, of this new way of life that God has revealed in his coming onto this earth with us and revealing the fullness of who he is. And so after going through the story of Jesus and his evolution as a human being, becoming fully — revealing himself rather, as more than a human being, as God incarnate, we’ve grown to the point of — we say, “All right, we’ve established something radically different than the Old Testament.” There’s been a major shift in this story, from the temple to a church, and the interesting thing about those two things, a temple by its very definition is a place where God dwells. In the Old Testament, the temple was everything, because the temple was the place that believers felt God was there. Only a few very, very holy, very special people could ever get close to this God, but they knew that God was near, in the temple. And they did everything they could to make that the most beautiful and the most wonderful place.

And Jesus comes on the scene and reveals the darkness of an institution that comes to somehow not truly represent who dwells within that temple but use the temple for their own benefit, and they distorted the message, and they turned it into what Jesus called a den of thieves, robbing people rather than filling them with what was there, robbing them of their God-given right to feel close to this God by talking too much about sin and about breaking laws and about being rejected. So we have this new message coming through Jesus, a new way to understand who God is and where God is. So the temple is somehow now destroyed, and in its place, there is this thing called the church, and two Sundays ago, we celebrated the Feast of Pentecost. Pentecost is considered to be the birth of the church, and the difference between a temple where God dwelled and a church, a church really, basically might be considered a building like the temple, but it’s not. If you understand the fullness of the message of Jesus, the new temple is our heart, the new covenant. “I will come and dwell there. I will write my law on your hearts. I will change you into the people you’re called to be, not through your own effort, not through all your own discipline. No, I will gift you with who you are called to become. When you feel me doing that in you, with you, you can only feel one thing for me, and that is love, union, communion with me. I want you to experience my presence in you.” So we have this new image of the dwelling place of God is not the temple but the heart, and we call that church, the place where God dwells. In the Vatican Counsel, when they were renewing the liturgy, I love the image that they gave me in one of the documents on environment and art, and that was the whole notion that God, who dwells in us, makes this place so special. And the buildings that we build for this celebration of the presence of God in us through the Eucharist is called not a church but a house for the church. I love that image, the house for people who are filled with Spirit, with presence of God.

So we have this celebration just two Sundays ago that we celebrated the beginning of the church, Pentecost. And what’s so unique about that feast to me is what it says about this new understanding of who God is dwelling inside of you, and that presence of God inside of you is not just for you. It’s for the world. It’s for the world. We are not the ones who can receive this gift and turn in on ourselves and close ourselves off from the world. No, our challenge is to be in the world bringing this message to everyone. So in Pentecost we saw that happening in the most mysterious, mystical way, that this message is now in the hearts of human beings, and as they think and reflect upon the marvelous works of God, this sense of what those marvelous works are is communicated to others outside of this small community of believers, and it goes into the world. But the most mystical, magical, mysterious thing is that what’s happening is that they’re — it’s not being conveyed by words, that those who had this Spirit in them, this presence of God, are speaking about it, but the people that are listening speak different languages. And they can’t understand that language, the word itself, but they’re feeling and knowing what it is in this person. That’s such a beautiful image of what the church, human beings are capable of, communicating this message of life, love, light, not so much through our words but who we are. It resonates through us. It underscores to me the most interesting part of what it means to be a believer, that when we are believing that God is in us enabling us to be a source of life and we intend it, we want it, we want to have an impact on people that is life-giving — we’re not there to take from them or to use them or to abuse them in any way, shape or form. We want to give life to them. Then you are absolutely manifesting the intention of God when it comes to your destiny. That’s what we’re here for, to be filled with these gifts and this power and this insight and these awareness’s and then share them with people. It’s called church.

And then we celebrated the Feast of Trinity, which is all about this mysterious thing that this indwelling presence carries with it, and it’s this fullness of God. And what I love about the fullness of God is, when you listen carefully to the words we shared last week, you’re going to realize that, in this fullness of God, we have this loving, creative figure, an artist who, while wisdom watched on, created this beautiful, beautiful world for us. He did it for us. And then the Son is the manifestation of who he is. The Father, the Son — the Son is love incarnate. He is the presence of God in a human being, which is the church, and when it resonated out to other people, they are transformed, healed. And that healing is a oneness that comes over us, a oneness that keeps us from falling into the trap of thinking we’re unworthy of God, we’re separate from him, we’re not connected to him because of our weaknesses. It heals the division that happens to us when we feel that there’s something in us that’s wrong, that’s not right, that we are feeling shame and fear about it. It unites that broken part of us to the wholeness that is our inheritance when we are filled with the understanding of what forgiveness is. And then there’s, in that Trinity, the wonderful Spirit that teaches, that teaches people who they are and who God is and what their role is in the world. So we have the fullness of God just celebrated last Sunday, and now we just fine tune the whole thing and realize that in essence, the best way to celebrate this thing called church, the best way we can engage in this wonderful life that God has given us is to believe in indwelling presence. It’s everything to me. God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit living inside of you and resonating a message to the world that they are loved, that they are forgiven, that they are called to something extraordinary.

And being filled with this awareness of this presence inside of us, we have an image in this particular set of readings that’s so important. It’s the heart of what I want to share with you today, and that is what does it mean that God is inside of you? Well, first of all, this set of readings is interesting. It starts off with the image of a great priest, Melchizedek, and in the Old Testament, Melchizedek’s role as a priest was to bless the kings that went to battle. And over and over again in the Old Testament, we see that God manifested his power in the people who would believe in them by giving them power over their enemies. They would conquer those who were trying to conquer them. Think of this as an image initially inside of us of who we think God is. God is the one that’s going to come into our life and fix everything that is out there that will rob us of what we want life to be. It’s like, if we see the world and the way the world is as an enemy, it’s something that’s attacking us or frightening us, and we turn to God and say, “Take these enemies away from me, and I’ll be — I’ll follow you forever.” Isn’t that interesting? You see this evolution of the beginning of what religion was in people’s minds, a God who would take care of our enemies, and it’s not that God reveals himself fully as that. But imagine a God who goes from destroying your enemies to forgiving your enemies and healing you of their power over you through forgiveness, not through destruction, not through attack.

So we have this presence of God manifested in the second person of the Trinity who forgave our sins through an act of pure love, and then we learn that not only does this God, who now comes into the world, live inside of us, meaning that we are now the temple of the Holy Spirit, we see that his presence in us is there not just for us but for others. So we need to be people who have been nurtured by this awareness of God in us, and now it’s time for us to turn and nurture our brothers and sisters to be in the world with this message of life and light and truth. And what’s so interesting to me about that indwelling presence is it’s like there’s a mystical part of these three feasts. How is it that the mysterious way in which the message of God flows from inside someone’s heart to someone else without using words? How is it that this Trinity of God is one, that three is one? That’s not logical. It’s mysterious. It’s mystical, and then the mysticism that’s out in this last image of indwelling presence and this trinity of feasts that we’re celebrating, it’s so beautiful, because what it’s really saying to us is that when we have this power in us, we need to believe in its ability to do the thing that it has done for us to others. If one feels the love of God in you, healing your brokenness, bringing unity out of the destruction of the separation that guilt and shame create, when that all becomes healed, you don’t go off and say, “Oh, thank you, and now I have a wonderful life.” No, you’re in the world there to feed and to nurture, but the danger is it’s not you that does this work. And when I think of the church, when I think of the people that are there in the world who represent this figure Jesus and his indwelling presence and the resonance that comes from that indwelling presence that changes lives, it’s so risky to think that they get too much in the role, and they become somehow the source of power and energy for a community. I’m thinking of leadership that becomes too much self-centered, too much self- — using people, using their authority to feed their own ego and to feed their own power, and we get this sort of pseudo-religion, cult-like issues. And they’re terrifying, and they’re there to remind us of something over and over again. This indwelling presence that is in each individual is the power of the church, and that power of the church flows between people who realize that they are not the source of what they’re giving to other people. That’s what’s so beautiful about the image in this gospel.

Jesus has just learned about the death of John the Baptist, and he’s the end of the Old Testament. And he’s with his disciples, and he wants them so much to understand what the new temple is like. And it’s about people being filled with an awareness of who they have become because of God’s goodness to them, and that resonates out of them. They aren’t the ones doing the teaching and the changing, but the indwelling presence of God is. That’s why there is enough food to give to these people in this story. It’s crucial, because we aren’t the source of that nurturing power. We are the bearers of it. It’s abundantly in us, and when it flows out of us without any even consideration that we’re the source of it, it works so beautifully, and there’s plenty left over. I love that. So that indwelling presence of God inside of you that creates the church is the most exciting thing and the most exciting way to end this great season and be ready to hear the story, through Luke, of how this work of Jesus continues in the world and how it continued in the world the first time it went through the world. Amen.

Father, bless us with the receptivity to the mysterious way in which you have called us into this work we call church. Sharing you, sharing your message, sharing your presence is beyond what our logical mind can comprehend in terms of its fullness, so open our hearts. Open our imaginations to enrich the world with a gift that it longs for, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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THE SOLEMNITY OF THE MOST HOLY TRINITY

Proverbs 8:22-31 | Romans 5:1-5 | John 16:12-15

God, our Father, who’s sending into the world the word of truth and the spirit of sanctification, make known to the human race your wondrous mystery. Grant us, we pray, that in professing the true faith, we may acknowledge the Trinity of eternal glory and adore your unity, powerful in majesty. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

In 1960, I was a sophomore in college, and I had a lot of things on my mind, trying to figure out who I wanted to be and who I was. And I remember so much thinking that the things of the world, the different occupations I would kind of thumb through in my imagination never seemed to be enough for me, and so I had this weird idea that maybe I should try a seminary. And I don’t even quite know why I felt so strongly about that, but it was enough to move me from my years at the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas, a Catholic school, and I entered the seminary. And I have looked back on that decision over and over again and wondered, “What was it that made me long for something that seemed very, even at the time, etheric and mysterious, working for the church?” I wasn’t drawn to the church. I wasn’t drawn to religion, and that became clear to me. But the thing that was in my heart was this incredible love for human beings. I always had this sense of, I don't know, wonder about humans. I remember even in my family of origin, they would say, “Why are you always so interested in getting to know everybody in the neighborhood,” or something. I don't know. I just had that, and I think it was the gift that God gave me that drew me into a work that I think it’s now clear to me why I’m in it than ever before. And that is because I really believe, with all my heart, that this wonderful thing, called my Catholic Church, and all the churches, have such an incredible, deep responsibility of putting people in touch with God, and yet in so many ways, because of our human nature, I supposed, because we’re in a period of transition more intense than maybe we’ve ever been before, religion can fail pretty miserably at doing what I think it’s intended to do, to really care for, love, take care of human beings and nurture them into becoming who they were created by God.

The image in the readings, or at least in the Psalm, is that we’re made just a little bit less than the angels. What an incredible thing that God created human beings with such dignity and value. And so in the first reading from Proverbs, we go back to the moment of creation. Last week we celebrated the Feast of Pentecost, which is the beginning of the church, the beginning of this thing we call religion, and in that moment that God created this thing, we were told that the manifestation or the work, I would say, was to manifest God for who he is and the incredible, wonderful, marvelous works that he accomplished. That’s what we celebrated in that feast, of some human beings in one place talking about this God and all that he did and all that he’s doing, and everybody around from all different parts of the world that couldn’t begin to understand their language understood something flowing out of their hearts. And that is the wonder of God, the beauty of God, the love of God and the dignity he’s bestowed upon human beings. That’s the beginning of the church, and then as she evolves, she gets caught up in the things of the Old Testament. And we know that the temple was the great burden that Jesus carried in his life as he loved in human beings and wanted to bring them into a life of fullness and wholeness, and he saw the temple as the enemy, as the one who was robbing them of their dignity of knowing God, feeling God’s presence. God was presented through the temple as a law, a demanding law that, if you failed that law, you had failed God. And that’s the shadow of all religion: judgment, condemnation for your imperfection as a human being. Yet God created us this way.

So we have in this particular feast, the Feast of the Trinity, we have the most important teaching about the nature of God and his relationship with human beings when it comes to who we are to become through the communities that God forms called churches. And we’re to be people filled with an awe and a wonder of who God is and what he does for us and an absolute understanding of the role of Jesus, who is the one who came to manifest to us who God really is and how he longs for us to see him in our life. And then we’re to know something about this Holy Spirit. So it seems to me that, without all three of these mysterious ways in which God describes himself, if we lose any one of them, we’re really in a dangerous place, and religion can skip some of them, I think, in what happens and not stress the wholeness of who God is because — let’s look at the wholeness of God for a minute. That’s what this feast is all about.

God the Father, who is he? Well, he’s always existed. That’s easy to understand, right? He’s always been alive, always been around, and at one point in his imagination, he decided to create a world. And he was motivated by this sense that he has of who he is. It’s called wisdom, and so the world that he created is extraordinary in terms of its beauty and its interconnectedness. It’s so fascinating to me that God created a world where everything about its nature, every single aspect of one part of what he creates is blessed and nourished by another part, especially that comes true with animals, that every animal is in sort of a cycle of an ecological system where, if you take one of the animals out of that system, the whole thing kind of falls apart. So in God’s creation, everything fits together. Everything makes sense as one. That’s the wisdom that was there in God as he created the world, and the first reading from Proverbs is so beautiful, because it’s describing God creating the world. That’s God’s role as an artist, beautiful, beautiful artist creating the world, and of all the things that he created, wisdom is there. That’s the wisdom that is in God, and it’s like this thing that he’s creating is so interconnected, it’s so filled with wisdom and a connectedness and a beauty that is beyond anything any human being could ever, ever imagine. So you have God creating the world with the gift of wisdom as his guide, and I love the image of wisdom. It’s feminine in this whole beautiful passage of Proverbs. It’s masculine in the gospel, but that doesn’t mean that wisdom is either feminine or masculine. It’s both, but the beauty of this image of wisdom is that there’s such — such beauty and balance and integrity. And it all makes sense if you could just see it for what it is. That image of the Spirit as wisdom is so beautiful in the creation of the world and in the creation of the communities that God calls us to live in, called churches, called religion. The wisdom has to be there as those institutions grow and are created by the human beings that run them. It has to be guided by wisdom. It has to make sense to us. It has to be something that, when we see it for what it is, our hearts melt in its presence, and we want what it promises.

And we can’t talk about God the Father and the Holy Spirit without talking about Jesus, who makes up the third part of the Trinity, and what we see in Jesus is the manifestation of the kingdom taking flesh so that we don’t have it as an idea but as a — it is witnessed to us by Jesus, who is a man, a human. Don’t get caught up in the male part of him. He is everyone. He is human nature. He is humanity, and he is coming into the world to manifest the wisdom of who God is and how he functions in the world. And Jesus is the one who says, “I come into the world through human nature.” And that means, when we think about church, it means that the witness of who God is, is going to come primarily from the people around you, people who are living this gospel. In other words, the gospel takes root when it’s in a human being functioning. When a human being is there for others with no judgment, no condemnation, only love, only forgiveness, that’s the manifestation of God in human beings, and that’s what makes up religion. That’s the most attractive part of it. Talk to anybody that’s had a really wonderful experience with religion. You say, “What was it like?” “Well, we had these wonderful people around us, these friends, these people that I spent time with, and we were loving each other. And we seemed to understand each other, and we were forgiving each other. And we were living in a world that we felt was so idyllic.”

And then the shadow of religion often comes in, because the shadow of religion is when wisdom slips away, then what’s left is something dangerous. The absence of wisdom leads to control, and control is power over people. And when you have a religion that becomes power over people, it has to have a reason to have that power, and it claims that, if a person isn’t reaching a certain goal, if they don’t reach a certain kind of wholeness or perfection, they are unacceptable. That’s the most dangerous, frightening thing about all religion. It can become judgmental, narrow, fixed, demanding, and in a way, frightening as it may sound, resentful that you haven’t achieved a certain goal that you’re supposed to achieve. It’s the antithesis of wisdom, the antithesis of what God wants. And why would I say that? Because the wisdom that is at the heart of what God reveals to us in the Holy Spirit is this awesome reverence for human nature. When God said, “I created you just a little bit less than the angels,” what is he saying? He’s saying, “Of all the things I’ve created in this world —” He created angels also, but of all the things I’ve created that make up the world that you and I live in, there’s nothing more precious to him than human beings. Nothing deserves more honor, more respect, more forgiveness, but also nothing less than honoring a human being’s freedom of choice. Freedom of choice, isn’t it amazing? A religion that becomes dominant over a person’s personal life and becomes demanding and claiming that they have to live in a certain way, they have to reach a certain goal, they have to be free of certain problems in order to be a member of this church, that kind of thing just does violence to the very dignity to a human being who has within them the presence of God, as in Jesus, and the presence of wisdom. And what is wisdom within you enabling you to do that you couldn’t do without wisdom? Make choices, discern your weaknesses, recognize there has to be in all things some reason for being, and all things work together for the good so that our weaknesses become the very tools that we need to work through in order to reach the goodness that is our nature. All of that works together, but if something comes along that decides it’s going to rule this system of evolution of growth and change by not allowing it to be its natural — take its natural course, which is sin, problems and rejection, all kinds of weaknesses, as the scripture today talks about. There’s weaknesses in our human nature, and they create character.

So what I want you to feel with me is that, in God’s plan, you have this extraordinary gift of God’s wisdom living inside of you, that if you turn to it, you will find, as the Proverb says, you will find life, and things will make sense. And you’ll have the most amazing capacity to look at yourself and see yourself as this creature that God creates that is meant for growth, change, evolution, and it does it through mistakes and being forgiven. But most especially it develops inside a human being a capacity to see, understand, to make sense of the things that you can’t understand with your brain, but it makes sense to a heart that realizes that this God, who created you, would not create you for freedom without giving you the tools that you would need to make the right decisions. And without freedom, you know what can’t exist is love. Love of its very nature is a free gift of self to someone else, not something that you’re told you have to do in order to have a relationship with someone else. That’s not love. No, love is the most divine attribute that we can take on, and its very nature is to say, “I am freely — I am freely offering my service, my goodness, my presence to help someone else, to help myself to be a source of goodness in me and in others.” That’s what wisdom gives, and the reason why it becomes so strong and so powerful is because you see what it does. When a person feels love for who they are, when they feel forgiveness, when they feel that you would be there as a source of wisdom and guidance for them, and that guidance comes through you, because the Spirit doesn’t just dwell in you for you but for you — as it takes root in you, you’ll share it with someone else. That whole process is the most beautiful, most, I think, amazing description I can make of what religion is intended to be, the most experience of God in you, living in you, guiding you, awakening you to the truth and then enabling you to be that truth to one another.

Father, your wonder, your awesome beauty and goodness are so beyond our comprehension, so beyond our ability to grasp fully who you are. So bless us with your most precious gift of wisdom so that we can see you in all things that you’ve create, honor your beauty and your goodness in all things and find a reverence that’s beyond anything else I could imagine that would guide us in moving toward a life that is an instrument of goodness to the world. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

Acts 7:55-60 | Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20 | John 17:20-26

Graciously hear our supplications, oh Lord, so that we, who believe that the Savior of the human race is with you in your glory, may experience, as he promised, until the end of the world, his abiding presence in us, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This set of readings is almost too much, too many images, too much wisdom to even know where to begin to draw from these words and these images something that is so essential to our understanding of who we are as believers in God, who reveals himself in this man Jesus, who is also God, who then lives in us as a spirit animating everything we do. But I’m going to try, and I want to start with an image that’s in these readings, and that is the image of the tree of life. It’s in the second reading. It’s in Revelations that somehow that this image that John is working with is an image of this God entering into the world, bringing with him something for people, and what he brings is recompense to each person according to their deeds. Recompense, I would probably have read that without pondering what the word really meant, saying, “I will bring with me judgment so that people can be judged at the end of time,” or whatever. But recompense is payment for a debt that you owe. So it’s the image of this God that we’re asked to believe in. This presence of his image of judgment has nothing to do with punishment but everything to do with acceptance and forgiveness, and he comes with forgiveness for recompense to pay for any debt that you owe, anyone that you’ve ever harmed, because you’re going to be washed in his robe. You’re cleansed, and it says, “If you’re cleansed, then you have a right to the tree of life.” Right to the tree of life. What is the tree of life? Well, you can hardly talk about the tree of life without talking about the tree of good and evil, and that’s where sin enters into the world and our consciousness. But think of this tree as an image of some force that produces some kind of fruit, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a calling, an evolution, let’s say, of human nature into a place where we begin to see clearly what’s right and what’s wrong. We live in a binary world of good things and bad things, and we use justice as the basic thing that we evaluate our choices. It’s wrong to harm someone. It’s right to take care of someone. That world we grow into as young adults or young children. We begin to discern right and wrong. That’s where the human race was at one point in time, but it had a shadow. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is about a binary world where either things are good or bad, and the danger is that, if we take that binary world and we apply it to our nature, our essence, we fall into a world that is the shadow of the Old Testament where people are considering themselves as good people or bad people. “I’m valuable, or I’m of no value.” It’s a way of imagining this division that is really not true to reality, but we will say, “If I have done something wrong, I am that thing that is wrong.” Someone lies to you, and they’re a liar. Someone doesn’t really tell you the truth and they pretend to be someone else, they’re a hypocrite, or if they take something, they’re a thief. It’s really interesting how we divide ourselves into pieces like that, and that’s the world of the Old Testament, the world of judgment and condemnation.

And when you see the essence of the person of Jesus coming into the world to blow that system apart and to say what — I’ve replaced that idea of judgment with this incredible description of love, love for the essence of a human being and that love never being tarnished by any indication that the person has failed somewhere along the way. It’s about forgiveness, and that’s the tree of life. The tree of life is the fullness of who we are as creatures of God redeemed, forgiven of our sins. We’re filled with this ability, this capacity to go beyond our weakness, our human nature and enter into a world that is infused with divinity, and when that divinity is in us, and that’s the promise of the tree of life — the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a way of discerning right from wrong. The tree of life is an awareness of a God whose presence is in us, that transforms us, that transcends anything like right and wrong. It’s about the essence of who we are in God. We are his beloved. We are his greatest creation, and he pours love into us. That’s what’s so beautiful about the tree of life. It’s never earned. It is just simply given, freely given to us, and the challenge is to believe in our right to the tree of life. And remember when the story in Genesis unfolds, it’s when Adam and Eve are allowed to leave the garden, and they go to the earth to work out this right and wrong world that they’re going to live in. And God makes these garments for them and helps them go to this new life, and then there’s an angel placed at the entrance of the Garden of Eden. And basically it’s saying, “You can’t come back here and eat of this tree of life. It’s not something you can achieve. It’s only given freely — freely given.” That’s the essence of the New Testament, the essence of the presence of God in a human being who comes into the world to reveal who he really is, and who he is, is not anyone interested in judgment and condemnation but only in union and communion. That’s the awesome truth that we find in this set of readings.

Look at Stephen in the first reading for a moment. He is just a man who’s been touched by the tree of life. He’s been given this insight into who God is. He sees it as so attractive and so powerful. He wants to be one with it, and he’s allowed to be one with it, because God pours his essence into Stephen, and Stephen does exactly what Jesus would do. And it just shocked the people around him who are executing him, who are part of the world of good and evil, who are judging him as a negative element, because they’re trying to stop this contagious awareness of God’s love and forgiveness. The temple people are invested in a world of judgment. A world of forgiveness is the enemy to them, and so when Stephen is celebrating out loud his connection with this God that lives inside of him and he sees an image in heaven, which is an image of the new covenant, God in man, man in God, humans and divinity together, and they can’t stand it. So they stone him, and then what he does is so beautiful. They stone him, because they’re judging him as unworthy, and then they are the ones unworthy. And Stephen looks at them and just says, “Please God, forgive them.” Forgive them. Stephen and God are together in that image. Human beings do not have that capacity to forgive like that. So we have in that story of Stephen a beautiful image of how Christianity spread. It’s when people were doing things that didn’t make any sense to the human nature that was grounded in judgment and right and wrong in a binary world. There was this new image that seemed to animate these people, and it was all about presence and love and forgiveness. And they kept giving the honor and the glory of who they were not to themselves but to a God who lived inside of them.

Then you see this powerful prayer of Jesus to his Father in the gospel, and he’s praying that all be one. And when I used to hear this, I used to think, “Well, he’s praying for the unity of Christianity, the fact that we all are one, that we love each other and care for each other.” No, he’s not saying, “I pray, Father, that you will make all the members of this body of believers in a place of unity and oneness.” Yes, that is going to be the result of who they are, but the real prayer is, “I want them, God, to be one like you and I are one. I am in you, and you are in me. I know that. They don’t know that they have that as a gift given to them by us.” Jesus, the human God filled with divinity offering to people a gift, a sacrifice of his humanity’s ego, whatever you could say that Jesus was doing when he offered himself to God completely, surrendered his will to God’s will. He became one with divinity. That’s our inheritance, and so what he’s praying is, “I want the followers of you, who’ve now revealed yourself to them — I want them to feel you in them just as I feel you in me, and when I go into them, I want them to know I’m in them.” How does Jesus say, “I want them to know —” that he is in them? He’s just saying, “Because of the love I have for them. I see everyone you’ve given me as this incredible gift. I’m so filled with love for them, and if they can believe that I love them, that love that I have as a human being for them, what I bring with me into them accepting my love is your love also.” So it’s convincing people in their imperfection that they are loved. That is not easy to do. How many people have been told, that are wallowing in some kind of shame and guilt over a world that they’ve lived in as the binary world, the tree of good and evil, and they’ve split themselves into pieces. And there’s a good them and a bad them, and then they’re torn. “Which one is really me?” And then if they fall into the trap of depression and darkness, they’re going to say, “I am my sin.” I’ve listened to people, and they’ve told me, “If I lie, I’m a liar. If I steal, I’m a thief.” That identity with evil is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a human being in their relationship with God, because it creates a false separation. There is nothing in the revelation of Jesus as to who God is that God has any shred of desire to punish or to judge and to condemn someone. Sure, he makes it clear that discernment is essential. You have to discern whether you’re doing something that’s destructive, but when you’re doing something destructive, if you feel that that is your identity and then you feel that you’re a destructive being, then you get identified with that, and it’s dangerous, because it’s almost as if that part of you wants to have a life. You give your weakness an identity, and then that identity takes over and wants to exist. It feeds off of shame, and you find yourself drawn to things that are negative, because that gives you a sense, “Yeah, you probably are this person that’s bad.” No, you’re not. How can you listen attentively to what Jesus is revealing about who he is and why he came into this world? “I came into this world to reveal to each individual the love that you, God the Father, have for them, how much you long to be in them.” But it’s hard for a human being to believe that God loves that way, but a human being that looks at you and that you know that human being and they love you, you can feel that love. And what I think Jesus is talking about is his disciples. He started with them. He’s saying — they failed pretty badly about trusting in him and the process that he went through, and what is so beautiful to me is that, when Jesus came back to the disciples, he was saying, “Look, it’s okay. I forgive you. I love you. My love for you is what I want you to feel, not any judgment, not any condemnation. The essence that is you is a gift to me, and I want to be sure that gift is preserved.” That’s your dignity, your identity, who you are in God’s mind as he created you. That’s what God wants — that’s what Jesus wants people to know, that he loves that part of you and that he wants God to be revealed to you through him, that that’s the way God loves.

I don't know why that’s so hard. I don't know. Maybe it’s easier for you, but for me, so many times when I’ve done something wrong, I tend to over-identify with that part of me, and then I feel separated from God. And the prayer of this gorgeous gospel passage is you have this Jesus who lives now in the image of Stephen in the first reading. Stephen could see Jesus and the Father as one, and this image as Jesus, the one who’s there forgiving you for all of your sins, is God forgiving you for all of your sins. And all he wants you to know and believe is that you are loved, you are a gift, and when you’re loved that way, when you feel that affirmation, the image that an action that you did, a mistake that you made, a mark that you missed will never create in you a sense of division and separation. And there will be oneness. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil separates. It’s about judgment, performance. Tree of life unites. It’s about love and forgiveness, and you and I have a right to the tree of life.

Father, the world in which we live is not necessarily a world of understanding and compassion, forgiveness. It’s really a world at times that is filled with judgment and condemnation, rejection, separation. Help us to be free of that illusion that that is somehow a world that you have created. It’s not the world that you created. It’s the world that exists when you are not fully understood, recognized, received, believed in and trusted in. Help our world to change, to become more the world you created it to be, not so much outside of ourselves. We can’t control that, but we can control the inner world, the world where we are often the judge, we are often the condemning spirit. Free us from that. Fill us with love and life, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

Acts 15:1-2, 22-29 | Revelation 21:10-14, 22-23 | John 14:23-29

Grant, Almighty God, that we may celebrate with heartfelt devotion these days of joy, which we keep in honor of the risen Lord, and that what we relive in remembrance we may hold to in what we do. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We’re obviously continuing the journey of listening to the story, the story of what happened to a very small group of people who were the first to be touched and filled with an awareness of the God who has always been there but never fully revealed before the time that Jesus entered into the world and manifested who he is — who he is. And the God that is revealed is so radically different from the God of the Old Testament in certain ways, even though the God of the Old Testament reveals slowly and becomes more and more like the God that is revealed through Jesus, but nothing prepared them for what was about to happen. And that was they would see their God not as a God that had to be served but as a God who serves them — serves them. If Jesus is God and God is in Jesus, and that’s exactly what Jesus said, then when you see Jesus on the cross, that is God manifesting himself doing what he’s always wanted to do for you and for me but could never reveal it to us, because we weren’t ready to receive it or ingest it or even believe it. The God of the universe, the God that has created everything comes down and goes through a painful situation. Now granted, God the Father is not going to be in pain, but the image that Jesus, humanity, took on the pain, and Jesus revealed, through the pain of Jesus, the suffering that he wanted to end for human beings, because there’s a kind of way in which, if we don’t understand who God is, we’re being destroyed, crucified, if that’s a word, just meaning executed by our shame and our guilt. We live in a horrible world if we cannot open our hearts and fathom the beauty of this God.

So here we are back to the story. So let’s look at this particular incident. This is like a wonderful mini-series on whatever, on Hulu or something. So here we are now. There’s an interesting thing happening. First of all, just a comment about the opening prayer: church is such a valuable thing. When I say church now, I mean a group of believing, committed Christians who know God and know the Spirit and know Jesus, and what we do in communities, as churches, is we relive in remembrance these stories. Isn’t that interesting? We relive in remembrance these stories. Why couldn’t we have taken these stories and just wrote out a nice manual and describe exactly what it is we’re supposed to do? Well, actually we’ve done that, but why wouldn’t that be enough? Why do we have to go back and react, reenact the crucifixion every year, and why do we have to reenact the resurrection? Why? Because this religion that you and I are called to believe in is all about a relationship that creates an experience that creates a transformation.

There’s a line from John’s gospel. It’s not in this particular set of readings, but it’s when one of the disciples is looking at Jesus and saying, “Why don’t you tell the world about this? Why don’t you preach to the world?” Because they were so obviously aware that Jesus had, especially after his death in the post-resurrection experiences, he was working just with this tiny group of followers, and I guess they were saying, “Why don’t you broaden your audience?” And I love the answer that Jesus implies, because he goes on to imply that no, this religion is not going to grow and change because of some major movement, a major announcement to the world about what is real and what is true. No, it’s going to happen one-to-one through a kind of contagious nature of joy, acknowledgment that we’re loved, a freedom that we’ve experienced. When people are filled with that, they are the ambassador of this story, and they are the ones who become the teachers. I don't know if you’ve ever read any kind of detailed, theological description of the mysteries of the faith. And I read them, and they are complicated, and they make lots of referrals to Latin documents and ancient teachings and all that. And it’s very, very intellectual, and it doesn’t move me. But let me sit with someone who lived in fear and shame, whose life was torn about because they were constantly addicted to destructive things, and all of a sudden, their faces are filled with light, and they’re telling me that they realized something about God. And that is he is a lover, and he ministers to us. And their life is changed, and I’m changed.

So let’s look at the stories that we have in this particular set of readings, because it’s one of the most important readings, I think, about the way the church functions, this first reading from the Acts. I don't know what it would have felt like to be a very devoted temple follower. They believed in everything the temple represented, even though it was filled with corruption, and probably they knew that on some level. But they bypassed that, because they realized that this is the place where God dwells. And people can blind themselves to the lack of integrity of those who work in religious institutions sometimes just out of a desire not to think that that’s even possible, but basically, these people who are following the temple are watching this thing happen. They’ve been told that the Messiah that they were thinking, “Maybe that was the one,” actually is the one that throws them into a kind of very confused state. “Do I — what am I supposed to do with this man Jesus?” He was very well-known in Jerusalem, let’s face it. So they were confused, but basically they’re sitting there wondering, “Who are these Christian people?” They didn’t have the name Christian really, but, “Who are these followers of Jesus?” And so they began to be upset with him, because it was clear that the people that were in charge of these new Christians and the people that they respected, that were teaching, in particular Paul, because he was a Pharisee — he was one of them. To have one of your own turning toward this one that was the enemy and saying, “He’s the best thing that ever happened,” is really debilitating for the temple ego. But nevertheless, what you see so clearly is that they’re realizing that this figure, Jesus, is somebody. So they’re being converted to this, and they’re going to say, “Well, all right. If you’re going to become the Christian, then you’ve got to put on the same things we did. You’ve got to follow the Mosaic law, because that’s what we had to do, and you have to do it.” And it’s so interesting that one of the things about the Mosaic law, it was not a neutral kind of little decision to make, and that was you had to be circumcised. So they want all the Christian male, all the followers of Jesus to be circumcised, and it upset them. And it was not just that, but then they wanted them to follow the rules and the laws and the dietary laws. And so this is the thing that’s so interesting. There’s this gathering of the leadership of the church, as young as it was. This is called the Council of Jerusalem, and they debated this. And they said, “Look, we’re not going to lay burdens on people anymore. That’s what we left when we left the temple. So we’re not going to do that.” So they just prayed about it, and certainly God said, “No, this is what I’m freeing people from, the burden of the law, the burden of responsibility, of having to perform, perform, perform.” And so they were basically — the decision of the church was, “No, we’re not going to do this to people.” But what I love about that, it is the beginning of a new image of how the church functions, how religion functions. The temple demanded so much from people in order for them to even feel that they were potentially capable of some favor from God, which could easily be taken away by the temple, because they could be judged as not deserving. And then you have this Jesus figure who was so radically different.

And so we have the temple again is described in the second reading as not a building but something in the midst of the people, and what it is, it is beautiful. It is translucent. It is filled with light. It is based in the experience of the 12 tribes of Israel. That’s the Old Testament. It was based in this wonderful figure Jesus and the disciples. It’s founded in that experience, and so we see in the transition presented to us over and over again a new earth, a new heaven, as we talked about last week.

Now let’s go to the last major thing I want to talk about, and that is in the gospel. What are we learning? We’re learning about the way this new way of life evolves in a human being and what is engaged in it. I love in the image of the story that we have to ponder, there is this idea that there is this shift from the old to the new and that, in this coming of something new, there is a new dynamic relationship between divinity and humanity. And the simplest way to start it is to say over and over again, so clearly what people have discovered, as I said at the beginning of the homily, is this is a God who ministers, who is a doctor, who wants to heal. All of his miracles are so beautifully designed around making a person whole, and then the one miracle zone, I’m going to call it — and the miracle topic he dealt with was the one I love the most, and that is getting rid of evil spirits, negative spirits, self-hatred, self-doubt, loathing, shame, things that rob you of life. And so we see this new, new, new religion, this new temple, and then how is it going to be conveyed to people? Well, it’s clear in this reading from John. He’s saying, “Well, first of all, you have to understand that the core topic of this new religion is God.” He is the focus, and who is he? How do we describe him? He’s truth. He’s reality. He is who you are, why you are here, what the world is for, how it functions. All of that is this wonderful, extraordinary experience of this divine, creative, loving being that’s created this whole world. He is at the heart of all Christian religions, to take and believe in and to take him into your life, and he fills you with this thing called truth. And what is Jesus there for? Jesus is the communicator, because he’s mostly the moderator. If you want to explain to someone how to do something, one of the things that I — I can read it. I can read instructions, but they never work. No, show me. Show me what it’s like, and that’s who Jesus is. “I’m showing you the Father.” So this image of this incredible, powerful force being someone who would literally worry about our broken bodies, worry about the spirits that infect us with negativity, worrying about whether or not we’re free and fully alive, that’s the God — that’s Jesus’ role, to say, “This is who God is.”

But then comes the advocate, the new character, and the advocate came in the form of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is going to teach everybody. And this is what’s so fascinating about this. How can I describe to you how the role of the Holy Spirit is to teach you and open your heart and mind to all that is true and all that is wonderful and free you from shame and anger and fear and all those things? All I can tell you is the Holy Spirit is the presence, the indwelling presence of this incredible figure, God, and an advocate is someone who is on your side. You are innocent of anything that you have been told to become. You are innocent of the things you’ve done that have been in the wrong direction, not because you didn’t do it. You’re innocent, because you have been made innocent by the blood of Christ. So everybody that turns to God and the Spirit in saying, “Teach me. Help me,” the advocate, the one on your side, he comes in, and he fights your battles with you against those forces that are evil, that are around in the world, that are wanting to pull you down. No, he’s there to argue the case that you are a beautiful human loved by God and freed from the shame of anything you’ve done in the past. You’re acquitted, and that’s the gift of the advocate, the Holy Spirit.

Father, your presence is so rich and so powerful, and it can only be described in words that can’t really fathom it. But it’s so interesting that you’re not just God. You’re God the Father. You’re God the Son. You’re God the Holy Spirit. And it’s interesting for me to think that you have given these images to us, because each one carries something that’s so essential, that you are truth, that you are love, and that you’re on our side. Help us never to lose an awareness of the fullness of who you are, and let this ministry bless hearts everywhere with this awareness. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

Acts 14:21-27 | Revelation 21:1-5a | John 13:31-33a, 34-35

Almighty, everliving God, constantly accomplish the Paschal mystery within us that those you are pleased to make new in holy baptism may, under your protective care, bear much fruit and come to the joy of eternal life, and we ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

It’s obvious that the way the scripture is put together for the lectionary that I use, it’s telling the story over and over and over again, and we’re at that point in the story of salvation history where we see a major, major change, a shift so radical that it can only be described as something so new that everything changes, a new world, a new earth. Nothing is the same. And what is that radical change? Well, I want to go to John in the Book of Revelations. What it is, he sees something coming down from the heavens, which means it’s something that’s coming from God’s part to our part and our mind, a new idea. And what it is, it’s a New Jerusalem, a new city, and what was so important about the city of Jerusalem, it was the place where the temple was. And the temple was the most important thing to the Jewish community because — well, why? Because that’s where God dwelt. God was in the temple, not anywhere else but only in the temple, in the ark, and in that ark, as you know, there were the Ten Commandments, the manna from the desert and the rod of Aaron. That was God’s presence, and only a very few were ever able to go into the presence of the Divine. And all of a sudden, there is a voice from the heavens, and it says something so radical, so unbelievable. It was depicted in the scriptures at the time of the crucifixion of Jesus, when the veil that separated the holy of holies from the rest of the temple was ripped apart, and now the word is, “Behold, God’s dwelling is within and for the human race.” God now dwells in you and in me.

Can you imagine the radical shift that would be for the people whose imagination was wrapped up in the Old Testament? And the Old Testament is a very important time to go back and realize — why do we have to go back and listen to the Old Testament in order to understand the New Testament? It’s because it’s by way of contrast, in a way. It’s like the Old Testament is so clearly a system of justice, and that makes so much sense to our minds. Justice, you do something bad, you should pay for it. You should be punished. You should be corrected. There were rules and regulations upon rules and regulations that guided the way people were invited to live as God called them to live through the ministry of the temple. And when you didn’t do what you were told, you were judged and condemned and, in some cases, separated. And you have to remember, in the Old Testament, there wasn’t a time — that was a time when people did not yet believe in an afterlife. It wasn’t that you stopped existing at death, but you went to some holding place. So if there wasn’t a place after death, then in the world of justice of the Old Testament, you had to have punishment. That’s what justice is about, and so you see the God of the Old Testament always being the source both of life-giving wisdom, the Ten Commandments, at the same time, he would inflict disease, pain, suffering on people. And they would be seen, because of their suffering, as outcasts, sinners, people that God did not like and did not want to have any part of.

Now, think about that kind of system, a system based in law, justice, reward/punishment, and then there was this image of God being the possession of the temple. Now, does that sound like anything that you might have encountered in your life as a way of imagining religion? Because I’m afraid that we have — I know that we have that story of what was, and it’s replaced by something so radically different that the reason we have that contrast is because it’s something we have to go back to over and over and over again, because the Old Testament is, in a way, the shadow of religion, the religion that Christ came to found, a religion of love and acceptance and forgiveness.

So let’s look at some of the issues that I’d like to talk about right now. First of all, let’s do some definitions. When I say the word religion, I’m not sure what you think of, but what I’d like you to think of, religion is a — the word means to be bound to something. Religion is a way in which a community of faith gathers around a set of beliefs and practices, and they say yes to those beliefs and practices. That makes for a good religion, a healthy religion, and so it has to do with surrendering your own thoughts and your own ideas about who God is, listen to the wisdom of the church, the doctrine of the church, which is the teaching of the founder, and you take on certain practices that help you do that. It’s interesting. Catholics have certain practices. You have to be at mass every day. You go to confession and communion. Other religions don’t have that responsibility. They may say, “You can’t do certain things. Those are not part of the way we live our life.” Those practices are part of religion. That’s an image of what religion is. And what is church? How would you describe church? Church is this interesting community of people who are living out a certain way of life, and you know what’s so interesting about the word church, because — I’m a Catholic priest, so we have a Catholic Church, an Episcopal Church, a Presbyterian Church. So church, the best way I can describe it, it’s community, and I was surprised in the ‘80s when there was a major kind of response to — well, it’s just been a time of transition, change, all that time since Vatican 2. We’ve gone through a lot of changes and hopefully going back to something more authentic. But a lot of times people were leaving church, and so there was a study. Why do people even go to church? I remember this big study, and I thought, “Well, it’s going to be, if you’re a Catholic, it’s because of the sacraments. You love the Eucharist and confession and those things.” And it wasn’t that. It said most people choose to belong to a church not so much because of the God they believe in but because they want community — community. I look back in the ‘50s and ‘40s, and I can remember living in Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Catholic cities. The parish was everything. It was the country club. It was the health club. It was the place — your whole neighborhood community was around which parish you belonged to. It was beautiful, and so religion is important, because it means we have a core belief that we surrender to. Church means that we have this longing for community and oneness.

But then there’s this thing called spirituality. That’s what I’d like to talk about, because spirit is life force. It is that thing that is in both human beings — it’s in all things that are alive. It’s this mysterious force that animates and creates something that is reflective and thoughtful and loving, and spirituality means that we’re longing to know and to understand this mysterious thing we call life. What’s it for? What are we here for? What are we doing? And in church and religion that creates community and gives us guidance as to what to believe also is the source of spirituality for us, and spirituality to me is the thing I always want to focus on when I’m talking to you. I want to talk about spirituality, which means I want to talk about how you see the life force in you being enhanced by what religion teaches. How do you sense God in you? Because if you read the scriptures today, it’s so clear. The fullness of revelation that God has always wanted to share with human beings came to a point 2,000 years ago, when it became clear that all of religion, all of the things that are about that system, boil down to one simple truth: God is in you, with you, for you. And what he pours into you is the very thing he’s asking you to be to each other, for each other, with each other. He’s loving you intensely as you are, and he says, “Now, if you can believe that I, the God that created you, overlook all of your sins, all of your mistakes, all of that, if you can see and feel in me that those things that you do that are wrong are not a turn-off for me, but they’re a turn-on —” I love the image of Jesus as the good doctor. It’s a wonderful image when he says, “I’m a physician. People that are sick need a physician. I am called to the sick, to those who need me, to those who are hurting.” Look at his miracles. Eyes that don’t see can see. Ears that don’t hear can hear. Tongues that can’t speak speak. Hands that don’t do the work can do the work. Legs work. It’s all about images of being a full, active human being, reflective, thinking, feeling, listening, speaking. And then there’s this other thing about demons. He drives out demons.

So we have this loving God engaged with us, and his response to our mistakes and sins is not in the world of justice any longer but in the world that we call mercy — mercy. God is amazing. I can remember in my early years as a priest, I remember meeting people, and it always threw me off when they’d say, “I just love the Old Testament, but I hate the New Testament,” or vice versa. And I’d go, “What?” And it’d be somebody who really likes things neat and clear, right and wrong, binary world people. They love the Old Testament. The New Testament is irritating to them, because it’s not — it’s sort of — it’s not clear enough. It’s not black and white enough, and yet there’s this wonderful thing in the New Testament, the Spirit of God that enters into you. The idea of a black and white world is no longer necessary, because black and white world give you a sense of clarity and control, and you kind of know where things are. But the mysterious thing about God’s presence living inside of you is not so much about clarity but about a mysterious world you’re a part of, and all you need to know in that world as you go through all the processes he’s taking you through that change you and awaken you and help you to see and to speak the truth is mysteriously complicated. And the only way to go through it in a way that brings life is that you trust in it. You trust that there’s something going on in your life that is calling you into an awareness of who you are and who God wants you to be, and it has everything to do with being loved.

What is being loved? Does it mean you’re not held accountable anymore? No. No, mercy and justice are still both engaged in this life that we lead with God. Justice is there, because we need to see what’s right and what’s wrong. We need to discern what’s good and life-giving and what is destructive. Yes, that’s true. But here is the subtle difference that I want you to try to grasp with me, and that is, when you’re in a world of justice, it seems like the negativity that is part of our life, the mistakes we make, somehow get identified with us. And so if you do something bad, you are that bad thing that you do. That’s the world of justice to me. It’s like it not only judges in the sense of discerning what you do, but if you’re found wanting, you’re considered to be less than, even to the point of being excluded, cut out, rejected. Mercy does not reject anyone, and mercy has this incredible capacity to make this kind of distinction. See if this makes sense. When you do something bad, in mercy, you’re not a bad person. When you do something good, that doesn’t make you a good person. There’s a you that exists, and it’s good. You are good. You are made in the likeness and the image of God. Think of you as a child, innocent and beautiful. That’s who God sees you as always. When you choose to do something negative, something wrong, his first and foremost response is forgiveness. “I do not hold that against you. I will not let that evil you’ve done limit my ability to be there for you. In fact, I’ll move closer. I’ll be more attentive to you. I’ll be more aware of what you might need. I want to heal that brokenness that caused you to do that sin.” In other words, there’s only one you.

I don't know if you’re like me, but sometimes I can do something wrong, and I can look at myself, and I say, “You’re supposed to be this priest. You’re supposed to be perfect and all that stuff.” And now I see myself as selfish and self-centered and abusive in some way in the world, and I identify with that. And when I identify myself with my sin, I go into this really strange funk, a darkness that frightens me, because it seems to attract to that feeling that I’m not worthy of God’s love, a kind of shame that is a pain in the pit of your stomach. “There’s something wrong with me. I’m not lovable.” How can we say that to a God who reveals himself as he really is, the doctor that comes because you sin? That’s why he wants you to feel your — he wants you to feel him loving you in your sin, in your sinfulness, in your brokenness, and if he can love that in you, then here’s what he’s praying for: that you will forgive yourself, that you will not see yourself as evil, negative, bad. There’s nothing more debilitating in this work that we’re called to do in loving one another if we are filled with any kind of selfish shame and self-hatred, because self-hatred is going to project onto other people. When you see people who are doing something wrong, you’re so critical, because you’ve got this self-criticism raging inside of you. You’ve got to believe that God loves you at your worst, and when he loves you at your worst and you can believe that and you can sense that, you can forgive yourself. I know you can, and if you forgive yourself, you’ll forgive everyone, and you’ll be church. Amen.

Father, in the world today, you gather people in groups of loving companions, and they have different names, different denominational names, but they’re all the same. They’re your people. They’re the people that you love, and you long for them to grow in the understanding of what it means to be church, what it means to have a religion that you turn to and you are fed by it, that you find your soul, your spiritual self there. Bless all churches. Bless them with wisdom and understanding but most especially with an understanding of what it is that we’re called to be to one another: friends, lovers, forgivers, patiently putting up with one another’s shortcomings and faults and never ever getting separated from us because of weaknesses. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT

Ezekiel 37:12-14 | Romans 8:8-11 | John 11:1-45

By your help we beseech you, Lord, our God. May we walk eagerly in that same charity with which, out of love for the world, your Son handed himself over to death. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This set of readings is the end of the five most important gospels, I think, that we have in order to ponder and understand who we are in this life with God. We saw Jesus work out his humanity in that first Sunday, and then there was the revelation that God in a human being becomes light, and a person filled with God is enlightened and brings light into others. And then there was a beautiful image of forgiveness in the woman at the well where her sins didn’t limit in any way, shape or form God pouring his life into her like life-giving water. And then there was the man born blind, and it’s about the presence of God in our lives where this inner life becomes a beacon for other people and opens our own eyes to see exactly who we are and why we’re here. And then the whole notion comes together of all these images. It comes together in this one image of this miracle, incredible miracle of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

So it’s all about us understanding the indwelling presence of God. What’s it for? What does it do? It brings life, but the greatest of all mysteries that God wants us to ponder and finally surrender to is the life that we’re promised only comes after death. Life he promises only comes after death. And what does that mean? Well, somehow the things in life that cause death, let’s call it sin, lies, pain, suffering that comes to us, those kind of things that are really frightening to the human spirit, and we tend to blame God for them. And we say, “Why are these things happening to us?” What we’re not understanding fully yet, until we embrace this fullness of who Jesus is, the best clue we have to who we are, that we have a journey, a way, a process to go through, which is surrendering our way of seeing, our way of knowing the life, of knowing life, of all the illusions, let go of all the lies. If we do that, we can enter into life, and one of the biggest lies that we can get caught up in is somehow misunderstanding the role of God in our life. What’s he here for? Most of us say, “Well, he’s a lover. He’s a God who’s come to save me. He’s going to bring me into life.” So that means that then, when things are difficult for us and we struggle with them, where do we turn? We turn to God. “God, help me please. This is killing me. This is destroying me. This thing happened to me or may happen to me, and I need your protection. I need your care. I need your power in me over the evil that is in the world so I’ll be immune from being harmed by it. I won’t be harmed.” And Jesus listens to that plea, and as a lover, human, fully-human lover and also a divine lover together, because God gave into this man Jesus such compassion and understanding for people. He has to teach us this lesson that’s in this gospel so powerfully presented.

He has a friend, Lazarus, and he is going to die. And so typically, just like you might call to God, if someone you know and you love is dying, “Help them please, God. Don’t let them die. Heal them of whatever it is that’s killing them.” If it’s not a disease, if it’s a problem of some kind of harm that was done to them that robs them of life, whatever it is, “God, take it away. Take it away.” And so they sent word to Jesus and hoped he would come to heal Lazarus so he wouldn’t die — he wouldn’t die. And we begin to feel something in this story that, “wait a minute.” If Jesus is saying, “No, I’m not going to go. I’m going to stay here and wait, because this death that Lazarus is going to go through is not simply about him dying. It’s about something I need to reveal to everyone, and it’s one of the hardest things that I can have —” It’s one of the most difficult things I think Jesus must have felt that he had to do when he had to teach people that, in order to find the life that God promises you, God is going to ask you to die to something. And it’s going to feel like a real death. And so the story is unfolding, and you see that he gets to Martha and Mary, and the two of them say the same thing when they greet him finally. They say, “If you’d have been here, my brother would never have died.” And I don't know if I can capture what I feel is in that statement, but it’s something that I’ve said a million times to myself. I’ve heard people say it to me. “If God is who God is, if God is the God that’s going to take care of me, my baby is not going to die. He will not let that happen. How can he let something like that happen if he’s the loving God.” Or the stories I’ve heard of people who’ve been abused and hurt and harmed by situations in their life where they’ve been treated so badly and scars are so deep, and they ask me, “Why did God allow this to happen to me when I was a child, when I was innocent.” And the answer that comes is not very comforting initially. It’s because — the answer is going to be because that is what had to happen in order for life to enter into you. That had to happen in order for life to enter into you.

And so Lazarus had to die in this situation, and when that death was experienced by everyone around him, there was a longing inside of so many there that said, “Where was this guy? He healed the blind man. Why is he not here doing the same thing for his best friend, Lazarus? What’s wrong with this Messiah figure that we’re supposed to believe in, this loving figure? He doesn’t seem to really care about us enough.” And just as they’re thinking he doesn’t care, there’s this manifestation in this story of Jesus looking at all of this, and he’s deeply, deeply troubled, and he starts to cry. Now, what is that? What is troubled inside of him? The word perturbed is a very interesting word. I had to look it up in my Oxford English Dictionary, and it means not just being confused or upset but having some kind of major crisis inside of two conflicting ideas. It’s disturbing, like an earthquake going on. It was like — could have been this is Jesus’ humanity wanting so badly to be the person that these people needed him to be, wanted him to be, but he couldn’t be, because he was there not to reveal what a human being might want to do but what only a divine God can do in terms of seeing the future and knowing everything and knowing why does this have to happen in this way. And no human being knows the mysterious way in which death and surrender and submission transforms not only the person but the world, which is the great mystery of suffering. So he’s weeping and crying and feeling disturbed, and maybe he’s wondering about whether or not he was effective. He looked at all these people. They didn’t seem to really understand him. His disciples, they still didn’t fully understand him. He knew that. He knew that, once this miracle was performed, he was going to go back to Jerusalem, and he was going to be humiliated. And what was going to be the reaction? Jesus knew in his gut probably that they didn’t yet fully understand who he was, and they wouldn’t understand the crucifixion until Pentecost.

I want you to feel that human emotion inside of him. “I’d like to fix it, but I want you to see this. I want you to understand this, and it’s hard, and I know it’s hard.” And so he prays out loud to his Father, which is unusual for a miracle. He says, “Father, Father, I want you to help me do this. I want you to help me convince these people of what this is about, and I know you’ll do that.” And so it was almost like Jesus, the man, saying, “I’m going to turn this over to God. I’m going to make everybody here, make them realize that I am not doing this as a human being. I’m turning it over to God, and God is going to do this miraculous thing of turning this death of this man into something so life-giving that the only way I can show it to you and describe it to you is the very death that we’re here to mourn and to weep — think of that as a symbol of all the things that we think will destroy us — comes back to life. He isn’t dead. He didn’t die. It’s like if you’ll accept the things that feel like a death inside of you and surrender to them and allow God to do what he’s doing through a death that he promises will bring life, when you can do that, you are going to experience the life on the other side of surrendering to that need that you have for a nice clear explanation of where was God when I was so deeply harmed or why would God let this happen to someone that I love so much or why would he allow me, a parent, a young parent, go through a disease where I’m ripped away from my family. How can you ask me to do that and believe that somehow it is for life?

Well, the witness of this moment in Christ’s life, or all of us, meaning watching it, how we watch it, has got to be to see in it the mystery that is so essential to living with the indwelling presence of God, because it’s not going to free you of everything that’s harmful or painful or confusing. But what an incredible promise he does make, that everything that is confusing, dark, hard, difficult has within it the potential of life. That is manifested in this miracle, but then it becomes explosive when we see Jesus on the cross with his hands outstretched horizontally, his body vertical. We see in this crucifixion, this divinity zooming down into this heart of God. This divinity enters, and it connects with his humanity. And the human being filled with divinity has his arms outstretched to the world, and he’s just been treated so miserably by the world and by life. And he’s hanging there saying, “Father, I don’t want this to happen. Why have you forsaken me? But I know it will bring life. I know it will. So forgive humanity for its doubts and fears. Let them feel what I feel, life flowing through me so strong that I will rise and change the world.”

Father, in this season of Lent, we have opened our heart more fully to the mystery of who you are and the plan that you have created for each of us that brings us to the fullness of life. Open our eyes. Fill us with an understanding of the depth of your love and your forgiveness. Let us fill this new life coursing through our veins as we face the things that are difficult, answer the questions that are unanswerable, in a sense, by our minds but can be accepted by our heart. It is open to the mystery of how you are our God and the promises you’ve made to us. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT

Joshua 5:9a, 10-12 | 2 Corinthians 5:17-21 | Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

Oh God, who through your word reconcile the human race to yourself in a wonderful way, grant, we pray, that with prompt devotion and eager faith the Christian people may hasten toward the solemn celebrations to come. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

I want to begin my reflections on the image in the first reading. The story is about the role of a prophet and the role of a king. In the Old Testament it’s clear that God did not speak to everyone directly but only to a few, and the prophets were the people considered to be those who were able to listen directly to God’s direction and God’s guidance. And then there were the kings, who were the basic rulers of the people. They were the ones who had power over people. So the history of kings is not exactly successful in terms of being in sync with what the prophets had been given to show them how they should be a leader and what they should do, and it’s clear that there was this tension between the two, because somehow the prophet, who was then able to have a direct connection with God — they were mystics in that sense. When they demanded that the powerful kings had to make sure that they were keeping in line with the teaching of the Torah, they resisted, and there’s something about being in a position of power. I think we all know that there’s a kind of inflation that comes into that role. You’re the one with the power. You’re the one with the authority, and you start acting autonomously out of your own needs. Unfortunately, when you go to a kind of unredeemed core of a human being, back then, throughout the Old Testament, human beings were basically self-centered creatures. They hadn’t evolved very much, but there came a moment in history that this New Testament inaugurated, and it changed everything.

And so I’m hoping you can see in this story of what it is that made that change possible, and what it is, is an action on the part of God, not an action on the part of human beings but an action on the part of God to decide that all of you, all of us are prophets. He said, “I will come and speak to each of you in your hearts.” It was talked about in the Old Testament. Jeremiah said that there would be a time coming in the future where God would enter into everyone’s heart. He would write his law there. The things he wanted people to be that were having to be told to people from an outside authority, they were going to be inside the human being, living in his heart. We would know what is true. We would know what is right. We wouldn’t have to be taught and told what to do. We just needed to be awakened to that realization that God then placed in our hearts. It’s the new covenant, the new law described as love.

So you can see in that Old Testament image of two powers, the authority of the king and the authority of the prophet, those two live inside of you and me. Our heart is filled with an awareness of what is true and what is real, who we are, why we’re here, who God is, but our minds, our minds can act independently of the heart. And when you look at the way the brain works compared to the heart, the heart is based in mercy, compassion, intuition, mystery, but the mind is pretty practical and usually has a drive inside of it to achieve a goal. And it will use the most logical ways of accomplishing that goal. There will be the ways of logic. There will be whatever works. If it works, it doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong. Then it’s going to be chosen if the focus is primarily on achieving the goal of the mind, and that’s what Jesus had to come to change. The only control over the mind in the Old Testament, the control the prophets had, in a sense, to anyone who was not following the rules and regulations of the Torah, was punishment. So there it is. If you punish the one who is achieving a goal in the wrong way, they may listen and say, “Well, I’m not gaining what I hoped I would gain. I’m not getting what I wanted.” So the punishment overrides the benefits. So they find themselves changing, but that never really did much to change who the person is.

And so we have in this story, a beautiful story about the way God works in the world today, is that he’s not interested in looking at your sins and judging them and punishing you, because it didn’t work. It doesn’t work. He had to do something much more mysterious and much more of a — much greater a gift. Rather than using the fear of punishment as a way of changing behavior, he said, “No, I will place in your heart what is true and what is real. The behavior that really produces life for you, I’ll place that in you. You’ll know it in your heart, and the only thing you have to do in order to be in touch with that is allow me to do something for you. Allow me to do something.” What is it? Enlightenment. “Let me show you the impact of a lie that you might be living out in your waking life, in your head. I will show you that the lie doesn’t do what it promises. It can’t produce that. So if you’ll let me show you — just let me open your eyes. That’s all I want to do so you can see it for what it is.” And there’s resistance to that.

It seems the more authority a person feels they have in the way their life goes, the harder it is for them to hear that they are not the one that is making it all happen. They’re not the power source they thought they were. There is something so difficult about a person in authority to accept the fact that they’ve been wrong. We see it in our own egos, but we also see it so much in a political leader, in a person that has tremendous influence and power in a company. We see it in religious leaders. When you have this authority, you’re given some kind of sense that you’re better than or more important than others, but you get — entitlement comes in, and isn’t it interesting to see that political systems that are unhealthy or a religious way of treating members in the church that isn’t filled with compassion but rather with judgment and condemnation, all those things are so clearly evident in our culture. We look around us. Yes, it is really hard for people who have a sense of their own importance and a sense of their privileged place, where they can make decisions about things without any responsibility to how they affect people — that kind of thing is absolutely there. And you know what? Every time you see it exposed and you see it collapse, there’s a light that comes on. That’s what, I think, that second reading is saying, that every time the thing that is dark and hidden and insidiously damaging to people, once it’s exposed, it becomes a light to everyone. It’s like we all realize what potential is in an ego that is self-centered, an institution that works only for itself, any kind of position that one takes when it’s so clear that they have no compassion or empathy. What a horrible thing, when you think about it, to live as a human being in the world, to get the things you want without any consideration of how it affects people. We call that a sociopath. It’s interesting to me that there are such creatures in the world, and you wonder, “What are they there for? Why does God allow people to come in and literally—” They’ve looked at their brains, and they find out, hey, there’s something in this person’s brain that they don’t have any sense of compassion or empathy or any realization of what their choices are doing to people that are deeply harmed by them. They have no sense of that. So it just reminds me that, if that sense is sometimes not there, it could be there in lesser forms, and it is in people that are just blinded by something. Maybe it’s trauma. Maybe it’s something that happened to them.

But here’s the key, the seed: to begin to see like that blind man in the story was touched by this God, who once he saw, once he saw his blindness, the man realized there was something that — well, it wasn’t necessarily that he so much understood that his blindness was there. He obviously knew he couldn’t see, but it’s so interesting to me. The action of Jesus to that man was to do nothing other than to want him initially to see and to do something that gained his sight for him. He didn’t look at the man and say — let’s say he didn’t use blindness but something in his control. He wasn’t asking somebody who was in control of changing to change. You’ve got somebody who wasn’t in control of the situation he was in, and he changed him. That’s the mystery. God does not look at you and say, “Stop sinning. Wake up. Look at it. Do that work, and then come back to me.” No, he said, “Just wait. Just believe a little bit, a little bit. Believe I can change that. I can open your eyes. All you’ve got to do is say, ‘Yes, I would like to see.’” A blind man must want to see. He had that desire. Then the blindness of the mind and the blindness of the will — there’s something in us that doesn’t want to see, because we don’t want to lose the power. But just as God entered into a blind man who couldn’t fix himself, he’s entering into you and me, and we really don’t on our own have the ability to fix ourselves. All he wants is a, “Yes, I see. In this area, I think I really am blind, but show me what I don’t see. Show me.” And he will show you, and he won’t condemn you for what you reveal to him. He won’t turn against you in any way, shape or form, because his only intention is love, and love is light, and light is life.

Father, you revealed your heart in the person of Jesus. Your heart is not filled with judgment or condemnation but a deep, deep longing to open our eyes so we can see the beauty of the life you’ve created for us and turn away from the things that rob us and rob others of that life. Open us to this gift. Give us the courage to say yes to your working in us, opening our eyes gently, sometimes not so gently maybe, but the core is that you are the one who saves us. We can’t save ourselves. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT

Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18 | Philippians 3:17—4:1 | Luke 9:28b-36

Oh God, who have commanded us to listen to your Beloved Son, be pleased, we pray, to nourish us inwardly by your word that, with spiritual sight made pure, we may rejoice to behold your glory. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Last Sunday we listened to the image in the gospel, and it was all about Jesus the man, the human facing the reality of his work to reveal to the human race who he is and who his Father is in him. He went through temptations. His human nature was resisting what it was that he was going to be called to do, and each time the devil tempted him, he showed something in him that was no match at all for the temptations that were before him. He knew in his heart who he was and what he was there for. It’s a beautiful image of who we’re called to be, someone who knows what we are and what we’re here for, and so traditionally, this second Sunday of Lent, which we have today to contemplate is the transfiguration, Jesus taking his disciples, not all of them but three, Peter, James and John, who he must have thought were able to deal with what he was about to show them, took them to a place where he manifested who he was. He was light, an incredible light, which to me is all about the work of God, through Jesus, of enlightening us as to who we are, but let’s look at this full set of readings, because that’s what always is there to enhance our understanding of the core gospel that’s presented.

And so what I’d like to do is talk for a minute about the whole salvation history, which I love talking about, because when I was growing up as a Catholic, we never ever heard homilies on the Old Testament. Rarely we did. There would be certain feasts where it was common to hear a story from the Old Testament, especially during Holy Week, but generally the preaching was always on the gospels and the epistles. But since Vatican 2, 55 years ago or so, it was changed, and it was that now we preach every Sunday on the Old Testament. So the fact that I’ve had 50 years of that has opened my heart to the way in which the two are so intricately entwined. You can’t really understand the New Testament without the Old Testament. And one of the things that’s interesting about what we learn from the Old Testament, it’s not just filled with theology, who God is, but it’s loaded with anthropological truth, who human beings are and how we’ve evolved. So I want to start with that image.

You know the story of Adam and Eve obviously. Adam and Eve revealed something about human nature, that we’re not really that comfortable being in a place of effortless existence. It’s interesting to me that, when Adam and Eve were in that garden and everything was perfect and there was no struggle and everything, it seems that there was something inside of them gnawing at them that wanted something more. And when they were tempted to try something on their own that wasn’t really being offered to them at that time by God, they chose it, and they were easily — easily seduced. It’s interesting that we’re most open to seduction if the person who’s seducing us knows that what he’s asking us to do we really want to do. And so the devil knew that human beings like an autonomy. They don’t want to be just cared for. They want to be engaged in their work. They want to produce something on their own. I’ve always felt that story was misunderstood when it sounded like God was so upset with them that he cast them out to punish them, but when you look at the story deeply, it’s clear that they left because they resisted the life that God had given them there. When they left, God sewed clothes together and sent them to the earth and said, “It’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be a hard, hard, difficult process to live that life on that planet, but if that’s what you choose, go. Go and do it.”

And that period of time, from the Adam and Eve story to, let’s say, the call of Abraham is interesting in the scriptures, because that period of time, which some claim was maybe 1,000 years — maybe it was more, but there’s almost nothing told to us about that, except for two things. One, that the first children of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, were so competitive that one, Cain, killed his brother, Abel. When you think about that, here’s the first two human beings born on the earth, and what are they? One’s a murderer. And so it says something about human nature, and then you go on. And the next major thing in that period of time was when God looked at the creation that he had made, and he said he saw nothing but darkness in their hearts, and he said, “I want to destroy all of them. I want to start over again. I made a mistake. I should never have created human beings.” What is that other than a story about the longing in God that human beings not be corrupt, that they not harm one another, that they live a different kind of life than, let’s say, their lowest animal nature? And so that story is so beautiful, the story of Noah, because what it is, it’s God looking at human beings at their worst and saying, “You know what? There is something I can see in someone,” which is in everyone, a spark, something about goodness in them that he wants to build upon. So there’s something in human nature that is designed to be selfless and self-giving and nurturing, like the God who created us. And living on this planet is part of our process of entering into that work and believing in it and doing it.

So we have then at that point in this story is that God is going to give the human race a second chance, so to speak, and so we have the call of Abraham. His name was Abram before it was changed to Abraham, and what’s interesting about this story, and it’s so like something in the gospel that I want to point out, is I want you to listen to the story again with your imagination and see that this is the human race, Abraham or Abram, being invited to go on a journey, not knowing where it is but somehow being told that, “If you take this journey with me, if you allow me into your life to be a guide to you, we’re going to take — I’m going to take you to a place, a land flowing with milk and honey. And it’s going to be a place that’s going to nurture you and feed you and give you life and teach you things.” And when he’s saying all that, it’s so beautiful, because he’s saying it in a way to Abram, asking Abram to trust him to do this. He doesn’t explain how long it’s going to take or where it is. He just said, “Come with me on this journey.”

That’s just a beautiful image of who God is in your life and mine. He’s awakened in our consciousness at some point in our life, when we’re in a place of thinking, “What am I here for? What am I supposed to be doing? What is life for,” and he’s there to give us this purpose and this direction. And the thing that’s so interesting about the covenant that he makes is that, when you listen to it carefully, there’s two things that he promises to Abram. One is posterity. In the Old Testament, in particular the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, nothing in there talks about life after death, and so some scholars would say, “Well, that’s because in the beginning, God was not so much interested in people reaching a goal outside of this life, but he was really interested in teaching them how to live in this world.” Whatever the reason, there isn’t anything in the Old Testament about life after death. So if one was going to have a sense of continuing, in terms of their value in the world, they would have posterity. They would continue to live through their sons, and Abram and Sarah did not have a son. And so God promises a son, which is insane when you think both of them were 90 years old, but he makes a promise that doesn’t make sense to our logic. And when he promises that, he’s saying, “That means I want you in this land of milk and honey — I want you to know that you are having an impact that is long term.” There’s something about your life and my life that we think is just about us, but we are part of an evolutionary process of human beings. And when we do our part, it is connected to other people, and when you grow intellectually and emotionally and when you’re enlightened with the truth, it has a contagious impact. So what I love about this promise of Abram is — it’s a promise to every human being. “I want to make you effective, not just get through this world and get to the other side that I promise you that, if you do what I say —” that’s an oversimplification, to say the least, but if you do the work of evolving, growing, changing, you’ll have an impact on the world. And what the world will be because of you is more nurturing. So the promise is — the land in those days, the land was life. You lived off the land, and so the image that he used was he took animals of the land and laid them out as this ritual and cut them in half. And then what was happening is that, in this ritual, Abram was being told that, “If you follow me, make this covenant with me, this life-giving environment, in which I’m going to place you, is always going to be there, but if you don’t, they will be destroyed. You won’t have that nurturing quality to the world.” And so the image is that you slice these animals in half, and when God passes through, as a light passes through this image of these split animals, what he’s saying is, “If you break this covenant, this will be what happens.” It’s like the light is showing how important this covenant is to keep. If you don’t keep it, then life is destroyed. The life that God has given you is lost. So the covenant made with us through Abram is, “I will make your life effective, and you will be a nurturing source for the life of the people around you. I promise I’ll do that.” He’s saying that, because he knows that’s what we really need. That’s what we want, but when that happened, he was terrified. He went into a deep, deep darkness, and that’s what I want to talk about.

What is it, when we’re told that with God inside of us, if we surrender to him, we’ll be so effective, why is that frightening? Why don’t we just say, “Of course, I’d love that”? So look at the same image in the gospel, because what you see there is Jesus taking his disciples to see who Jesus really is. And he is the Word that has come into the world, the truth, and when you open your heart to it, you are enlightened, and you evolve, and you change. And when the disciples saw Jesus there with Moses and Elijah, that was the rules and the laws and the people who judged you and condemned you if you didn’t follow them. What was happening is that was the transfer of Old to New Testament. No longer is God going to work with us by giving us rules and laws and punishing us. No, he’s going to do it by enlightening us. But when the disciples saw that and realized it, they were at first confused, but then a cloud overcame them, and they were in this place of fear and fright. And what that means is that there’s something in us that resists this incredible promise that, if we surrender our wills, our thoughts, if we give it all over to God, that we will be transformed.

So this season of Lent is always a time of reflection. Where is the resistance in us to this wonderful promise of God? And it’s all about that human, darker side where we say, “I’m in charge of myself, and I will run my life as I am able to do, and I’ll take great pleasure in having achieved it.” We don’t achieve it on our own. That’s the key to the promise that God has made to us. Accept our weaknesses, accept our need for him and allow him to enter into us and get pass the fear and the confusion that that creates is the key to this whole wonderful season that asks us to reflect on this great resistance and to let it drop and let the light in. Amen.

Father, your wisdom, your plan for us is so clearly revealed when we take time to listen attentively to salvation history, to know that this story is our story. So bless us with real openness to what we can be shown, and then when we see it and we open our heart to it, as the human race has done throughout history, we see the benefits, the joy and the life that flows into us. So bless us with an open heart to not depend on ourselves solely but to depend upon ourselves with you, in you, for you, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT

Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18 | Philippians 3:17—4:1 | Luke 9:28b-36

Oh God, who have commanded us to listen to your Beloved Son, be pleased, we pray, to nourish us inwardly by your word that, with spiritual sight made pure, we may rejoice to behold your glory. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Last Sunday we listened to the image in the gospel, and it was all about Jesus the man, the human facing the reality of his work to reveal to the human race who he is and who his Father is in him. He went through temptations. His human nature was resisting what it was that he was going to be called to do, and each time the devil tempted him, he showed something in him that was no match at all for the temptations that were before him. He knew in his heart who he was and what he was there for. It’s a beautiful image of who we’re called to be, someone who knows what we are and what we’re here for, and so traditionally, this second Sunday of Lent, which we have today to contemplate is the transfiguration, Jesus taking his disciples, not all of them but three, Peter, James and John, who he must have thought were able to deal with what he was about to show them, took them to a place where he manifested who he was. He was light, an incredible light, which to me is all about the work of God, through Jesus, of enlightening us as to who we are, but let’s look at this full set of readings, because that’s what always is there to enhance our understanding of the core gospel that’s presented.

And so what I’d like to do is talk for a minute about the whole salvation history, which I love talking about, because when I was growing up as a Catholic, we never ever heard homilies on the Old Testament. Rarely we did. There would be certain feasts where it was common to hear a story from the Old Testament, especially during Holy Week, but generally the preaching was always on the gospels and the epistles. But since Vatican 2, 55 years ago or so, it was changed, and it was that now we preach every Sunday on the Old Testament. So the fact that I’ve had 50 years of that has opened my heart to the way in which the two are so intricately entwined. You can’t really understand the New Testament without the Old Testament. And one of the things that’s interesting about what we learn from the Old Testament, it’s not just filled with theology, who God is, but it’s loaded with anthropological truth, who human beings are and how we’ve evolved. So I want to start with that image.

You know the story of Adam and Eve obviously. Adam and Eve revealed something about human nature, that we’re not really that comfortable being in a place of effortless existence. It’s interesting to me that, when Adam and Eve were in that garden and everything was perfect and there was no struggle and everything, it seems that there was something inside of them gnawing at them that wanted something more. And when they were tempted to try something on their own that wasn’t really being offered to them at that time by God, they chose it, and they were easily — easily seduced. It’s interesting that we’re most open to seduction if the person who’s seducing us knows that what he’s asking us to do we really want to do. And so the devil knew that human beings like an autonomy. They don’t want to be just cared for. They want to be engaged in their work. They want to produce something on their own. I’ve always felt that story was misunderstood when it sounded like God was so upset with them that he cast them out to punish them, but when you look at the story deeply, it’s clear that they left because they resisted the life that God had given them there. When they left, God sewed clothes together and sent them to the earth and said, “It’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be a hard, hard, difficult process to live that life on that planet, but if that’s what you choose, go. Go and do it.”

And that period of time, from the Adam and Eve story to, let’s say, the call of Abraham is interesting in the scriptures, because that period of time, which some claim was maybe 1,000 years — maybe it was more, but there’s almost nothing told to us about that, except for two things. One, that the first children of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, were so competitive that one, Cain, killed his brother, Abel. When you think about that, here’s the first two human beings born on the earth, and what are they? One’s a murderer. And so it says something about human nature, and then you go on. And the next major thing in that period of time was when God looked at the creation that he had made, and he said he saw nothing but darkness in their hearts, and he said, “I want to destroy all of them. I want to start over again. I made a mistake. I should never have created human beings.” What is that other than a story about the longing in God that human beings not be corrupt, that they not harm one another, that they live a different kind of life than, let’s say, their lowest animal nature? And so that story is so beautiful, the story of Noah, because what it is, it’s God looking at human beings at their worst and saying, “You know what? There is something I can see in someone,” which is in everyone, a spark, something about goodness in them that he wants to build upon. So there’s something in human nature that is designed to be selfless and self-giving and nurturing, like the God who created us. And living on this planet is part of our process of entering into that work and believing in it and doing it.

So we have then at that point in this story is that God is going to give the human race a second chance, so to speak, and so we have the call of Abraham. His name was Abram before it was changed to Abraham, and what’s interesting about this story, and it’s so like something in the gospel that I want to point out, is I want you to listen to the story again with your imagination and see that this is the human race, Abraham or Abram, being invited to go on a journey, not knowing where it is but somehow being told that, “If you take this journey with me, if you allow me into your life to be a guide to you, we’re going to take — I’m going to take you to a place, a land flowing with milk and honey. And it’s going to be a place that’s going to nurture you and feed you and give you life and teach you things.” And when he’s saying all that, it’s so beautiful, because he’s saying it in a way to Abram, asking Abram to trust him to do this. He doesn’t explain how long it’s going to take or where it is. He just said, “Come with me on this journey.”

That’s just a beautiful image of who God is in your life and mine. He’s awakened in our consciousness at some point in our life, when we’re in a place of thinking, “What am I here for? What am I supposed to be doing? What is life for,” and he’s there to give us this purpose and this direction. And the thing that’s so interesting about the covenant that he makes is that, when you listen to it carefully, there’s two things that he promises to Abram. One is posterity. In the Old Testament, in particular the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, nothing in there talks about life after death, and so some scholars would say, “Well, that’s because in the beginning, God was not so much interested in people reaching a goal outside of this life, but he was really interested in teaching them how to live in this world.” Whatever the reason, there isn’t anything in the Old Testament about life after death. So if one was going to have a sense of continuing, in terms of their value in the world, they would have posterity. They would continue to live through their sons, and Abram and Sarah did not have a son. And so God promises a son, which is insane when you think both of them were 90 years old, but he makes a promise that doesn’t make sense to our logic. And when he promises that, he’s saying, “That means I want you in this land of milk and honey — I want you to know that you are having an impact that is long term.” There’s something about your life and my life that we think is just about us, but we are part of an evolutionary process of human beings. And when we do our part, it is connected to other people, and when you grow intellectually and emotionally and when you’re enlightened with the truth, it has a contagious impact. So what I love about this promise of Abram is — it’s a promise to every human being. “I want to make you effective, not just get through this world and get to the other side that I promise you that, if you do what I say —” that’s an oversimplification, to say the least, but if you do the work of evolving, growing, changing, you’ll have an impact on the world. And what the world will be because of you is more nurturing. So the promise is — the land in those days, the land was life. You lived off the land, and so the image that he used was he took animals of the land and laid them out as this ritual and cut them in half. And then what was happening is that, in this ritual, Abram was being told that, “If you follow me, make this covenant with me, this life-giving environment, in which I’m going to place you, is always going to be there, but if you don’t, they will be destroyed. You won’t have that nurturing quality to the world.” And so the image is that you slice these animals in half, and when God passes through, as a light passes through this image of these split animals, what he’s saying is, “If you break this covenant, this will be what happens.” It’s like the light is showing how important this covenant is to keep. If you don’t keep it, then life is destroyed. The life that God has given you is lost. So the covenant made with us through Abram is, “I will make your life effective, and you will be a nurturing source for the life of the people around you. I promise I’ll do that.” He’s saying that, because he knows that’s what we really need. That’s what we want, but when that happened, he was terrified. He went into a deep, deep darkness, and that’s what I want to talk about.

What is it, when we’re told that with God inside of us, if we surrender to him, we’ll be so effective, why is that frightening? Why don’t we just say, “Of course, I’d love that”? So look at the same image in the gospel, because what you see there is Jesus taking his disciples to see who Jesus really is. And he is the Word that has come into the world, the truth, and when you open your heart to it, you are enlightened, and you evolve, and you change. And when the disciples saw Jesus there with Moses and Elijah, that was the rules and the laws and the people who judged you and condemned you if you didn’t follow them. What was happening is that was the transfer of Old to New Testament. No longer is God going to work with us by giving us rules and laws and punishing us. No, he’s going to do it by enlightening us. But when the disciples saw that and realized it, they were at first confused, but then a cloud overcame them, and they were in this place of fear and fright. And what that means is that there’s something in us that resists this incredible promise that, if we surrender our wills, our thoughts, if we give it all over to God, that we will be transformed.

So this season of Lent is always a time of reflection. Where is the resistance in us to this wonderful promise of God? And it’s all about that human, darker side where we say, “I’m in charge of myself, and I will run my life as I am able to do, and I’ll take great pleasure in having achieved it.” We don’t achieve it on our own. That’s the key to the promise that God has made to us. Accept our weaknesses, accept our need for him and allow him to enter into us and get pass the fear and the confusion that that creates is the key to this whole wonderful season that asks us to reflect on this great resistance and to let it drop and let the light in. Amen.

Father, your wisdom, your plan for us is so clearly revealed when we take time to listen attentively to salvation history, to know that this story is our story. So bless us with real openness to what we can be shown, and then when we see it and we open our heart to it, as the human race has done throughout history, we see the benefits, the joy and the life that flows into us. So bless us with an open heart to not depend on ourselves solely but to depend upon ourselves with you, in you, for you, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT

Deuteronomy 26:4-10 | Romans 10:8-13 | Luke 4:1-13

Grant, almighty God, through the yearly observance of Holy Lent, that we may grow in understanding of the riches hidden in Christ and, by worthy conduct, pursue their effects. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

There’s something exciting to me about the work that God has asked me to do, and that is to dig as deeply as possible into these stories, the images of the stories and look for and seek what is hidden, what is there that is so obvious once we see it, but it was often easily missed. At least it was in my life as I used to read these stories and not find much in them other than maybe some word would trigger me on a topic, and then I would give the homily on that topic that weekend. But as I’ve grown as one who preaches and teaches from these stories, I realize that the surface is just the beginning, to go deeper, deeper, deeper, and you’ll find a consistent, simple, direct message that goes right to the heart and ignites something in the heart that the heart already knows.

So let’s begin with the image of the first reading, because here we are, as I said at the beginning of the program, looking at some of the most basic teachings of scripture. And I love this first reading, because it summarizes pretty much the whole Old Testament story, and it’s a simple story of freeing human beings from slavery and bringing them into freedom. And the slavery they were caught in was something that kept them from being who they were called to be. To be a slave to someone means that you don’t have the choices that you need to have in order to grow and develop who you are, and so you’re constantly doing what you’re told, constantly doing what is demanded of you. And if there’s a good image of a negative way of understanding religion, no matter what religion it is, that instead of igniting in someone a journey that is engaged directly with the divine, we’re told about the things we should do, how we should act, and it ends up being a kind of issue of being controlled behavior. And nothing could be further from the truth as far as the heart of this beautiful story of salvation history. It reveals who we are. It’s not people who are forced to behave in a certain way but people who are invited into a relationship that is so radically transformative that the memory of who we were before just fades into almost nothingness.

So what is this first story about? It’s about a people who are taken on a journey, and they were formed by God and placed in a place, but in that place, they became slaves to something outside of themselves, the Egyptians. And the promise that God has given to them is, “I will take you on a journey, and the journey will take you from a place of slavery,” which is a pretty clear image of being forced to do things because you’re told to, “To a place filled with milk and honey.” And that image of the place of milk and honey is so clearly, if you’re agrarian culture, that it’s a place of security and money and wealth or something. It means, “This is what you need in order to do the thing you’re called to do.” So these people were farmers. They were herdsmen, and so to know that there was green grass, there was water, there was good soil — but all those images refer to something in the human spirit that is needed before it can really flourish: a place. I’ll call it a place of security, place of knowing that somehow we are deeply loved, that we’re safe, and that we have value. That conviction creates in a human being an environment in which then we are open to receive this incredible message of the Divine as it’s revealed in a person, a human being called Jesus.

So there’s something that has to happen first in a way, and I would call that our gift from God, the gift of our human nature that is designed to be connected to the divine Spirit. We’re made for that, and it’s only with the indwelling presence of God that we have this sense, that is not logical but more mystical, that we are truly a people that God has created, that we’re an individual that God has created that has dignity and value and that that is our inheritance. And when anything is there that tries to rob us of that, we know that that is not God’s will, and yet God’s will is the strongest of all powers in the world. So that’s where our confidence comes from even though I don’t understand fully what it means as I look at myself to say — I look at what I see, and I say, “Oh, it is so lovable. It is so beautiful.” And I don’t. I see the negative. I see the sin. I see the imperfection, and even God sees that, but it doesn’t keep him from being the source of this new place, this land that we’ve been given, the fertile land of openness to divinity and openness to the destiny that we’re called to live and the ability to live it. So think about that first reading then as creating an image for us of a disposition that is our inheritance. We’ve earned it, not individually, but the human race has been struggling for it and longing for it. And we have found a way to find it, and it’s been revealed to us by God. And how this all works is through a connection, an intimacy with the Divine.

So it’s interesting that we begin this series of importance gospels by looking at the man Jesus, the human being, and at a certain point in his life — I think it’s fascinating to think about the life of Jesus. What was it like? Did he, once he reached the age of seven, did he realize, “Oh, I’m the Messiah, and I can do these miraculous things. And I am divine. I am human, but I’m also divine”? I don’t think it was that way at all. He, like us, went through the human experience of growing and evolving and beginning to understand who God really is and his relationship with God. And then at some point, it had to be so clear to him that he was the unique one called to experience God’s indwelling presence in a way that no human being had ever done it. Now, I’m not saying that, at Jesus’ baptism, he became the Messiah, but it seems that at baptism, as a human being, he became very aware of what was happening to him. And so the people around him knew something was special about him, because there was, as you remember, at the baptism of Jesus, the words of God spoke in a thunderous voice. They heard it. “This is my Beloved Son. This is the one I’ve sent into the world to reveal who I am in you.” And there it was, a manifestation in the imagination of a human being called Jesus of who he was and what his destiny was to be about. And then he had to deal with his humanity, and that’s what the gospel is about and the second reading.

Let’s look at the gospel first, and what do I mean? It’s there. Here it is: Jesus, after he is receiving this awareness, this consciousness of God inside of him, he is taken to a place of reflection, whether it’s the desert literally or not, but it was his mind racing to figure out, “What does all this mean?” And if you don’t think he grew like a human being, you don’t understand. That’s the way it’s described so clearly in scripture. He grew in age and in wisdom. He didn’t have all his wisdom at the beginning. Otherwise he wouldn’t be fully human, and now he’s facing a temptation, a set of temptations and the classic resistance in all of us to this mysterious indwelling presence. What do we do with it? What’s it for? How do we respond to it? So the devil that I call that evil, self-centered part of all us, though I’m not saying there isn’t really a devil, but anyway, there is something in us, the human part of us, that cries out for self, always for self first. I speak to you often about the evolution of human beings, and there’s a lower level, which is all about us being safe, being cared for, being — getting everything that we need for ourselves and even getting things from other people. And then there’s a higher level, which we’re there to give and give life and give hope and direction to other people. But the self-centeredness is what first raises its head when we open ourselves to a power that is given to us, and the first thing that Jesus seems to be tempted to do, as I would be and you would be, if we have this new power, use it for comfort. Use it for everything I need to make me more comfortable in this world. The image, turn these stones, these heavy, rock-like burdens, into bread, life-giving, soft, fresh, melted butter on it bread. That’s the temptation we have with any gift that you’ve been given by God. And these gifts are first there — we don’t realize they are the presence of God in us, but there’s something really powerful about recognizing that these things are not for us, just for us. So the first temptation is, “I’m not interested in using this power so that my life will be more comfortable and more, more — easier,” let’s say.

And the next thing is the temptation where the devil awakens in Jesus, the human Jesus, that there’s a great deal of benefit from being powerful and strong and mighty and famous and a celebrity, all the things that the world tends to offer us that gives us a sense of our own self-importance. He says, “I can give you all that. I can give that to you. It’s easy. If you want it, it’s there for you. You’re talented. You’ve got great charisma.” If he’s playing on Jesus’ humanity, it’s not just some generic thing that he’s being tempted in. The devil’s playing on Jesus knowing he is a gifted man, and he said, “So let’s do it in a way that brings you fame and fortune.” Jesus said, “No, I’m not going to worship — I’m not going to give myself over to the rules and laws of this world that we live in that’s not truly truthful or life-giving.”

And then the last one is so important. The devil takes him to a high parapet, an edge of the temple, and says, “Jump off.” I think it’s interesting he’s jumping off the temple of all buildings, but that’s another issue you can use your own imagination with, since the temple was the thing that he was not happy with. But it’s — what he’s saying in this last temptation is, “Okay, if you’re going to do the thing that God is asking you to do, then be sure you test everything that he’s going to ask you to do before you do it,” which is almost saying, “Look, you don’t have to be convinced of this. In fact, it’s impossible for you to be convinced of it unless you have proof.” He’s playing to the logical mind of Jesus, and so he said, “Test everything first.” And then it really hits to the core of Jesus is, because, “No, no. No, my idea is be convinced — to convince that this God that I believe in, this Father that I know is mine is there for me and will never, ever disappoint me.”

And then Paul says, from the second reading, “This kind of belief is not something that the mind does. It’s not logical. It’s not anything other than your heart being awakened to something that it alone can understand, because the mind will come up with arguments against it. It’s being so convinced that it dwells in your heart, this realization of who I am in God, and all the things that the Psalm said God will do for me, he will do for me. He will never let me fail.” That’s the most beautiful conviction that we can have in terms of living out our life. It is difficult. It is painful. It is something that we would like to have, some kind of power in the world to change the things that might be causing us pain, but if we are deeply convinced, as we are invited to be by this grace of God living inside of you, if you have that conviction, then those decisions of me turning away from the things that are the most easy out from pain and suffering and difficulty and loneliness, they just melt away. In its place, we have this inner conviction. Our heart knows, and when it knows like that, then you’re in that land of milk and honey. You’re there with a conviction that you are loved, and you are safe. And you know what? You are deeply, deeply valued, because God is using you to bring life to a hungry, lonely, needy world.

Father, we get confused, and we’re often in the dark. And we don’t realize — we often feel that we have to be the person you call us to be before you’ll be there for us, we have to prove to you our goodness before you enter us to make us good. Free us from that. Let us know, in our broken and loneliness and our selfishness, that there you are for us and with us, and you will make us into who you call us to be. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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EIGHTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Sirach 27:4-7 | 1 Corinthians 15:54-58 | Luke 6:39-45

Grant us, oh Lord, we pray that the course of our world may be directed by your peaceful rule and that your church may rejoice untroubled in her devotion. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This is a very interesting set of readings to me, because it seems that we are talking about things that are not necessarily the classic things that you think of that religion is drawing you into. It almost feels like these readings are written by a therapist. He’s concerned about your well-being. He’s concerned about your growth and your integration, becoming a person of authenticity, integrity.

So I was reading the reading from Corinthians. That last paragraph really struck me, and it said we should be devoted to the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord, your labor is not in vein, meaning if you do God’s work, which is certainly something that we have to produce something on our end, meaning trust, openness, receptivity, honesty. But the real work of the work of the Lord is God working through you, working in you, being a part of you, and that’s what I think he means when he talks about when the corruptible is clothed with incorruptibility, the moral clothes itself with immortality. We have a human nature. We all know our human nature. It’s got a selfish side to it. It’s got a kind of primitive thing it goes back to over and over again, and that makes total sense to me. We don’t evolve and grow into a totally different person. We grow into a person that has a kind of integration of the old and the new, the selfish and the selfless. And so this work of God that is giving us a taste of divinity, a presence of divinity in our very being, we can rely upon that. We go to that, and it has a wonderful potential to lift us beyond a kind of self-centered selfishness into other-centeredness. And that other-centeredness is always, always concerned about the well-being of another person. It wants the other person to become everything they’re intended to be, everything they long to be.

Paul also talks about what it is that, when people are not in the right relationship with each other, something is raging. Some enemy has entered it. It’s called sin, and the power of sin is interesting. It comes from rules and laws. And I don't know whether you feel it this way, but sometimes we can have regulations in our way of seeing ourselves or the way we expect other people to act or to do their thing, whatever it is. And it’s so interesting to me that there is this kind of power of expecting things to be a certain way that would be our own set of rules and laws that get in the way of our being in union with each other, because sin comes from rules and regulations, having to be someone you’re supposed to be, expecting other people — they should be who they’re supposed to be. And if you want a real understanding of the effects of sin in your life, there’s always going to be separation. Separation, and that separation, when it comes to our relationships with each other, even our relationship with ourselves, is that whole issue of judgment. We talked about it last week, and it’s again in this set of readings. Stop judging.

Isn’t it interesting that of all the things Jesus has said about what we need to be, the one thing we seem to just have such a hard time paying attention to — because in my experience, religious people can be the most judgmental, the most critical, the most always evaluating other people’s performance, or we even — as a Catholic priest, growing up after Vatican 2, it seemed like I entered into a church that initially, back in — that would be the mid-’60s — was divided between those who believed this new ideas — the new ideas of the council were so wonderful and exciting, and others felt they were detrimental to the regulation way in which they understood religion. And there was always this tension, and it was always you were judged. Are you a pro-Vatican 2 or an anti-Vatican 2? It was crazy, and it’s always been that way in my life, it seems. I’ve entered into the world of religion at a time, at least within the Catholic Church, that there’s always this division. And so when I’m thinking about this way of imagining people should be a certain way — imagine that as a kind of rule in our psyche. We say, “Okay, this is the way people should act. This is what it means to be Catholic. This is what it means to be Christian. This is what it means to be a good person.” If we have those set regulations in our mind, then we can’t listen, can’t listen to another person without judging them, and the judgment immediately sets up a separation. We’re somehow looking down on them, or if we happen to judge them as much more intelligent, much more well-read or well-formed in what they are talking about, we can feel that they’re elevated above us, and we feel separated that way.

But if you can imagine the real work, the real work of the gospel in your heart and in my heart is to be connecting to people, to be connecting, not judging, not evaluating but listening to them, paying attention to them, wanting something in your own mind — I’ll call it your intention — that they become fully who they’re intended to be, and you listen not with judgment but with interest and curiosity. I’ve tried to do this, and it’s interesting. I think like a lot of people, I can be competitive, and especially if somebody else is talking about maybe their spiritual life or their work, or they’re talking about another priest’s work, and I can start comparing myself to them and feeling, “Oh my God, they’re better than I am,” or, “Oh, I’m so much better than they are.” All that stuff immediately sets up a division, and the last thing that God’s work is engaged in is dividing us. It’s always drawing us into each other, and so if we play with this image of judgment as a sin that is there for causing separation and isolation from people — and I think it’s interesting that Paul goes on to say that the sting of death is sin, and I think — I don’t know if this is what this means, but it’s fascinating to me to think about it. Does that mean that the thing that really frightens us about our death is whether or not we’ve sinned or not or whether or not we’re really forgiven by the God who says he is filled with forgiveness? So there it is again. Sin is division, division between human beings and division between ourselves and a God who said, “I’m here to save you. I’m here to forgive you. I’m here to accept you.”

So let’s look at this image of the gospel, because I think it’s really a beautiful way to imagine how we have to be careful in our way of listening so that we don’t end up in judgment, and we don’t end up in separation and isolation. But the image is there’s something that we’re supposed to do if we’re involved in this work of being authentic and integrated, and that is some self-reflection. You can’t grow unless you take time to understand your story, your background, who you came from, those early years that formed you so intensely in terms of things that are what I would call your default. We respond to situations because of the way we were trained to respond in the family of origin we have, and then we grow up in a city, in a certain place. We have certain relationships. Some of those are very positive. Some of those can be negative. We can engage ourselves in people that are life-giving, and unfortunately we can be the victim of people who suck life out of us. You have to pay attention to all of that in order to understand who you are. And why is that so important? Because when Jesus is talking to his disciples, he’s putting on a therapist hat, as I said earlier, and it seems like what he’s saying is, “Look, unless you look at your own stuff, unless you have self — examine your life and you recognize there are things in you that are there because of the negative things that have happened to you or the patterns in which you’ve grown up, unless you can realize that there are things that block your ability to see and to hear and to connect with people, unless you know that and face those things, you’re going to do the most classic things that all of us do.” When you have a really irrational response to somebody’s, let’s say, imperfection or maybe their self-centeredness or whatever it is that they’re proclaiming without even realizing it in their speech, and you begin to see it and feel it, if you’re filled with judgment and it’s a rational, intense judgment against them, guaranteed that thing that you can’t stand in them is the very thing — it’s the beam in your eyes, the thing you have not looked at. What a real tragedy it is to be caught in that kind of system where your reactions to other people are based on some kind of repressed understanding that you’re supposed to have of your own faults. So isn’t it interesting that the only way you can begin this wonderful work of connecting with people through the way we speak, through what we say — if you’re filled with judgment about those things, you’re not going to get very far in terms of learning about both who you are and who the other person is.

And there’s something about your heart, this thing in the middle of your chest that is filled with divinity, clothed with divinity, and it’s there that you’re going to find your intention. The intentions you have in a relationship with a human being, is it to evaluation them, judge them, become better than they are or evaluate whether they’re better than you are, whatever, are you going to be in that game? Are you going to get free of that and enter into relationships with people? And we do it by listening attentively, and when we listen with intention and curiosity and wonder about who they are, maybe what they’ve been through in their life, and we’re not filled with judgment, there’s this wonderful feeling of oneness, unity, connection. That’s what we long for the most. When I think about it, the pandemic has been such an interesting experience, but I know that I can be in a funk for a couple of days when I’m by myself, and I pick up the phone, and I talk to somebody. And all of a sudden, I feel this energy coming, flowing into me, and maybe it’s flowing back to them, I hope. And there’s that dynamic that is where grace operates in communion with another person. So you can feel why Paul is saying what he’s saying, and also Jesus, what he’s saying, he’s trying to get people attentive to the way in which we communicate. And if we understand that the heart, where God dwells, is interested in reaching into the heart where someone else dwells and wants to give them some kind of wisdom and insight into who they are, how we listen is amazingly affected, because we listen without judgment, with curiosity and maybe even then sometimes with sadness or a kind of, I don't know, longing that they shouldn’t have gone through what they went through that caused this problem in them that makes them so judgmental or makes them so bitter or makes them so negative. If you have this compassionate thing moving between you in conversations, then those conversations aren’t just information passing back and forth, but it’s grace, this mysterious thing we’re clothed in that is different than our corrupt nature. It is filled with incorruptibility. It is filled with an energy that enters into another person and gives them some kind of hope, even though you haven’t corrected them, haven’t told them that they’re overly judgmental, because sometimes if you attack someone for their weaknesses and they’re not willing to look at their weaknesses, you’ve only made those weaknesses stronger in them, because they feel like they’ve been attacked. And their self-centered ego part of them says, “No, no. I’m not going to let you attack me. I will prove it to you that I am who I am, and I’m going to stay with who I am, because that’s who I am. Blah, blah, blah.” Defensiveness.

Now, to be free of anything that separates us from another human being is a grace that I long for, and I know you long for it deep inside of you, because the heart that God has created in us, that has been given whole and complete, that has been perhaps damaged in our past, still longs for this kind of integrity and authenticity. I want to be a source of life to the person sitting across from me. I don’t have to think about that all the time. I just have it as a fundamental intention. I want to be with people, and somehow because I’m with them, I want to receive something from them, and I want to give them something. That’s the work of the Lord, and it’s not about preaching Jesus. It’s not about quoting scripture. It’s not about — certainly not about correcting and judging that other person, but it’s all about paying attention to the intention that’s in your heart. “I want to be connected. I’d like to be a part of who you are.” It may be in a 10-second, 20-second interchange between two people, and it may be in a lifetime of spending time together. But the intention is the same, and when you’re dealing with the work of the Lord, you know what? It doesn’t have anything to do with quantity or even a necessarily quality. It’s just that, if it’s his work and it’s coming through you, you’ll know that it’s going to bring life. Amen.

Father, we strive always to please you in what we do and how we act, how we speak. So let us always trust, most especially, in your ability to give us everything that we need to go beyond our human nature, to go beyond our brokenness and backgrounds that keep us perhaps from being fully authentic. We trust in you. We open our heart to you. We ask you to fill us with you. We have every confidence in the world that we can be exactly the person you intend us to be, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

1 Samuel 26:2, 7-9, 12-13, 22-23 | 1 Corinthians 15:45-49 | Luke 6:27-38

Grant, we pray, Almighty God, that always pondering spiritual things, we may carry out both in word and deed that which is pleasing to you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This set of readings has a wonderful way of awakening us to a reality that we are engaged in that we may not be thinking much about, and that is the nature that we have inside of us, our human nature, and this call to be more like the divine figure that has created us. That tension is something we all live with, and I just have to say something to you that really maybe sounds strange from a priest who’s been around for so many — been preaching for over 52, [5]3 years, whatever it is. Basically I don’t remember this second reading from Paul. I don’t know why it never imprinted itself on me, and it’s so loaded with such a wonderful, wonderful teaching. So I want to start with that, that second reading.

What it is, is Paul is trying to explain to people this transition, I think, that has happened in him. At one moment, he was out there destroying all those who believed in Christ. He was anti-Jesus. He was pro the temple. He was the antithesis of what God wants us to become, and he was resistant, as many people are, to the transforming power of grace. And so he was in this place, and then all of a sudden, he had this awakening, this experience that changed everything for him. And he’s describing, I think, in this reading what he realized for the first time, that there are two dimensions to all of us. We have a natural state. It’s called our humanity, and it’s basically — I think we know how the evolution of human nature is, and I think we can look at this first part, when Paul is saying, “Remember, the first was the natural, and then came the spiritual.” The first was the natural; then came the spiritual, meaning in the evolution of God’s revelation to people in salvation history, as well as if we look at the individual life that each of us lead, we realize that, in the beginning, we come into this world, and we have some basic needs that need to be cared for. I would call those the natural state of a human being. We need safety. We need a comfortable place to begin our life. We need to know that we’ve been loved and that there’s food, there’s shelter, there’s warmth. That feeds our human nature in a healthy way. So we go to the next stage where, as we develop, we realize we need relationships. We can’t live autonomously by ourselves. We need other people. The pandemic has taught us that more than anything else recently. We need human communication, and when we don’t have it, we get a little crazy. So the need for a safe environment, the need to have a relationship, and then the next thing that develops in the human nature, and also in the evolution in the human race, is a sense of who we are, that we have value, that we’re unique, that we’re different than someone else. That’s the natural. That’s the way we are in nature. But then something happens, and this is what happened when Jesus came into the world to reveal who God really is fully and to do something for us called redemption, which is very mysterious. But this redemptive event is somehow shifting, is shifting in us so that we become not just the natural, but we then become spiritual. I think it’s interesting that we use that word spiritual, but I’m not sure I’ve used it in a way that might really capture what I’m trying to say right now. But the spiritual nature that we are called to is not a change in us, not evolving more in a natural state, but rather it’s an infusion into us of a spiritual force, a spiritual presence. And that’s the mysterious of salvation, of salvation history.

We went from rules and laws outside of us to something inside of us that shifts the whole focus of who we are from self to others, and so we want to follow that level of evolution from a safe environment to something that is communal to something that gives a sense of value. Then when this infusion of divinity comes into us and all of a sudden we discover that we have something has been given to us, a destiny — a destiny. You know that time when you were young and you started thinking, “What do I want to do with my life? What do I want to be?” People say, “I want to be in law.” “I want to be in medicine.” “I want to do this,” or, “I don’t know what I want to be,” or, “I just want to be around people that I love. I want to be loved.” Whatever it is, we have a sense of something that we are called to be, and then in the evolution of the spiritual side of us, we allow this Spirit, this power to enter into us that gives us a sense of clarity to why we’re here. Then we begin to develop it. We say, “I want to do this.” We find people that know something about this part of life, and we enter a medical school, or we go to the seminary, or we go just into life more fully to find out who we are and what we really want. And so you have this beginning of awareness of, “What is my passion?” And then the next to highest stage is we develop that. We find people around us to teach us that, and then we give it away.

The first part is, the natural, is more self-centered, in a healthy way really, and the second is centered on a force that’s greater than us that comes into us that enables us to then become what I would say is our destiny here on this earth, why we’re here. The truth is what I always try to teach. The truth is what I want you to know, and one of the things about the truth is that I — the way I like to describe it is you need to know who you are, who God is and why you’re here. And who we are is these evolving creatures that continue to move and develop in the world. Each of us go through this stage of development, but the whole human race has been going through something very similar. People that lived 2,000 years, 4,000 years ago, maybe even 30 years ago are different than when we start off. So there’s an evolution of the whole process where we’re getting closer and closer to the fullness of who we are, but the beautiful thing about this reading is the fullness of who we are is more than just us. It’s a spiritual dimension that enters into us. I used to think being spiritual meant you went to church, you said prayers, all that. That was a spiritual person. No, a spiritual person, the way Paul’s talking about it, is a person aware that something has been infused into them that is more than them.

And we see it in the experience of the first reading, of the story between David and Saul. We know that story, pretty much, from the Old Testament, but basically, Saul was the first king that the Israelites received from God. The Israelites wanted a king. They wanted to be like the other nations, having a strong leader to conquer the enemy, and Saul comes into it. And so many of the kings that were chosen, they all went south. They all went negative. They were just filled with self-indulgence and self-importance, and the kings were a disaster, except for one, for David. David is the greatest of the kings of Israel. He’s the one that conquered enemies, won Jerusalem back, started building the first temple. He’s also the one that wrote the Psalms. He was a poet and a lover. He had a great friendship with Jonathan, but we see in this figure of — what we see in him, in David is this expression of what it means to be infused with something way beyond human nature. He was so far ahead of those others around him that were leading, trying to lead the Israelite community, and what he had in him was this spiritual dimension where you could say without it, in the natural state, we are basically looking out for ourselves. But in the other state, the spiritual state, we are always looking out for others, to take care of them, to be life-givers. Natural people want to live, sometimes becoming selfish about it, and the spiritual is that we’re life-givers. So we have that image in the first reading of a life-giver versus a life-taker, let’s say. So it’s — this call to go beyond ourselves was there from the very beginning, Old Testament, and finds its fullness in the New Testament.

But then let’s look at the gospel, because it’s got a hidden secret in it, I think, that I hope I can help you to see. And it goes like this: Jesus is talking to his disciples. Let’s say he’s talking to the natural human nature that we all have. Now, the Old Testament — something natural about us is justice. Justice seems pretty fair, pretty even. The natural man says, “Yeah, if somebody takes from me, I can take from them. If someone hurts me, I can hurt them.” That’s the natural, but the spiritual takes it above that, much higher level of consciousness, of awareness of who we really are meant to be. And so we see, when Jesus is just stating these things, that the disciples must have been shaking their heads, saying, “Are you serious? Somebody slaps me, and I should offer them the other cheek? Somebody comes and steals my sheep, I should go back and give them all the ones they missed? I should care for those who hate me and do awful things to me?” It just goes so against the natural state of a human being, and I listen to that, and it’s like always don’t do things because they give something to you. Don’t do them for a selfish reason, but at the same time that he’s saying all that, at the end he says, “If you do what I’m asking you to do, you will get something. Don’t do anything just to get it, but if you do what I ask you to do, by loving, giving, sharing, you’re going to get something back. A thousand times as much as you’ve given, you’re going to get back.” So it’s almost contradictory. Don’t do things to get something, but if you do things, you will get something. So how can I explain that? It’s very, very simple. It’s all about intention. Intention — why do you do anything for someone else? If your intention when you’re doing it is to get something from them, even to follow the logic of this gospel passage, “I will give you to, because I know God promised me that whatever I give you to, I’ll get a hundredfold back. That’s why I’m giving to you.” That’s the wrong intention, and the minute that intention is there, what you’ve excluded is the spiritual. You’ve fallen back into the natural man, and the spiritual, remember, is not just your evolution to a higher state of consciousness. It is that, but it’s caused by the indwelling presence of God. The indwelling presence of God is in you, and when he’s in you, he has this capacity to awaken in you a longing that is core to who you really are meant to be. “I want to give, because it’s so beautiful and wonderful an experience for me to see me being a source of life for someone else.” It’s satisfying on a level that we can’t ever find in the natural state of humanity, the joy of loving, the joy of giving life, and when you’re doing it just because it’s what you know you should do — it’s not, “I’m obligated to do it. I have to do it.” No, it’s just who I am. This is what I do. That would imply to me that you have an intention in your essence, in your being. “I want to be here in this world, because I’d like to add something to it. I’d like to make the world better. I’d like to help the people that are in my circle of friends enjoy life more. I want to be that which God is calling me to be. That’s my intention.” And when that’s there and you’re giving without any need to get something back, boy, the flood gates open, and you receive the fullness of everything. What an interesting way to describe life in this world with divinity, being filled with divinity. The kings always had a problem, because they were so filled with power and authority that they thought they were special, and they become threatened by everyone else. And in a simple way, we could say, in a mindset that you are working hard to perform at a high level because you want the authority or the power or the importance of that, that’s the wrong intention. And when you’re in that, you know you’re in it, because it doesn’t satisfy the most basic human need.

I love the fact that, when God enters into us and gives us the fullness of who we are intended to be, the joy being in that spiritual, natural state — intertwine the two so they become one — is just filled with a kind of inner peace that you can’t describe, that you can’t get from getting something from someone. So the goal is to integrate the spiritual and the natural and to know that that isn’t something that’s our work. It’s rather something that we believe and we allow. Believing, allowing, believing, allowing, those are the two things that have to be a part of who we become, and if we’re longing to find the peace that is our inheritance, then the task is pretty simple. Listen attentively, not just to scripture, not just to advice from somebody like me. But listen to who you really are, and you’ll hear the longing that you have to be a life-giver and never to be somebody who takes any kind of joy in seeking life from others or taking life from others.

Father, you call us to a life that is like yours, and it’s out of our reach. And we try over and over again, and when we experience our failures, we lose hope. So create in us a deep longing for, an understanding of this great gift of your indwelling presence so that we know that, when we turn to you and open our hearts to you to flow through us, that we will always be able to be exactly who you call us to be. So free us from the doubts and the shame that come from too much trust in our own ability to be who you call us to be, and open us to this beautiful gift that you have given us, your presence living in us, feeding us and enlightening us. Amen.

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SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Jeremiah 17:5-8 | 1 Corinthians 15:12, 16-20 | Luke 6:17, 20-26

Oh God who teach us that you abide in hearts that are just and true, grant that we may be so fashioned by your grace as to become a dwelling pleasing to you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This is a fascinating gospel to me because of the way in which I feel Jesus was talking to two groups of people, one the disciples and the other the crowd. So I want to talk first about what I think he was doing with the crowd that he had in front of him. I’m always fascinated by the fact that Jesus could talk to so many people, like 500 or something like that, without a microphone and all that stuff. Anyway, he must have had a very wonderful voice that carried. That’s a wonderful way of thinking of him, with his beautiful voice and a beautiful message. But back to the audience, one of the things that’s clear in the Old Testament that’s different than the New Testament is the Old Testament there is a strong theme that human beings are earning salvation. They’re earning the love of God. It shows up over and over and over again, because God first revealed himself to the Israelites by saying, “I am — I want you to understand that I am the only God, and I have a burning desire to connect with you, to lead you, to guide you to a place that you cannot get to on your own, a place you don’t even know fully what it is. But I want you to trust me. Go with me to a land that you have never been there before.” And that’s a good image of the way in which God comes into human nature and changes the way we imagine things, the way we see things, but again, back to the image in the Old Testament. It’s basically that, when God was working with them, he would do this: he would say, “I will show you how much I love you by helping you with your enemies.” Now, you have to understand, back at the time that this was written — that’s almost 4,000 years ago — life was very different, and enemies were something that was real. You just had to — it’s why the cities were all walled, and there was always some group that might come in and destroy you. So there was a sense of war and battle throughout the whole thing. So that’s where you see God working with the Israelites. “I will be the source of your success in battle, and I will crush the enemy for you,” which must have sounded wonderful. But then that same God revealed himself as the source of everything. He was the source of that kind of goodness to his people, but he was also the source of evil, which is hard for us to imagine. But they saw gods as in charge. Anything bad that happened, it was the God that was angry, and so God acted like the rest of the gods so they could begin to understand. “All right, he’s credible. He’s like the other gods.” But they’re going to learn slowly how different he is, and that’s not fully revealed until Jesus. But basically what I’m trying to say is that there is this pattern in the Old Testament of God being the source of all good and all evil, and one of the things in which that left people with was the sense that God could turn on them. And he could crush their enemies, but if they didn’t do what they were told, he’d crush them.

So in that system of God’s favor, if you follow the rules and the laws, that was something that pleased God very much. So there are many people who just follow the letter of the law, and the sign that they follow the letter of the law was wealth, abundance, well-being, a wonderful, glorious life, almost like a prosperity gospel. Turn to God and believe in him, and your world becomes rich and full of all that the world offers. That’s what basically was being presented to these people. And so the opposite would be, if you were sick, if you had leprosy, if you had a problem that was really terrible, then that was always God punishing you, and if you didn’t do anything wrong, then you were told, “Well, it was your parents’ sin, and you’re being punished for their sins.” So they have an image that God’s favor is a result of their obedience, and God’s favor would be that they would not have disease or a difficult life situation. So the sign of God’s favor was prosperity. So Jesus in this thing flips it. He said, “No, the rich, those that are satisfied, those that are accepted, those that are looked up and honored, they’re in trouble. Woe to them. A warning: you’re not going to be who I call you to be living in a life of —” I will just stretch it a little bit, “— luxury and prosperity.” But there’s something else.

There’s another way of living and of being in union with God. God’s not interested in taking care of all of your needs so that life is easy. But if you’re like me, I don't know, if you have something horrible that happens — I hear this from many people. Something bad happens. They say, “Oh, God is upset with me,” or, “What did I do to deserve this?” And those are still remnants of that way human nature is wired together naturally, that we think pleasing someone gains some kind of access to their generosity and their goodness, and that’s normal. But it’s not who God is. God is the one who longs to dwell within you and within me. Jesus reveals him in his fullness. He’s a lover. He’s someone that’s come into your world not to judge you but to forgive you. He wants to offer you the fullness of life, and the fullness of life is such a beautiful image. There’s a way in which scripture captures that gift of life so beautifully in the image of water — water, life-giving water. Remember the woman at the well when Jesus met her, and he broke all the rules by talking to her, because no rabbi or Jew would talk to a gentile? He just disregarded those laws and had a conversation with her and said, “If you knew who I was, you would ask me for a drink, and that drink would be a life-giving fountain inside of you.”

So listen to the image in the first reading, because it’s really beautiful. It’s also in the Responsorial Psalm. We in this life are like a plant that God has placed here, set on the earth, and we see two images of plants. One is a barren bush in a lava waste. I went to Iceland a couple of years ago, and I know what a lava waste looks like. It’s devastatingly empty of any life, and here’s a bush with no leaves sitting in it. That’s the human being who trusts only in himself and needs nothing from God, is not interested in God and maybe doesn’t reject him so much. We don’t necessarily go around rejecting God, but we ignore him. It’s a really hard thing to imagine that we do, but we ignore his help, his presence. And our life becomes empty, and that’s an image to me of darkness and depression. And then the other image is a beautiful tree, tall and strong, filled with beautiful leaves and fruit to nurture other people, and it’s right next to a river, a stream. So it can endure the extremes of weather, because the water is always there. What a beautiful image to hold in our hearts of that’s who God wants to be in your life and in mine, life-giving water, a source of life.

So I said the last of these — well, let me put it this way. What God was doing to the audience in general was shocking them with almost a scandalous way of describing God by saying he is not showing favor to people, or people are not receiving this favor from God as a reward for their perfection. And the ones that are in serious struggle and striving and working and struggling, those are the ones that have received God’s favor. So they flipped the image. So it’s wonderful, and it’s also, when he flips the image, he’s also directing the words now not so much to the crowd, but he’s directing them to his disciples. And let’s look at why this reading fits so well to what the disciples were getting ready for and what Jesus was getting them ready for, and it’s this: “I’m asking you to give up everything, not so much your fishing with your family and giving up family and coming and following me, but I’m — like God in the Old Testament, I’m going to take you to a brand new place, and you are not going to be able to endure it and understand it without my presence in you. So I am going to put you in a place of great emptiness, I guess you would say, poverty.” He’s saying, “You are going to experience something that is essential to you being a person who depends upon me for everything that you really need. You will receive a sense in yourself that you are not enough for what I’m asking from you.” Because he’s going to ask for their life. They were all martyred. So he’s saying, “What I want you to do is understand that I am going to be in your life. I’m entering into your life to change you, but I need your poverty to enter in, because if you don’t have a need for something more than you can handle on your own, you probably won’t turn to me.” Isn’t that interesting? The blessing of poverty is not necessarily being without money. The blessing of poverty is, “I am not self-sufficient.” And that’s like an opening to the rich, wonderful waters of life. And he says, “You’re going to thirst for things.” And I think what that thirst is all about is longing. If we have a longing to do something that we really long to see happen, we want it very much, and it’s something that’s hard to achieve without wisdom or without a lot of discipline. And when you’re in that disposition of deep thirst and longing for something more than you are, you also have another way of inviting God into your life, because he’s going to come in, because you’re going to instinctively cry out for help. “Oh God, what am I going to do?” So the person who is not enough, the person who longs to make the world better but can’t figure out how and perhaps doesn’t have the energy to do what is necessary, God is there to help them, and they’re open to it.

He’s also saying, “Blessed are the sad,” which is interesting. And the disciples, I don’t know if you’d say the life they led was sad, but the sadness that I think he’s talking about is the awareness, the being awake to what is happening in the world. And one of the things that Jesus wanted his disciples to see so clearly was the abuse that was happening through the temple and the extreme demand of laws and rules and condemnation and judgment and expensive rituals for forgiveness. He saw the temple as a horrible place, and so he wanted them to realize how many people were suffering deeply so that they would be, I would say, blessed with an awareness of the pain the world that doesn’t necessarily have to be there and certainly should not be attached to God and his divinity. And so they were very conscious, compassionate, had empathy to the people that were suffering.

And the last is, “Blessed are you when they reject you.” And I don't know if you think about this much, but I’ve often thought that, when you are like the rest of the culture — let’s just say whatever the culture honors, you’ve got it. If it’s height, you’re tall. If it’s handsome or beautiful, it’s that. If you’ve got a great education, all these things, if you fit in this category of being what the culture and society expects to be — that you should be, then you’re going to be acceptable. Everybody looks up to you and puts you as a model or something like that. But all of that is the subtlety of the way human beings, in order to belong, in order to feel acceptable, will become whatever they need to be. If there’s one thing the disciples are going to have to have, it’s this strength inside of them that is so convincing that they know that, when they start preaching and they are rejected and they’re trying to destroy them, and they ultimately will destroy them and take their life — all but John was martyred — it’s because they have confidence, confidence in who they are, confidence in their message.

It’s interesting that, when you think of these gifts of being confident, of being compassionate, of being — wanting the world to be better, of realizing that we humbly are not enough, all those are such blessings, and that’s why he could say, “Blessed are the poor, the thirsty, the sad and the rejected.” What a beautiful way in which he’s beginning to form the disciples, and this is even before he called them. They were listening, but they were there. So I wonder what their conversations were afterwards? “Who is this guy? What’s he talking about?” But then living with him, working with them, he in their presence made all the difference, and what God was saying to them is, “I am in my Son, and when my Son was your life-giving source, it was a sign that that’s who I am, and that’s who I want to be.” So anything that moves you or me to realize any of these weaknesses that we have and see them and feel them, then we know that we’ll be more open and receptive to this incredibly complicated but simple but wonderful in-dwelling presence of God. It’s what I long for everyone to feel. It’s what I long to feel over and over again, and there are moments when I feel it. And it slips away, and I feel insufficient. The key is to trust that he will be there when he needs to be there.

Father, your longing for intimacy with us is beyond our imagining, and so bless us with the kind of imagination that can be excited by the fact that, if this is true, imagine the things we can accomplish, that I can accomplish. Imagine the anxiety that will go away. That’s our inheritance. That’s the challenge to believe in who God really is. So bless us with openness to him. Amen.

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FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Isaiah 6:1-2a, 3-8 | 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 | Luke 5:1-11

Before I begin my reflections, I just had a feeling while I was listening to the music. We used to be able to play popular music or songs that people could hum to or sing along with the words, and I always made sure I picked songs that fit the theme I was working on. And that was wonderful, but we’re unable to do that since we’re on so many stations. But what I just felt, when I was listening to that, is it’s important that you understand why I chose that piece of music that was written especially for our show and what I’m hoping it will affect in you. And I was just listening to it, and it had a way of just washing my mind away from everything that was a possible distraction. It was like I just sat there and let the music pour over me and just felt like cleansing water, just getting rid of my distractions so I would be open to whatever God is going to say to you through me, which I truly believe I do that. And I want you to know I believe I do that. Otherwise, I don’t know where I get the — how would I say it even — the energy to do this work, because I believe in it so much. Anyway, I’m just hoping that piece of music works for you as it works for me.

Now let’s look at the readings, and what’s so interesting about the theme of this particular set of readings, it’s all about God calling people into a relationship with him. In the first reading, we have the call of Isaiah. In the second reading, it’s the call of Paul, and in the last, it’s the beginning of the call of the disciples. He was showing them a miracle, and the miracle was amazingly effective to teach them something about this Jesus who was to them simply an ordinary man. And now they began to realize this man Jesus had something within him, is someone who has this power inside of him to accomplish things that are beyond what human beings can accomplish. So there’s always this image when God is presenting himself to someone and inviting that person to enter into a relationship with him, and the relationship is primarily about teaching and preaching who God is. Then it’s interesting that there’s included a manifestation of some great power, something awesome. In the case of Isaiah, he has a vision of God and all these angels, seraphim, the highest of all the angels, doing nothing but praising this figure, God, this awesome God. And what you see in that is the reaction inside of Isaiah is the reaction that each one of these men are having, and that is the first thing they think of is, “Get away from me, God. I’m a sinful man. I’m an imperfect man. I’m an impure man.” And isn’t it interesting that somehow in religion that is calling us to a high level of moral and truthful life, when God wants to come and be with us, the first instinct is, “I’m not good enough. I don’t have what you might ask of me to give to another person. I’m a sinner.” Paul has a way of doing it. I love Paul so much, because Paul, when he’s talking about it — Isaiah has this vision of God in heaven. Paul has an experience of Jesus talking to him, appearing to him, and asking him to be his messenger to the Gentiles, and Paul is aware that he has been crucifying those who believe in Christianity, and he’s shocked by the fact that this God would come to him, one of God’s enemies, that Jesus would come to him and say, “I need you. I need your talent.” And that’s a miracle in and of itself, the overwhelming ability of God to look past our weaknesses and our sins. It so impressed Paul, and then the disciples, they were ordinary guys, fishermen, and they had heard about this Jesus. They had listened to him, and you’re going to hear more about the way Jesus got to the more intimate way in which he called them, but this was the beginning of their interest in maybe following this man, because he did something extraordinary. If you’re a fisherman and you get that kind of fish, you’re pretty impressed.

So what am I saying? There’s a couple of things that you need to be aware of that is in your destiny, because you have been created by God, and you are called by God to be his prophet, his teacher, his priest, his minister. It’s amazing, and when you realize that, that you have this destiny in some form, in some — it may be minuscule compared to the work that was done by Paul or Isaiah or the apostles themselves, but nevertheless, you have to believe that, in your destiny, is this promise that God himself will come and dwell inside of you. And that indwelling presence will make you so powerfully effective, because Isaiah, the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, in teaching the future, who Jesus is going to be — there are more references to who Jesus is, how he was born, that he died, and he rose, it’s all in Isaiah. Where did he get that? From God. Paul was such an effective preacher and even it was told that it was a tradition that he raised someone from the dead. Where did he get all of that? God inside of him. The disciples gave up everything, even their lives, for this work, and they were so effective, but they also were empowered with such great experience of having the same power that Jesus had when he walked the earth. So Jesus is the model of who we can become. He’s also for us the model of who God truly is, because he is God. So if you can feel with me what I’m trying to say, I’m saying everyone is called to some degree in this work of God dwelling in them and resonating his strength through them to the people around them that need whatever gift they’re longing for.

Now I want to be personal and just share with you a vision, an insight. I don't know what you call it, but I was deep in a meditative state, and I heard God talking to me. And this is — I don’t want to say that I’m like a Paul or something like that, but in a way I am, that God can talk to you directly. It’s not — you don’t hear a voice, but if you get deep enough in a meditative state, you can feel, not only hear the voice, you can feel the voice. And these are the things he was saying to me. It was really interesting. It was clear to me that he was describing my call and what he did to me as a human being, which he does to all of us. I’m not special in this. And one is, he said, “I want to take you. I want to take you. I want to teach you. I want to hold you. I want to free you.” Take me, teach me, hold me, free me. And I just felt, when I heard those words, that that was somehow the ministry that God has given to me, and then I waited, and he explained some of it. He said, “Take me means I enter into your life, and I don’t just send you an invitation in the mail that you can read and say, ‘Huh, I guess I’ll go and find out who this is.’” No, he said, “I enter into you, and I take your hand, and I take you, just symbolically, I take you into a new level of awareness of who you are, why you’re here and who I am.” It’s more than just an invitation. It’s a passion for God to want you to be intimately connected to him. And then what he says, “I want to teach you. I want to teach you, and I want you to teach others.” And what’s so interesting about the teaching of God is that it comes in different forms, and one of the ways it comes is through the story. I don’t see how you can really enter into an understanding of God without listening to the story, the Old Testament and the New Testament. It is loaded with information and loaded with a kind of symbolic language that ignites something inside of you when you hear it clearly, and you begin to see who God really is and who you can be in him. So the teaching is not just about information, but it’s about a kind of consciousness of yourself and who God is. It’s more about not just the story but your story with God. And then the next one was hold me, and so what he does is, when he enters into you and invites you to do things, he’s not in a way teaching you to do something and you go off and do it on your own and then you kind of come back to him and see what he thought about it. No, this is where we really get into the intimacy of God living inside of you. It’s more like he’s there next to you, holding you but actually being inside of you. The idea of being held by someone is an intimacy where there’s a flow of life between you and the other person. That’s what God is using. He uses the strangest — not the strangest but a kind of — I’m glad I didn’t come up with this image, but he did. “I want to marry you. I want to be your wife. I want to be your husband. I want to be that intimate with you in the sense of we become one.” So the holding is really a beautiful image, and then the last thing in that vision was free me, free me. And did you notice that every one of the prophets and all the people that I just talked about, Isaiah, Paul and the disciples, “I’m not worthy. I’m not worthy. I’m not worthy. Free me from shame, and free me from guilt.” That’s what he wants to do for us. He wants to free us, and it’s so interesting. I don't know why we carry this, I don't know, this kind of communal guilt, but one of the things that’s interesting to me about shame and guilt, you can be ashamed of things you’ve done. But you’re part of the human race, right? I’m part of the human race, and when you think about it, when you’re in this relationship with humans, you are a part of them. And when you look at what we’ve done at times in history — there’s just recently the Holocaust anniversary, and you listen to what human nature is capable of doing to other human beings. When you pick up the paper and you read of abuse and genocide and these people who are so bent on destruction and abuse, and you say, “Well, that’s my race. That’s us.” There probably is, unbeknownst to us, a communal guilt for the sins of our humanity, and we have our own, of course, to add to that. But to be freed of that is the key to God to enter into you, to really fully enter in, to hold you, to completely open your eyes to the mystery of the story, and then to delight in the fact that this is not something that is a general invitation. No, it’s you he wants, you to do just what you and you only can do and are needed to do for the people around you. It changes so much for me when I feel this mystical invitation to be a part of the divine heart, mind and intention. Amen.

Father, your will is that you enter into us and become a part of who we are. For us it seems beyond our imagining that we, human, broken, sinful, could be elevated to a place of carrying you into the world. What a privilege, what an honor, what a responsibility, but that’s what you teach us. That’s what you’re saying. So free us from the shame and the guilt that might keep us from being so receptive to this awesome gift of you inside of us, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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FOURTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Jeremiah 1:4-5, 17-19 | 1 Corinthians 12:31—13:13 | Luke 4:21-30

Grant us, Lord our God, that we may honor you with all our mind and love everyone in truth of heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The beautiful thing about this opening prayer I just prayed is the way it focuses on two very, very essential things that we are called to do, and one of the things we are called to do, first and foremost, is to be reflective, to live a reflective life, to not just allow things to be what they are on the surface but to take some time to look deeply into what is going on in the world around us, in ourselves, in the people that we love. Pay attention. Pay attention.

It was about 11 years ago that I stepped away from my active ministry. I’d been at it for a very long time, over 40 years, and I remember those years were years of wonderfully — they were wonderfully filled with memories and events and celebrations and struggles with my own self and with the work that I had before me, but there was something about that time where I was moving so quickly from one thing to another to another to another. And there was just one sort of focus I had in my head, and that was, “How can I take care of this thing right now that’s before me?” And that may be like your life, some of us that are still so caught up in things that are happening, and there’s nothing — and we have to be in a sense. But the wisdom that we’re called to have, the wisdom that’s found in this opening prayer, when it says so simply that there are two things that we need to do, to honor God and to love with our hearts, and that seems so very simple and so very easy. But it’s to ask ourselves at times to reflect on who God is and what’s going on in the world and how do we imagine God being some force in the world that we need to understand and be in touch with. How do understand what it means to love each other? What’s our responsibility to each other? Those are things that are not easy questions, and unless we sit with them and reflect on them, we can’t develop the spiritual life that is our inheritance. So we start the reflection on this set of readings with that understanding. There are two very simple things. Who is God, and what are we to do in this world in relationship to our brothers and sisters?

And the first reading is so beautiful, from Jeremiah, because it starts off with a phrase that is so wonderful to ponder. “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I dedicated you. I appointed you to the role, to the task that I want you to have.” And this is directed to a prophet, and prophets seem to be those unique people that God calls to be his voice. But we have to understand there’s a prophetic role that every believer, every human being carries by their very human nature. We are proclaiming what we believe and how we see the world without ever having to use a word about describing it, our very actions. Actions make clear to another person who we are and what we see our role in this world to be. If we’re filled with anxiety, if we’re filled with worry, it’s pretty clear that we don’t believe in a God who is there to take care of us and protect us. If we’re constantly competing with each other, if we’re threatened by each other’s successes or take pride in being better than someone else, we’re really not loving like we should. So these are the two things that I think we are, again, focusing on. So the first reading gives us Jeremiah, and he’s basically saying unless we look at this God for who he is, we’ll miss one very essential role that he has, and that’s to make us a pillar of iron, a wall of brass to be able to endure anything that comes to us.

I don't know if you’re like me, but most of the time, when I get overwhelmed, like I feel like I am during this pandemic at times, confused as to what it is, what I should do to protect myself, how I should do that, whether I’ll get it or not — and the truth is, last Christmas I did get it, but I had no symptoms, because I’d been vaccinated and boosted, but whatever. The point is, when those moments come, do I believe in my heart that I have this strength inside of me that is divine. And that begins with a reflection on what is divinity, and if divinity isn’t for you some kind of sense of God’s indwelling presence — he lives inside of you. That’s the whole message of Jesus. Jesus is the incarnation of God in human beings, and Jesus remained mysteriously a fully human being and a fully divine figure in the world. And that is our destiny, to live in divinity, and if you try to say, “Well, what does that mean?” Then what you need to do again is to reflect on what does it mean that God dwells in me, and where does he dwell. He dwells in our hearts, and so that opening prayer, the truth of the heart, the reality of God living inside of you, guiding you, directing you, being the strength you need — and if you look for signs of that, if you look for them, that’s not where you start. You start with the conviction that it’s true. Why? Because the story, the salvation history story is all about that one mysterious union of divinity and humanity. So one of the ways in which we imagine this divinity inside of us is the ability that it gives us to withstand that which might throw us into darkness and depression. And it was never fully there until Jesus, until that mysterious thing called salvation, God in Jesus saving the world from sin and from darkness.

So we see the image in this first reading, that we need to look very carefully at who God is and what he’s doing within us, and it’s about giving us strength, a strength that is then empowering us. And one would think that one would want that. “Gosh, I would love to have this strength inside of me, doing what I long to do on my own but I can’t.” If you look at this gospel passage, which is fascinating, about Jesus going back to his hometown as a prophet, as one who carries this message in his very being that divinity now dwells in human beings, and he proclaims it to his friends and his family in his hometown — and his reputation there might have been, as many say, not so perfect. He wasn’t the perfect man in the image of the people in the village, because they knew about this marriage thing with his parents. It’s pretty clear that they believe that Jesus might be illegitimate and born out of wedlock, and if that were the case, of course, that would mean that he was the outcast. So let’s just imagine, if not an outcast, he was just one of the ordinary people. And he stands up in the synagogue, but he had been — that’s something he did. It wasn’t like he was a layman, just got up and started talking at the microphone, and they say, “Who is this guy?” No, he had done this many times, stood up and taught, but his message, his message was so astounding and so amazing that it, even though it sound — the way he said it and the beauty of the way he put things was so obvious that he was an extraordinary teacher and preacher. And yet they heard something very, very, very different, and that was the part of them that felt judged, I believe, because what Jesus was reading from was the prophet Isaiah. Last week we heard that reading, and basically what he was saying was, “Look, I’m here, because you don’t really see that much. You need to see more, so I’ve come to open your eyes.” And he’s also said, “Many of you are living in darkness, a darkness of self-centeredness, a darkness of using people, a darkness of sin, whatever, or depression. I’ve come to free you from that.” So here’s a buddy that they grew up with coming in to say, “I’m the one that is going to be the voice of God, and I am going to open your eyes and help you to see things and help you to be aware of your faults. And I’m there for you.” And all of a sudden, they took it in the wrong way. I think they took it as here’s an ordinary person who has his own faults and his own darkness, and he’s telling us that we need help and that we’re dark. And they were enraged, and I thought to myself, “What is it in someone that is that visceral in their response to being told they need help?” It’s a person living in a world of control and of fear and of hidden shame and of repressed anger, and it was triggered in that moment. And instead of saying, “I don’t really think this guy has too much to say. He’s too ordinary, and let’s just walk away,” no, they wanted to kill him. They wanted to kill him. The message that you are not enough on your own can trigger in a human being an action. If they are frightened that that is true and they’re living as if they can handle everything on their own and they’re very autonomous and don’t think they need anyone’s help, you’re going to get a reaction like that. And so what is that saying to us? The importance of being in union with your humanity. It’s natural not to see. It’s natural not to be aware of the darkness that’s in you and not aware of the help that God longs to give you. And when someone points it out, you should say, “My God, you’re right. Help me. Show me.”

And then the middle reading is so beautiful. It says, “Okay, you want to know what it is that I’ve come —” Jesus is saying, “If you want to know what I’m coming to do is I’m asking you not so much to be judged, because I’m going to do something for you where I’m going to forgive you of all your sins.” But you haven’t — you can’t — he couldn’t fully say that in that first homily in the synagogue in his hometown, but the point is, that I want to make, is that the thing that God has come to say in Jesus is not a condemning voice but rather an encouraging voice that says, “There’s one core thing you need to do beyond honoring me, God the Father, for giving you a destiny, for guiding you and making you exactly who you are and placing you in the world exactly when you need to be there. And the only thing I want you to do for me is ask me to help you, but don’t ask so much for spectacular gifts and powers and to be able to give the perfect homily on a Sunday morning.” I’m kidding. It’s not to empower us to be great, but the beauty of this message is to empower you to treat each other with dignity and with an intention. And the intention is, “I have been loved. I have been given something from God that gives me, for the first time, insight, awareness. I feel safe, because I have his strength inside of me. I feel empowered, because he’s giving me the ability to do the essential thing, which is to be there for my brothers and sisters. I have all that.” And so that’s this incredible invitation in the part of this beautiful passage. It’s probably one of the most famous passages of St. Paul when he’s saying, “Look, don’t strive to be extraordinary. Don’t strive to be better than your brothers and sisters in anything, much less the spiritual world, but do this: pay attention to the simplest of things, love.” Love is the essential core of what it means to carry divinity through you. If you have it inside of you, it passes through you to another person, and it’s not going to be through healing them of cancer or doing — giving them some insight that they look at you and say, “You’re the smartest, most wonderful person in the world.” No, it’s going to come from the ordinariness of being in their presence with an intention flowing out of your heart that says, “You are valuable. You are loved. You are beautiful. I want to be there for you.” And that’s something that, when you begin to feel it and do it, it is so satisfying. And when you think, “Well, what am I being strengthened to do? How am I going to see God’s strength working through me? I want to do something spectacular so that everybody says, ‘Oh my God, God is real. He did this miracle.’” No, God is real in people’s lives, because the people that are claiming to be his followers, knowing him, realizing he’s inside of you, are a constant flow of energy and light that lifts us out of darkness, a light that gives us a sense of our value. What greater gift could we have? It’s so simple, because it’s a mindset that, “I’m here to treat everyone as I would like to be treated.” Is that that hard to do when you think about it? How many people will tell you about customer service and somebody that treats them badly and how offensive it is? And yet we do that to other people without even realizing it. So the key and the heart of this whole thing is love.

Father, your strength is so beyond ours. It’s hard for us to imagine that you would share your strength with us, but that’s your will. That’s your desire, to dwell in our hearts and empower us to be who you want to be in the lives of the people in our circle, our family, our friends. So bless us with a conviction of faith in that gift so that our hearts are never frightened or never struggling to find something that gives us a sense of value. We have a value in being the most simple, loving, ordinary people. So give us that strength. Give us that joy. Give us that peace. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Nehemiah 8:2-4a, 5-6, 8-10 | 1 Corinthians 12:12-30 | Luke 1:1-4; 4:14-21

Almighty, everliving God, direct our actions according to your good pleasure that in the name of your Beloved Son we may abound in good works. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

One of the things that has happened to me as a priest is that I was ordained at a time in the church history that was phenomenal, and that was the Vatican Council. For about every hundred years, as an average, the church has gathered its leadership together to analyze and look at the way in which — what direction the church is moving and where things were developing. And from the beginning of that history of the church, the majority of the time since the time of Christ that there’s been councils called to crush a heresy, somebody trying to decide whether God was — Jesus was a God, or was he a man. That was one of the first major council decisions that were made, and they decided he was both human and divine, which I love that answer, because it sets the tone for everything that is being revealed by God. And that is its mysterious quality. It’s not a simple black and white, right or wrong religion. It’s filled with this mysterious thing called wisdom, which is a both/and kind of way of seeing the world. It is a — it takes into account the old and the new of the whole story of salvation history in a beautiful way.

So having grown up at that time, one of the things that happened that changed a lot was that there was a great emphasis placed in the Vatican Council, second Vatican Council, and that was the emphasis on the individual, the individual’s conscience, the dignity of the individual and how the church had to look at herself to make sure that the things that she was teaching were there to enhance the life of the individuals in their own experiences. It was a wonderful shift away from a stress on the institution to a stress on the individuals in the institution. How is the church teaching and preaching to the people, and how are they responding? And there’s a tension there. There’s always been a tension between two different focuses. One we see in the first reading of this set of readings, and it’s where religion becomes an authority, outside authority that is based on their position. And your relationship to them is subservient, and you are listening to everything they tell you, and you follow it, not because you understand it or believe it necessarily but because you’re told to do it. You’re not only told what to do. You’re told how to feel about what you’re doing.

And so in this first reading, which is so beautiful, when Ezra the priest is bringing a law before the people — and the law was basically the Torah, the teaching of the core of the Old Testament. The Torah is the core, I guess, of what it is that Jesus initially came to teach his people. And it’s a law, and it’s a beautiful, powerful way of describing what’s right and what’s wrong. And the interesting thing about the way it’s described in this, it’s a long process to read this law, from early morning to midday, and the other thing I find interesting is that image of the person who’s proclaiming it is elevated and in a position of more importance, and everyone is bowing down to the ground and listening. And the most interesting thing to me is that then they begin to weep. They’re listening to all the things that they should be doing, and their human nature must be very much racing in their heads, saying, “I don’t do this. I haven’t accomplished this. I’m not that good yet,” or whatever. And I think it’s interesting. When Ezra notices that they’re all weeping, he says, “No, no. This is really wonderful stuff. You’ve got to trust in this. This is giving you knowledge that you need to have. You should be rejoicing.” And I think it’s interesting that, if the first reaction one has to being held to a higher code of behavior is sadness, there is something that’s hopeful. If you say, well, if you don’t know what it is you’re called to, that’s even more frightening, but if you know what the core of who you are meant to be is this, and it’s out of your reach, you’re in a better position than if you have no idea what’s right and wrong. So just imagine. What we have in the Old Testament is this wonderful tradition of giving people wisdom, and the best way to describe that wisdom is in the Ten Commandments. But there’s still external rules and laws outside of what we would say — it’s not so much that it empowers us to do it but tells us what it is.

But then the New Testament comes along, this beautiful, beautiful way of describing the mystery that is proclaimed in Jeremiah where it’s clearly stated that there’s coming a time when this law that you’ve listened to, that’s outside of you, that you’re going to follow because of the authority of the people over you is going to shift its focus. And it’s going to no longer be outside of you but inside of you, and what God had promised through Jesus, and then Jesus says it himself, is, “I’m going to write this on your hearts, write it in your mind. It’ll be in you. It’ll be part of you. You’ll know these things.” That’s the most beautiful thing about the Judeo/Christian tradition. You have to understand it first as a regulation and rule that is outside of someone, and your obligation is to follow it or be destroyed. The New Testament is no, it’s not as black and white as that. It’s no, you can be given this beautiful wisdom, this piece of information that you need, that you know who you are meant to be, but then you’re adding to that the most extraordinary gift of the New Testament, and that’s redemption, that every time you fail, every time you mess up, it’s not punishment but forgiveness, compassion, understanding. It just makes everything so radically different than the Old Testament, but still there’s this tension in institutional churches that I still find. The Vatican Council to me so excited me that now the focus was not so much on what the church is demanding but on the response of the people, and is what the church demanding correct? To even have the church ask itself that question back then was phenomenal and hopeful, but it’s always still a tension, a tension in this thing we call our faith, our religion.

And there’s two other images in this reading that help in this whole story of what I’m trying to make. In a way it’s the focus of my ministry. I want people to understand there’s this major shift between authority and power over you and a different kind of authority that empowers you. So power over you is Old Testament. Empowered is New Testament. And it doesn’t mean that some people aren’t in a position where they need power over them. They need to be told what to do. They need to be threatened. That will stay always. That’s part of a lower level of human nature. We have to have that, but that’s not all that’s available. And when I see this beautiful image of Jesus returning to his hometown to tell the people that he knows who he is now — and he grew up there, and I consider he was probably thought to be an outcast because of his story. Everybody knew that Mary wasn’t really a virgin — well, they thought she wasn’t a virgin, but she had a child outside of wedlock, and that made Jesus be considered one of the lowest forms of human nature, that he was illegitimate. There’s a lot of teaching about that or a lot of history about that, but nevertheless, the point being that he comes back, and he’s the ordinary human being and maybe less than an ordinary human being, and he proclaims the truth in such a beautiful way, saying, “Look, I’m going to be the one that explains this whole thing to you, not just by words but by my very actions. You’re going to see God in me do something that changes the entire relationship that the human nature has with divinity.” No longer is it about right and wrong, punishment and reward. It’s about this mysterious, mercurial place of wisdom where, in the process of our understanding who we really are and who God is and what we’re here for, we are given the right to make personal, conscious choices. And we’ll be held accountable for those choices, yes, in one sense, but when we make the freedom — we have the freedom to make the choice that we believe in, there’s something radically different about doing that which you believe in versus that which you must or are forced to do because you don’t believe in it. One leads to anger, shame, fear, and that’s the shadow of an authoritative religion that isn’t listening to your needs or your situation or your intention. It’s just laying this sort of — this imprisoning sort of sense that you have only one option here. “Do it this way, whether you think about it — whether you think it’s right or not. That’s all you — you don’t have any rights.” And what a tragedy to see that. Religion falls back on that as a default, and I think individually we fall back on it as a default. Sometimes things are just so, so complicated, and we go back to the most basic rules and laws. And that’s not all bad at all. Sometimes we need to tell some — when you’re in a difficult moral situation, “Tell me what to do. I don’t know what to do.” But then there’s times when you’re in a situation and you know in your heart what you must do, and the law says you can’t. Where are you? And if people follow too much that old system, if they just say, “That’s the only system we have. It’s the only system that we will allow you to have,” then they’ve done something so violent to your very dignity. And that doesn’t make an authoritarian church evil or bad. It just means that you have to be careful of any institution, and every institution has its shadow. There’s no doubt about it. I’m not claiming that any religion is free of an authoritarian override over your conscience, but at the same time, you have to know the fullness of the story.

And the beauty of the story — the second reading, which is one of my favorites, when it talks about, “You know what? A community of believers are made up of all different kinds of people.” And you want all different kinds of people, and you want some people that are very, let’s say, like the attractive parts of the body, their beautiful eyes, their beautiful lips, whatever other parts. I don’t really have to say them, but you use sometimes those kinds of words to describe them. And they’re not that attractive, and they’re not that beautiful. I don't know. Maybe we think that, in an institution where authority is so powerful, that we can create in a community only where there’s beautiful, life-giving Christians. You know that kind of religion where everybody in that religion sort of begins to talk the same and have the same phrases and the same way of seeing things. That’s a caricature of what is truly a believing, faith-filled, God-fearing, God-loving community. We’re on all different levels of goodness, and yet all of us are important. All of us are part of that story.

So I guess what I’m really trying to say in the simplest way, that the wisdom that I’ve learned for a long time, through this period of many years, is just so simple and so clear. We have a God who loves. We have a God who forgives. We have a God who trusts in us. He gives us the best directions he can and says, “These are the things, the principles you need to follow. Now you make decisions, and you do it. And if you fail and you realize later it was the wrong thing to do, you don’t feel bad, because you did the best that you could.” It’s the idea of living with the compassionate understanding, loving presence inside of you that has one fundamental reason for being there: to enable you to become all that you’re intended to be. All that you’re intended to be, and how can you be that without making mistakes? How can you be that way without going through experience after experience of maybe making the right choice or the wrong choice? Each one has an incredible value, but if you don’t live in a kind of open spirit of that, then you have this authoritarian, demanding, judgmental, punishing situation. And just be careful. Be careful of it, because it robs you of a dignity, and you know how angry people get when their freedoms are taken away from them. There’s probably nothing more interesting about the pandemic. When we see people being forced to do something they don’t believe in and they just — you can see this human nature part of us that just says, “I am not going to do something I don’t believe in.” And there’s something in that that’s valid, but there’s something in the promise that we’re given the wisdom to make the right decision that is so hopeful. That’s the reason to rejoice, eat fine foods and drink fine wines. That’s the way to do it. Amen.

Father, you’ve created community after community of believers, and we’ve taken different stands, and different issues, as different religions have evolved, always have been there. So guide us with the enthusiasm that you have promised to fill us with when you say, “I will be in you. I will write my laws on your heart and on your mind. You will know what is right.” That’s our inheritance. That’s such a gift to celebrate. So thank you for the gift of wisdom, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Isaiah 62:1-5 | 1 Corinthians 12:4-11 | John 2:1-11

Almighty, everliving God, who governs all things, both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Last Sunday we celebrated the baptism of Jesus, and in that image of the Spirit descending upon him at his baptism in a bodily form and a voice being heard from the heavens, and the voice was saying very clearly, “You are my Beloved. My favor, my love, my presence is poured into you, and there’s a deep, deep oneness in us.” And what’s so important about that image is because that’s what it means to be baptized. It means that the relationship that we have with God is so amazingly free of anything that would keep him out from us, anything in us that would keep us from him, it was a celebration of the promise that God has made to all of us, that intimacy with him is the goal. It’s been the goal from the call of Abraham. It’s been the goal from Adam and Eve. God wants an intimate relationship with you. And it’s a struggle to find that intimacy, and I think it’s because of the Old Testament primarily. And that is this: the Old Testament is the beginning of the revelation of who God is. It is not the full revelation of who God is, and the unique thing that one has to have engaged in their imagination, when they read the Old Testament, is that this is a process of God slowly revealing himself. And the slowness of it is based on the capacity of people to understand, and so God does not reveal himself fully to Abraham and to the people that he was calling Abraham to form for him. He was — first of all, you can feel in what he’s saying that it’s a little bit — it’s radically different than the New Testament, but what it’s about, it’s about God is saying, when we take the first reading, that God is calling people into a community of Israelites, his people. He said, “I want, Abraham, I want you to call a people together that I will bless them as a people. And I will guide them, and I will be with them, and I will be their God, and they are my treasured ones.”

It’s amazing how religion has always a shadow of — whatever religion you belong to, they tend to tell you that they’re the only religion, the best religion. When I grew up as a Roman Catholic in the ‘40s and ‘50s, I was told, and I believed with all my heart, that if you weren’t a Roman Catholic, you couldn’t get to heaven. And we believed that, and that is not, in any way, shape or form, the essence of Christianity. It was a hangover, it seems to me, from the Old Testament when there was a certain sense of, I don't know, if God is going to favor me, does that mean he loves me more than others? Well, if he tells me he does, that makes me feel very special. It gives me confidence that he’s my God, my God, not the God of other people. And so there are two things in that first reading that you need to pay attention to. One is that God first reveals himself as having chosen a certain people, and they are his favorites, and he’s going to manifest to him his commitment by guiding them on a journey of evolution of growth and of change. And whenever there are enemies there that are in the way of this growth and change, such as the Egyptians were in the way of their becoming independent and being able to find freedom — and that’s the main theme of the Old Testament, moving from slavery into any system that keeps us from fully being who we are. And so in this process of being freed, what we see in this God of Israel, a promise, “I will be there, and if anybody’s in your way, I will just obliterate them and destroy them.” So we have a God who is kind and gentle to those who are his favorite and vicious and destructive to those who are the enemies of his favorites. That’s the way in which God was working with the imaginations of human beings at that time, because that’s what they believed when they thought of other gods.

Gods were territorial. They belonged to just a certain group of people. They actually belonged to a certain geographical area. And so God had — all the gods were having favorites, so God started out by saying, “Okay, I also am like the other gods. If you let me reveal myself slowly to you, you’ll find that there’s something unique about me.” Then what you see in the Old Testament is this God revealing himself like the other gods, except every once in a while, you’ll see him do something that doesn’t make any sense compared to the other gods, when a human being can talk God out of doing the damage to people that he intended to do out of justice. When Moses can say, “God, you can’t destroy these people. Don’t do it.” That would be unthinkable. So the Old Testament is a beautiful story of a God, like the other gods, who chooses a certain set of people, his favorites, and he protects them against their enemies, and he can destroy those enemies in vicious and horrible ways. The fact that he — I can’t imagine when the Israel, excuse me, the Egyptians were resistant to letting the Israelites leave, those plagues. And the last plague was God went in to every single family and destroyed the firstborn son, which was like taking the posterity away from all those men, because they lived in their children, and their firstborn was the way that they continued to live. It was horrible when you think of God destroying the firstborn of every family in a nation. He did that, and we have to be careful of not saying, “Okay, if a God can do that, he can condemn me anytime he wants, because if I don’t please him, I’m in real, real deep trouble.” But that’s not who God finally reveals himself to be. So he starts off with being filled with a kind of commitment to his people, a unique group of people, and he’s vicious in the way in which he protects them. And if they disappoint him, he turns that same anger towards them. Now, that’s the beginning.

It slowly evolves over 2,000 years until we get to something like we hear in the second reading, a beautiful image of what it is that God ultimately wants to be, not a God that is there for a group of people but a God who is there for every single individual. And the reason you can see that in the second reading is because he’s saying the intention of God is not simply to govern your behavior by threats of punishment, but the real intention of God is to enter into you to enable you to continue his work, to continue being the source of life that he longed to be for the Israelite community. You are now taking over that role, in a sense, and when he lives inside of you and then he cares for his people on an individual basis, it’s a whole new religion. God’s presence is given to each person for a purpose, and that purpose is your unique destiny. And that purpose is your responsibility to fulfill, but it’s the same God in everyone working in an intimate way versus through the Old Testament system, which was more impersonal. So you move from a God who, in a way, only works with groups, and he works through prophets — he doesn’t speak directly to people but through the prophets — to the New Testament where he lives inside of you. And he’s talking to you, and you have a gift, and he just wants you to believe that that gift is your unique reflection of him in the world, and you bring that into the world. And what is the most powerful, powerful manifestation of the Spirit of this God living in individuals that’s different than the Spirit of God that lived, in a sense, in a community of people? And that’s intimacy.

Intimacy, and so we have this image, last week, of the baptism of Jesus as being this moment of human nature being gifted with divine presence in this man Jesus who is also God. But careful. Remember, we have to focus on him as one just like us. Even though he was sinless, he’s still just a human being, and I think his sinlessness was the fact that he never, ever doubted his Father. He wasn’t perfect in a sense of never making a mistake or never saying a bad thing or whatever. We have to watch out to misunderstand what sin really is. The most serious sin in the world is doubting the presence of God and rejecting it, knowing what it is, and Jesus never did that. In that way, he was always sinless. Mary never doubted God’s plan for her. She was sinless. But in this wedding feast of Cana, we have something really unique and really powerful, and that is an explanation of the new relationship that God wants with human beings. And it is intimate, and there’s only one way to find intimacy between God and human beings who fail and sin and make mistakes constantly as part of the process of why they’re here, so they can grow through those things, and that is forgiveness. Without forgiveness, there’s no life, and that’s what this whole feast is about. Jesus’ primary message, primary message is intimacy with the Father, and there’s no way that you could teach that mysterious gift of God’s presence in a person if you also have a teaching that implies that, when we sin, we lose God’s favor, when we sin, we are judged by God. And that judgment, all judgment, carries a certain patina of condemnation, and condemnation means separation. Even the word condemn means to separate from something, to push it away, to exclude it. So just imagine, if you don’t move from pure justice in the Old Testament, if you don’t embrace the fullness of forgiveness in the New Testament, there is no way in which this intimacy with God can flourish and grow and become what it is intended to be.

So let’s look at the miracle. It’s not yet time for Jesus to manifest his power. Now, that’s really interesting, and I don’t — one of the ways I thought about this: if you have somebody that’s been preparing for something for a long time and somebody comes up and says, “Hey, do it. Perform. Do what you’re supposed to do,” and you say, “Well, I’m not really ready yet. I’m working on it. I’m getting ready, but I’m not quite ready yet,” that would be the most normal, human experience of having something inside of you that you know is powerful, and you’re not sure how it works yet. And you have to understand the humanity of Jesus to get this full impact of who he is and what he’s teaching us. So he’s got this power, and he hasn’t used it publicly. Maybe he’s never used it before. Who knows? But it’s a weird, weird situation where it’s a wedding, and they ran out of wine. And there’s nobody there to be healed. There’s nothing essential about charity that would say you have to get the wine. It’s like it seems a superfluous reason to have a miracle, except then that there must be some reason for it. And the reason is not that it was such a crucial thing that he had to do, but it’s what it represented. And what it represented was a transformation from the law, judgment, condemnation, which is the shadow of the law. That’s the stone water jars, and water is that image of cleansing. And those jars were there so that — when you were a good follower of God in the Old Testament, you always had to cleanse your body to get close to God, because God sort of didn’t like the dirty body that you had, and there was always this idea of having to cleanse yourself. And in place of that water for cleansing is this intoxicating, amazing teaching that what he was here to do was to bring this new wine into the world. The old wine of justice, which was more — which was less impactful, in terms of its effect on people — you can drink a glass of water, and not much changed. Drink a couple of glasses of wine, and there’s a radical change in your disposition. And so this fire and this wine, water is the image of the power of forgiveness that is there as the greatest gift of God in the person of Jesus revealing that this gift is what we long for absolutely the most. We want this good wine. The good wine has been hidden in the Old Testament for good reason, because the people weren’t ready for it, but now in the New Testament, we are ready for it. And yet still, 2,000 years later, we’re still struggling to understand it and believe it, and when you tell people that the God that created you will never, ever turn against you because of anything that you do, that his promise is that he is there for you always, that’s so foreign to some people’s mind, because they say, “No, no. The church tells me, and everybody tells me that, if I don’t do what I’m supposed to do, I’m excluded, I am kicked out, I am kept away from the gifts of God.” And there’s nothing further from the truth.

God reveals his glory in this man Jesus, this God/man Jesus, and what it is, is that he reveals a God who is seemingly too good to be true maybe or just so beyond our imagining that it’s hard for us to wrap around the fact that the God, who is so perfect, looks at our imperfection and sees it not as something that turns him away but something that turns him closer to us. And he wants us to believe that we’re loved. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t ramifications for what we do. We go through pain. It causes pain. It’s not good, but it doesn’t — nothing can do the condemnation that the law did if you understand the fullness of the great miracle of the new wine, the wine of forgiveness.

God, everyone seeks peace, and peace is that sense that all is well and all will be well and that we are in your favor, in your care. And yet we so often think that, when we fail, that we lose that attention, that focus of your love, and there’s nothing that can be further from the truth. So bless us with an awareness of your consistent, forgiving love and knowing that, when you stay with us in our imperfection, it’s not that you ignore the negativity that we’ve created. No, there’s a sadness in you when we do that, but what we do know is that your love, your attention, your affection is increased when we are not who we are supposed to be. And we need to keep ourselves open to that gift. So we ask for this gift in Christ’s name, amen.

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THE BAPTISM OF THE LORD

Isaiah 42:1-4, 6-7 | Acts 10:34-38 | Luke 3:15-16, 21-22

Almighty, everliving God, who when Christ had been baptized in the Jordan River and as the Holy Spirit descended upon him, declared him your Beloved Son, grant that your children by adoption, reborn of water in the Holy Spirit, may always be pleasing to you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

One of the things I began our program today with was the idea that this year I was praying for peace. I’ve been thinking about it. During that piece of music, I was realizing that this gift of peace is something that is not just something we should hope for but is something that we’ve been promised. We’ve been promised an inner quiet, a sense of reverence for the things that are unfolding before us that we can’t fully understand because of a belief and a conviction of a God who is nothing but love, nothing but compassion, nothing but understanding. Yet we have a long history of misunderstanding God, or at least I should say it this way: that God has revealed himself slowly, over so many centuries of human life, and we grow slowly into the fullness of who he is. And it doesn’t come until the person of Jesus, and the person of Jesus is the key, because he is us. This God/man is both God, but he’s also you, and he’s also me. And so one of the things that I want to begin with is an understanding that, when you have this gift of peace, it isn’t something that means there’s no anxiety or no tension.

There’s a critic that lives inside of all of us. We can never quite get rid of the critic, and the critic is the judge, constantly judging us, often at 3:00 in the morning, that we haven’t done the work we should have done the day before, or we’re failing in some way. But there’s this really uncomfortable, gnawing feeling when you’re under the influence of the critic. It’s a kind of form of evil that I just feel we all have to live with. I’d love for it to go away. I would love to say there’s a way in which you can never — could be free of that, but we never will be fully free of it, because somehow evil is in the world for a reason, and we don’t know why. But somehow it constantly calls us out to something beyond ourselves for help, for support, for something that we’re missing. And I would say the biggest thing we end up missing is this awareness of who God really is and what ultimately our relationship with him is like. It’s not something that we consistently have to fight to keep by avoiding sin. That is a very common way of imagining our relationship with God, but it’s not. It’s not what it is. No, his compassion is beyond our imagining, his forgiveness beyond our hopes. It’s something we have to train ourselves, in a sense, to enter into.

So I want to — this Feast of the Baptism is so fascinating that I want to start with the second reading, because it has something in it that I think is interesting. It’s a time in the history of God’s revelation to human beings when, for the first time, it was revealed, through Jesus, that God has no real partiality to the creatures he has created, even though in the Old Testament, it was very clear, and it came from God, that he would tell people that he wanted them to know that they were special to him. And so he started off with a kind of basic response to our human nature, and that is that we like to be favored. We like to be the favorite one, and somehow when you say, “You are the favored ones, and everybody else is not,” there’s a kind of way in which that builds up our sense of we’re going to be protected by this God. That’s what all the gods did. They were territorial gods. They belonged to a place on the earth. They lived in the earth, and the people that they cared for were their special people. So that’s what people understood. So it was natural to say, “All right, this God, the God that came through Abraham, that this is the God that is wanting to tell the people that will follow him that they are special, and others were not acceptable.”

What that reminds me of is, growing up as a Catholic, I’ve been — gosh, I’m going to be 82 this month, and I’m thinking, “I’ve lived a long time.” And I remember, in the ‘40s and ‘50s, it was so clear in the teaching of the Catholic Church that, if you weren’t Catholic, if you weren’t baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, you were not going to be saved, you went to hell. And I remember hearing that as a child and thinking, “Gosh.” It was perplexing to me in a way, because it seemed like a horrible thing to happen to these people, and there was some deep sense inside of me that I thought, “Well, they haven’t done anything. They haven’t chosen to not be Catholic if they grew up in a foreign country or if they grew up in —” where I grew up in Chicago and in St. Louis and in Philadelphia, I didn’t think about it that much. But I do remember that I would think to myself, “Okay, those people don’t get to go to heaven.”

In that passage that we have in that second reading, it’s the end of that system that still stayed on for a while, but the end of the system where the Israelites were told that they were the special ones was blown apart by Cornelius seeking the wisdom of St. Peter in that story. And the explosive thing of redemption is that not only are the chosen people saved through this mysterious act of Christ’s death on the cross, not only are they saved, but everyone is saved. Everyone is saved. Isn’t it amazing that that insight came into the church 2,000 years ago, and then it went away over centuries of misunderstanding? And when you think about it, it’s interesting that I lived at a time in the 19- — well, during my lifetime, actually when I was in the seminary, the Vatican Council came, and the Vatican Council was not unlike what was revealed through the question of Cornelius to Peter, is that the Catholic Church realized that this statement that we used to make, that people had to be Roman Catholic to be saved, was absolutely erroneous and that anyone who sought the truth and anyone who sought God would be saved, that all religions, if they teach the truth, are means to salvation. That was so freeing when I heard that as a 20-year-old, and yet it hasn’t really taken root that much, or it doesn’t seem, because there’s still people that like that image of being special, chosen by God. And there’s even a kind of mysterious, I don't know, egocentric feeling that, “If I’m the one that’s saved, then I’m better than.” What I’m getting to, I’m trying to get to, is there is that image in our relationship with God where God makes choices about our value and decides to save us depending on whether we have earned it through our performance. And if there’s anything I would want to free you from, it’s that.

I want you to look for a moment at what happened at the baptism of Jesus, because at that moment, something changed radically in the world of God’s relationship with human beings. I’m going to see if I can try to describe it for you. It’s not easy, but I think I can. But there’s something about that moment when Jesus was baptized. There is this sense of enthusiasm in that gospel passage, that everybody’s wondering who is the Messiah. They’ve been waiting for this one. It’s like you and I waiting for the truth of what this whole thing means. There’s an archetype for this longing for the truth that was in the historical revelation of God to his people through the Old Testament and New Testament, but it’s also in all of us, longing for this insight, this saving insight. And it’s there in that feast, or it’s celebrated in that gospel, and it’s part of the feast that we’re celebrating, the baptism of Jesus, because what happens in that moment, we see a human being, being honored and blessed by God in a unique way where he is being told, this human being — and now bear with me, but I want you to understand that Jesus is both divine and fully human. And unfortunately, when we think about the fully human part, we don’t realize that he’s just like us, even though — I think it’s perhaps because we’re told he was sinless, and we’re certainly not sinless. But just imagine Jesus in this moment is the human race, not — and he’s all men and all women, and what we’re seeing is God entering into the human race, the human condition with this longing to awaken in them a new way of seeing themselves in relationship to God. And so he pours out into him his Spirit, which is both the presence of God, which is love, acceptance, honoring who we are, and fire. It burns out everything that is not him, not us, not our true self.

And what’s so interesting to me about that image is that, when God entered into us to do that work, it wasn’t just a moment, boom, and it happens. It’s the promise that, when you live in the presence of God in your life, you’re going through a process called your spiritual journey, and in it, you’re constantly being purified, constantly being taken into a new level of awareness because of this indwelling, promised presence, which is never, never judgmental but always embracing your imperfection. It’s so essential that you believe this in order to find the peace that is our inheritance, because otherwise, we live in a constant kind of on again, off again, “I’m acceptable. Now I’m not acceptable.” Because of what? Sin. And yet we know that, in the mysterious fullness of who this God/man is going to reveal to us, the God who lives in him and lives in us, is a God of nothing but forgiveness, nothing but forgiveness. His judgment is on our actions but not our value. Yes, we can be told and shown by God and by those who represent him that there’s something about our behavior that is destructive and harmful to us and others. That’s not being judged and condemned for that. It’s being shown something. And when you look at what Jesus is receiving from God the Father, it’s a ministry from his Father into his life that radically kept him focused completely on what it was that he came to reveal: a new life, a new life in a relationship with God that is never, ever damaged by our mistakes, our sins, but only God invites us to let him minister to us in those moments.

This image of a ministry of God to us is the servant image that we have in the first reading. It is so beautiful, because that was revealed in Isaiah centuries ago, and it was always there, from the beginning, that we would finally discover the God that is creating us is not a God who is awesomely separate and distant from us but a God who is intimate and close. And he’s not there primarily to receive from us those things that we might want to honor him by striving for perfection, but he’s there to minister to us. He’s a minister. He’s a caretaker. He’s a lover. He’s a nurse. He’s a doctor. He’s a therapist. He’s all those things, and when you listen to a description of the things that he promises to be in us, they’re so beautiful, because he’s the one that has come into us to bring us insight, opens our eyes. Think of this: if you could just imagine God’s role inside of you, working patiently, consistently, lovingly, filled with forgiveness for our mistakes, saying, “If you will just let me do my work, let me minister to you, I want to open your eyes so you can see what you don’t see. Have insight into who you are and who I really am and what the world is all about.” And then he goes on to say, “Not only will I be there to help you open your eyes, but I will also be there to release you from every single thing that imprisons you from becoming who you are intended to be.”

Think about it. Think of the disposition you can place yourself under and have yourself feeling separated, isolated from other people, from God himself. It’s frightening that we have this capacity to be able to imprison ourselves through a misunderstanding of weaknesses. So the weaknesses make us seem to be unacceptable — unacceptable, unable to be a part of the culture around us, the society around us. Sometimes we feel our weaknesses are so strong that we have no value whatsoever in being able to bring something to other people. So we’re imprisoned in a world of shame and guilt, and what a tragedy. And God is there inside of you to enable you to find that kind of freedom.

And the last is the one that really just always makes me, I don't know, feel so blessed to have the God that we have in our lives, and that’s when he says, “I want to bring you out of darkness, out of depression, out of a sense of hopelessness.” If you realize that baptism is an awakening of your imagination to the presence of this interior God, this God living inside of you doing nothing but ministering to you, not demanding perfection — he is longing to awaken you to the things you don’t see, to the things that keep you from being yourself, and from a darkness that just robs you of something that I would just so long for us all to have. And that’s that wonderful inner sense of peace.

It’s not easy to change your image of God. It’s not easy to change it in a world where people are preaching and teaching the antithesis of what I’m trying to say, but all I can tell you is, if you believe it, if you imagine it as real and you begin to feel it, it is transformative. And you know what happens instead of people saying, “Oh, you’ll become so self-centered. You’ll think you can get away with anything.” No, it never works that way. The more you are loved, the more you are forgiven, the more you are cared for, the more you are given life, the more you will turn around and do the same thing for the people around you. It’s 1,000 percent sure to happen. The more you feel judged, the more you feel condemned, the more you feel rejected, the more likely you’re going to be that way to other people. We do enough self-criticism. We don’t need God to criticize us. We don’t even need a church to criticize us. We don’t need a religion that criticizes us. We need one that promises to call us into a place of real — how do I say it — awareness of a quality of favor. That’s what God said to the human race when he baptized — when Jesus was baptized, and we are baptized into him. And baptism doesn’t have to be the formal ceremony in a religion. It’s beautifully celebrated in religion, and it’s wonderful. But it’s also something that’s promised over and over again to every creature that God has created, that he will enter into them, and you, as you are, will find favor with him. “This is my Beloved, in who I am well pleased.” Don’t misunderstand that as a perfect Jesus that he’s pleased. Understand it that he’s pleased in you — you, the one that he loves the most.

Father, at times when we describe you as the lover that you are, it’s something that some people find difficult, because they’re so afraid that, if we don’t have someone there judging us and ready to condemn us, that we’ll somehow not perform at the highest level. And that’s because we’re constantly looking at our own stuff to be able to perform at the level that you want us to be, and that’s the biggest mistake we make. So bless us with this conviction of inner strength that is you, not just us but you and you in such an intimate way with us that you can’t really distinguish when we’re doing it out of your strength or when it’s our strength, but the two become one. So thank you for that gift. Thank you for our new life and for the peace it promises, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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THE EPIPHANY OF THE LORD

Isaiah 60:1-6 | Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6 | Matthew 2:1-12

Oh God, who on this day revealed your Only Begotten Son to the nations by the guidance of a star, grant in your mercy that we, who know you already by faith, may be brought to behold the beauty of your sublime glory. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The word epiphany means a showing, a way of seeing. What I want to talk about today is going to be really hard for me to explain it in using words that work on your mind, that help your mind to see how what I’m saying is logical and it makes sense, and that’s often a way that we imagine working with religious, mysterious, mystical aspects. And it’s always dangerous to say, “I’m here to help you understand logically what this whole feast is about, what it means that God entered into the world and became flesh and took the form of a human being and walked this earth with us.” All of that is mind-boggling, in a sense. It goes beyond logic. And how did it work, and who was he, and how could he be both God and man and all that? So I guess what — I’m just beginning my homily by saying whatever I’m going to be doing, don’t use your mind to try to understand it, but use your imagination and your heart to feel it, to sense it, to imagine it, because it’s beyond anything that the mind can figure out.

And the best thing that we could start with in this feast is something that seems really unusual, that the ones who recognize this birth of Jesus, this birth that was spoken of over and over again in the Old Testament, and all the experts, the scribes, the people that spent their lives studying and reflecting on scripture, they were not in tune enough to know when it was happening or where it was happening and what scripture basically gives us an insight into the fact that the temple, where this reflection on scripture was supposed to be something that was constantly in the minds of the great scribes and leaders and the Levites of the temple, that they weren’t aware of really what was happening. They hadn’t read the story that the Zoroastrians, these strange astrologers that discovered and became aware of this foretelling in the scriptures, that yes, there would be a star, and it would be over Bethlehem, and it was all written that way. And instead of the Jewish tradition opening that up to the minds and hearts of those who ran that religion, it was a group of Persians and — they weren’t magicians exactly, but they were very unique in the sense that they were fundamentally reading the stars, reading the heavens to look for the portance of what is coming, which is something the church has not encouraged people to do. So it’s so fascinating. When the story is that unusual, you know it’s probably really true, because it doesn’t make a lot of sense, at least not to the mind. But somebody had to recognize the sign, the beautiful sign that God was going to give to the world about who this child would be, and we’ve known, since we’ve reflected on it for weeks now, he is the incarnation of God the Father. He is the promise that God has entered into the world and become partners with human beings. He is 100 percent human and 100 percent divine, and when he came into the world as that figure, he came into the world to reveal to people primarily not who Jesus is but who God the Father is.

Jesus is a manifestation in the world of the presence of God in a human being. The presence of God in a human being, that’s who Jesus is. And what is the impact of having that divinity living inside of you? Well, first of all, the image of Jesus as a human being reveals something about who God the Father is, and that is that he is just like us. So one of the things we could say at the very beginning, the showing, the enlightenment that this figure Jesus is bringing into the world that God the Father is not this strange, distant, judgmental figure — he is somebody just like us. When Philip asks Jesus, “You keep talking about the Father being in you, and we don’t know who he is. We don’t know what he looks like.” And Jesus sets such a clear indication of what he really knows in his heart and what we have such a hard time believing could be true for us also, and that is he said, “Look, if you see me, you see me, see my face, this is what God looks like.” He is just like you. He is a human. He has a humanity to him. Now, that does not mean that he’s not divine, but divinity is manifested in a person called God the Father, and he’s real, and he dwells in the world everywhere. And basically he’s like us, so he understands us. He’s not some other kind of creature. There’s a wonderful book on the humanity of God that — I just can’t think of the author right this minute, because I’m 81. But anyway, but basically, the beauty of this image of God revealing who God is, the first stage of it is that he’s like us.

And then the next stage is something that is so clearly about this feast, and that is what’s it like when you experience the presence of this Father of yours, this God of ours? How does it feel? What does it feel like? Well, first of all, the images of a star are so important, because there’s something about this star in the heavens that reveals the presence of God coming into the world that underscores the fact that every human being, and especially God himself, comes into the darkness of the world, which in the first reading is described as darkness that covers the earth and thick clouds that cover people. I know somehow darkness covering the earth is that feeling that there’s nothing that makes any sense. There’s fear. There’s anxiety. There’s stress. It’s like depression, and then the thick clouds that cover the people is the lack of clarity and understanding. Whenever we recognize it, that’s part of the nature of being a human being, that we are prone to darkness, and we are also prone to being confused by trying to figure things out. Into that experience of darkness, there is this promised light, and when you see it — I love this image in that first reading. When you see it, your heart becomes radiant at what you see, and it throbs and overflows. And you feel rich, and you feel blessed, and you feel like everything is coming to you that you need. What an incredible, beautiful image of what it means to have a conscious sense of this promise of God that we see manifested in Jesus, a human being in partnership with divinity — and not that that’s something to look at and be in awe of and look at Jesus as if he is so foreign from who I am, he is so perfect, he is so powerful. No, we’ve got to look at Jesus and say, “This is who God is inviting us to be like him.” To be like him.

One major problem for me growing up as a Roman Catholic in the ‘40s was the only thing that I really knew about Jesus, that I was told, that didn’t create a great deal of enthusiasm and joy in my heart, was that he was perfect. He never sinned, and we’re supposed to be like him. And so he came to teach us what it’s like to live a sinless life. So if we live a sinless life, then we’re like Jesus. No one told me that what Jesus is witnessing is not a sinless life that enables us to be an instrument of life and growth to other people. No, that sinlessness robbed me of a sense of my ability to welcome this God, because I was so unworthy, unacceptable.

That God would come into the world and would reveal a God inside of Jesus that was judgmental — and there is nothing in Jesus that’s judgmental, and there’s nothing in him that would imply that sinners were a negative. In fact, they were the only ones he could reach. They were the only ones he could find. It’s almost like the life of Jesus said, “If you’re aware of your sins, you have the best chance to be engaged in this God/man Jesus who is the witness of who you can be with God inside of you.” It’s amazing. Imagine when Jesus comes into the world, not only is he accepting sinners, but he does something else, and this is the second reading in Ephesians. And it’s so interesting to me, because what this reading is describing is something I saw my church do in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s. When I grew up as a Catholic, I believed that those who were not Catholic would not go to heaven, could not go to heaven. That’s what I was taught. It’s a lie. It’s not true. Anyone who seeks God, anyone who wants what is good, what is true is able to receive God’s gift of salvation. God does not limit himself to only work through one religion. And so the same incredible revelation is given with the coming of Jesus as a light of the world, and one of the things he wants to enlighten us about is there is no way that we could imagine that God is an exclusive God to just a certain few people. He did begin with his call of Abraham to say, “I have a favored people, and I want to work with them.” And that’s what people needed, a God who was their God as opposed to their gods, but we grew out of that. And yet it took my church a while to catch up to that, but it’s so interesting that, when God revealed, through St. Paul, that the gentiles were as welcomed into God’s favor as anyone, that would be — gentile was a non-Jew. So it’s like, when the Roman Catholic Church at the Vatican Council decided that this is a true teaching — and we need to believe it, and we have to stop thinking about exclusivity in terms of the one true religion. We did that by saying, “We felt we were the only ones that had the truth.” And that is it may be that we have the truth, but that doesn’t mean that this institution is the only way to get to God.

Then we have this continued image. This most beautiful image that I want to get back to is that what this revelation of the incarnation is trying to say to us is that there is this light that is the presence of God the Father living inside of you and me. It brings people through and out of the darkness and out of confusion, and basically it was recognized by those who were open and receptive to everything that was written about him. There’s something interesting about that. If you go back to the Old Testament, you can find 300 references to who the Messiah is going to be, and you look at how possible it is that an institution that is dedicated to that truth can lose it because it became too over-simplified into a system of right and wrong, a binary world of good and bad and of sin and salvation. And all of that robbed those people of this gift that God wants so desperately to feel, this enlightenment that comes into us. It’s so personal. It’s not run through an institution. The institution teaches it and celebrates it. That’s what religion’s for. It’s to give us the truth and to celebrate that truth in community. That’s what every healthy religion does, but an unhealthy religion robs us of the intimacy of this God who dwells within us. And why is it? Why is it that an institution would be resistant to this? It’s because the authority that is given — when God’s presence lives inside of you, this partnership we have with God, gives us such authority to be able to make decisions as to what to do with our life, and who we’re supposed to be, and how we can maybe be there for someone else, and to go inside of us and to find that direction without having to go to an institution, say, “What do I do in this situation?” It undermines, in a way, the authority, but what a sad state it is. This very institution that is dedicated to bringing this light to us is less receptive to it in themselves, but it’s a shadow. It’s the shadow of being in charge, of being a parent, of being pastor, of being whatever. When you’re in a position of authority, you may try too much to lean upon an over-simplified notion of right and wrong and not open someone to this awesome light, this star of Bethlehem that is born inside of you.

I love the image that, when you’re connected to your star, which everyone has traditions that, when anyone is born, there’s a star in heaven that appears. You are a unique gift to the world, and whenever you separate yourself from that destiny and you separate it, it’s a dis-astar [sic], separating from your star. What a disaster it is when we don’t believe in the light that we are, and the light that we are can’t be separated from the light that God is when he’s in us. It’s not like you can say, “Oh, now I’m using God. Now I’m using me.” No, the intimacy of that communion of humanity and divinity in Jesus is in us the same. It’s not as deep. It’s not as intense. I’m not saying we’re gods. I’m saying that we have this right and this responsibility to live in union with a light that the world needs, and you’ll know when it flows through you. You’ll know the enthusiasm in your heart when you feel it working. It’s heaven on earth.

Father, your revelation to us is mysterious, but at the same time, when we see it and we hear it and we take it in, it is so life-giving, so comforting, so much — it produces peace within us. And that’s the joy that I think comes from finding the truth. It takes away all of our anger, all of our fear, all of our shame. So bless us with this wisdom that we cannot achieve on our own. We can only wait for it. We can only expect it. We can only trust in it. Let this light that Christ has brought into the world to awaken in us the goodness of God take its normal, wonderful course of filling us with such richness, such peace and such effectiveness of bringing others to the light. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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FEAST OF THE HOLY FAMILY OF JESUS, MARY AND JOSEPH

Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14 | Colossians 3:12-21 or 3:12-17 | Luke 2:41-52

Oh God, who are pleased to give us the shining example of the Holy Family, graciously grant that we may imitate them in practicing the virtues of family life in the bonds of charity and so, in the joy of your house, delight one day in eternal rewards. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The piece of music you just heard was named Humble by its composer and producer, Ryan Harner, and every time I listen to it, I want to make sure Ryan knows how much that piece of music means to me now. And I hope it’s a piece of music that helps you to let go of your logical mind and enter into this beautiful world that we call mysticism, a mystical promise that God has made to you and to me, that we have contact with him, an intimate contact.

Before I begin talking about the readings we just listened to on this Feast of the Holy Family, I want to go back to what we’ve just gone through for the last four weeks, and that is a meditation, a reflection on the mystery of the incarnation. The incarnation, something spiritual becoming material, the Spirit of God in the Old Testament that was spoken of so clearly from a position of separation. God in the Old Testament is outside of us, and he is talking to us. And he talked basically through other people, not directly. He talked through the patriarchs and the prophets and priests and scribes and kings. It’s so clear that what we read and what we ponder in the Old Testament is a system that wasn’t capable yet of being everything that God wanted it to be, in terms of his relationship with us. The Old Testament has a God that’s distant, that has a role of guiding us through regulations, rules and laws, and the motivation so clearly in the Old Testament, because we were much less evolved than we are now, was like treating a child, where you’d tell a child, who can’t fully understand the reason for your commands and your rules — they will follow it if you tell them, if they don’t follow it, there will be some negative results. So we have an Old Testament for 2,000 years where God is working on human beings through laws, through rules, through other people, and it was helpful. And the most helpful part of it was this wonderful wisdom of the Old Testament, the Ten Commandments, and it’s just a wonderful description of our nature. So in the Old Testament, we recognize a relationship that God had with us that was based on something that had a lot to do with our undeveloped side of ourselves, if I can say it that way. We were more like children than adults, but 2,000 years later, God, from that beginning of calling Abraham, basically he said, “I want to change this whole thing, and you’re going to have to change two major things that you have in your imagination. You have to change the way you imagine me, God, and you have to change the way you imagine yourself.” And incarnation is the coming together of this new image of who God is into the heart, into the very existence and the being of a human being.

And what is different in the God that Jesus reveals? The God that Jesus reveals to us is the Father, yes, but he is not the Father that is at a distance, that wants to guide us through regulations and rules. He is a God who is intimate and longing for a relationship that is not that of power over someone but a role that God wants where he wants us to believe that he empowers us, empowers us with his presence. And how does he describe his presence? Well, it is described primarily as forgiveness — forgiveness. If you look at the Old Testament system, it is based on people being responsible for the mistakes they make, and they are punished, and they have to endure the punishment. The New Testament, the way that God now reveals himself, is so radically different that we very seldom make the shift, and basically it’s this: “I no longer hold anything against you. No matter what you do, it doesn’t change for one second my intention to save you, to love you, to enter into you, to be a source of life for you, to tell you that you’re loved despite your weaknesses and your faults. That’s who you have to understand me to be. Otherwise, you won’t let me inside of you.” Who wants a judge inside of us? We already have one. If you’re like me, you have this critic that’s constantly laying responsibility upon us, telling us we’re not good enough or telling us we’re so great that we’re miserable, because we can’t achieve it. The critic is always there. We don’t need another critic. We need a lover, and so the first and foremost thing we need to do is just say, “All right, God, if you are going to come into me, I will allow this, because what you’re saying to me is all I’m inviting in is love, appreciation for who I am, and forgiveness for everything I’ve done wrong.” So there’s a new image of God that has to happen before incarnation can take root in you, and then the other thing that has to change is our image of ourselves. We’re not called by God to be perfect. We’re not called by God to not sin. We’re called by God to work through our sins so that they can bring us to a place of greater understanding and wisdom, and at the heart of that is the heart of the message of Jesus in the New Testament. And that is God is forgiveness.

Somehow we think that God demands forgiveness. That’s the way I always felt it. That’s me falling back into the Old Testament of a God who demands that I do things in a certain way. I have to forgive everybody that’s ever harmed me. Now, that’s not the focus. The focus is you have to believe you’re forgiven. You have to believe you’re forgiven by God, and if you can believe you’re forgiven and you can feel the freedom of that, you are going to be more drawn to and more naturally inclined to forgive everyone who’s offended you. The most important command that God has revealed to us, as he enters into us, into our hearts, is, “Listen to what I’m saying. I’m saying to you, ‘My love for you is so intense that there’s nothing you can do that can keep you from me entering into you and empowering you to believe what I am, who I am and what I do for you.’” It’s so hard for us to believe we’re loved that way. Why? Because we don’t experience it in life. So that’s the image I want you to hold onto as far as incarnation, a God living in you, empowering you to be the one in the world that is like him, offering other people this gift, the gift of forgiveness, acceptance.

Now, it’s so interesting that, as we spend four weeks on that theme — and if you can feel what I’m trying to say about the revelation about what God is asking us to take in, because it’s so radically new everyone struggles with it — but then we shift right over to another — the next feast is the Holy Family, and the Holy Family of Jesus is all about relationships. So the relationship you have, this incarnation experience of God living inside of you, is for you, but it’s going to be lived out in community, in the family or origin or the family you end up engaging in, the family of choice, your relatives, the people whose family you marry into, the neighbors you have, the friends. That’s the family that you’re in, and what’s interesting about this family, we use it — we go back in the very beginning in this set of readings to Sirach, an Old Testament image, and you’re going to hear a lot of the Old Testament God in the images of family. God the Father was the one who had authority over people. He encouraged people to do what they were told to do, and if they didn’t, he would punish them. I call that power over someone. That’s different than the God of the New Testament, who is the God who’s always been there fully revealed, and he is saying, “No, I want to be the God/Father. I want to be a Father who empowers my children to be who they are. I don’t want to be the one over them. I want to be the one living inside of them.” How do you live inside of someone? It’s called intimacy. You become one with them in some mysterious, mystical way, and when you go into somebody, just as yourself, you’re liable to be the one who overpowers them and tells them what they have to do, who they have to become. If you go into them with God in you, the God who’s fully revealed, you’ll find yourselves in the lives of the people in your family being there, hoping and longing for them to face all their enemies, all their fears and to become who they are supposed to be.

Listen to this first reading from Sirach. It’s all about a little bit — it’s about a hierarchy in the family, which is true in many ways. Children — parents take care of children when they’re young, and then the children turn around and take care of the parents. And that’s all a beautiful image, but we know in life that families are not always the healthiest place to be. And families are places where people work out their stuff. You come into the world with your own stuff to work through. I think it’s our ancestors we inherit, and then you’re in a family, and the family of origin is not necessarily the most ideal environment to learn how to love. It’s often filled with people who are damaged before they started the family, and there’s struggle in that. And there’s something very, very important to understand, that this is the context in which you learn how to live the incarnate life that God calls you to. It’s not about you becoming the best that you can be by allowing God to enter into you and change you. It’s about you becoming a minister, a servant of other people. You’re going to receive what you receive, but it’s always not just for you. It is for you. It’s also for the people around you.

So we listen to a New Testament image, because it’s St. Paul. So from the image of the Old Testament, power over people, we shift, and we hear this wonderful description of what it is that the incarnation awakens in a human being. And it’s a kind of relational gift: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience. Put up with each other. Forgive each other. If someone has something against you, you have to forgive them. If a parent overpowers you, if a sibling overpowers you, that’s older, if you have any of that system that is people abusing you, you have to understand that the only way to be free of the negative impact of that kind of negativity is not to take it personally and to be able to forgive the person who is struggling, struggling with this, as we all are, this invitation to be life-givers to one another, be life-givers. Okay?

So now let’s go to the gospel, because what we see in this is the story of real family life. You would think that, if our family of origin is supposed to be perfect, well, then you would certainly think then — let’s look at what is considered a perfect family in the Holy Family image, and it’s anything but perfect. The image the gospel gives us of the rare glimpse into the family life of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is that there’s tension. There’s disagreement. There’s pain. There’s inflicting negativity. It’s a classic story of what happens in one’s teenage years when one begins to realize that I have a destiny that comes to me, not because my parents tell me this is who they want me to be, but it’s because God created me. My Father, my true Father, ultimate Father is — he’s saying — he’s calling me into his world, into the world that I’m called to be in this life. Nothing is more exciting to me than to imagine grace is poured into us. God is poured into us, not just to turn us into sweet, nice people but the person we’re intended to be, the only person that gives us satisfaction when we’re living out of that very person we’re called to be. It’s called authenticity.

So we see that, in this story, Jesus is 12 years old. He’s feeling a calling of his own destiny, who he’s supposed to be. It’s not what his parents expected exactly and — or maybe they did, but they had no real sense of what it was like, but they didn’t know their son had the talent that he had. They didn’t realize he was as, maybe, gifted as he was, but in any case, he’s left them. And they’re searching everywhere, and I love the line of Mary. “How could you do this to us?” She’s hurt by this perfect God/man Jesus, and he looks at her without apologizing. He said, “Look, don’t you realize I am here to grow into who I’m called to be? And I have to be about my Father’s business, my destiny.” It’s so interesting that that’s the image we have of Holy Family, the tension between the parent role of guiding and creating an environment in which their children flourish and the children’s needs and wants because of their destiny. That’s the tension. It’s the tension in everything, it seems to me.

Relationships are there to support, and the most dangerous thing that happens is love gets confused with control. And many times parents, or anyone in authority, worries about those under their charge, and they want them to be who they are called to be. And instead of trusting and putting them in touch with the source that will make them into that, they themselves try to make them into it by telling them they must do this, or they’ll be punished, or they’ll be rejected, judged. Nothing is worse than living in a community of judgment. Nothing is more life-giving than living in a community of forgiveness and patience and kindness and all those beautiful things that Paul talked about. That’s our destiny. It happens now and then in family life. It’s true in my family, and when it’s not what it’s supposed to be, is there blame and criticism? No, it’s knowing that this whole system is designed slowly to bring us into a place of peace, and through tension with forgiveness is the way peace is going to be rooted inside of you.

Father, your promise is beyond our imagining. You want to live inside of us. You want to be a part of us. You want to be in our dreams, in our imagination. You want to be so intimately engaged in us that we don’t even see you as someone else, but it’s a part of ourselves that we listen to. And it frightens us at times, because it challenges us so directly and perfectly. Help us to believe in this relationship that you have given us, and help us to know how valuable it is in every other relationship we have. We long for peace. We long for intimacy. We long for oneness, and when we’re deeply damaged, those things are frightening to us. So heal us. Open us. Free us. Teach us, and let’s experience the life, the family, the communal life that is our destiny. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT

Micah 5:1-4a | Hebrews 10:5-10 | Luke 1:39-45

Pour forth, we beseech you, oh Lord, your grace into our hearts that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ your Son was made known by the message of an angel, may by his passion and cross be brought to the glory of his resurrection, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

When we began this season four Sundays ago, there was an image that I talked about that was in the readings, and the image was Jesus showing his disciples, who were sitting with him outside of Jerusalem, and they were looking back at the temple, and Jesus made this announcement that this temple was going to be destroyed, not a stone left upon a stone. And he himself would somehow rebuild it, and that seemed to be such an important theme that was in that first reading, because the Old Testament talked about how all this destruction was going to come on all these people. And that was the impact of this system that had been moving in a direction not toward more integrity and authenticity but to more corruption and abuse and control, but this whole system that developed over the Old Testament times was falling apart and was supposed to fall apart. And so we have this 2,000 years of the time from Abraham until the time of Jesus to, in a sense, be imbued with and be taught that there was a way in which God wanted us to live. We couldn’t do it on our own, so we had people who were in charge who told us how to live, and we were told over and over again, “These are the rules. These are the laws.” And there were ten of them, and they were beautiful, and they were pretty simple: a good relationship with divinity and a wonderful relationship with humanity. And the nature of human beings, who were longing for a kind of perfection that they weren’t able to achieve on their own but thought they could do it by rules and regulations. They got caught up in this system that was getting more and more damaging and less and less effective as human beings evolved and changed and became more like who they were intended to be.

So just pick up that image of the old collapsing around us, and then we look at these last readings and this set of readings, and it seems to be all about this thing that’s happening, this person that’s coming, this new world that’s being created. And it’s interesting. This person that’s coming to do this is going to be very, very — how would I say it? He’s complex, this Jesus figure. Who is he? Is he just a man? Is he a man who is just filled with divinity, or is he a man so filled with divinity he’s also divine himself? It’s almost like he’s too complex for us to comprehend, and I think that is true. And so how did, then, God plan on revealing the work that Jesus was here to do? How did he do that? And what he did was made sure that this divinity part of God/man Jesus was not the focus but rather this idea of the Son of Man, a human being — that’s how you translate Son of Man is human being — that we have to look at Jesus as a human being, not as a God. And if we do that, then he becomes more clearly the image that he’s intended to be, because he is who we are to become. And he came into the world to do something that initiated a thing that we couldn’t have accomplished on our own, but what he initiated was a relationship with God that’s so intimate, so close that there’s no way we could imagine that we could ever attain the goal that we have as human beings to evolve into who God intended us to be. We could never do that without this event called redemption, and it’s complex in a way and simple in another way. Complex is we don’t understand how it could happen, how one person could make up for the sins of an entire world, but that’s what is happening. And when we’re understanding fully that this Jesus comes into the world to reveal a Father, a God Father who we never could have dreamt could exist, and he is a God who is filled with nothing, nothing but mercy and forgiveness and love and affirmation. And he had to show us what that would feel like if we had a relationship with someone like that, and that’s who Jesus becomes for his disciples and those people who began to listen to him and to be transformed by who he is. And it’s never changed. It’s the heart of Christianity. How do you allow this figure Jesus to be real enough for you to be who he really is and to be, in a sense, presented to your imagination? And if you can feel who he is and know who he is, there’s an immediate response inside of you.

I want to use that as the image of what is in the gospel. This Jesus is in the womb of Mary. She has done the thing that the heart of Christianity asks us all to do: be who she’s intended to be, live the life God has asked her to live. When he reveals to Mary who she is to become, the Mother of God, how she could have ever fathomed what that meant, how she could have ever understood it — she couldn’t. All she said was, “I don’t understand this. I don't know what it means. It is risky for me. It’s an incredible adventure you’re asking me to take on, but all right. If this is what you want of me, if this is your will, then I want it to happen to me. Then this new life is born in her. Is there something there we should pay attention to? Absolutely. It’s the only way it can happen to you and to me, to be transformed by this presence of God in us, unless we say, “We can’t figure it out. We don’t know how it’s going to work. We can’t even understand it once it’s working, but if this is what you want, if you want us to believe, as human beings, that we are entitled to or have been given the gift of the presence of God inside of us, we’ll accept it.” And that’s what she did.

And there’s Elizabeth, who’s aware somehow in a mystical way, that there is this whole thing that’s going on, and she has John the Baptist in her womb. This is an interesting story, and when Jesus, in the womb, comes into the presence of John the Baptist, in the womb, John the Baptist, leaps for joy. It’s like, “Are you kidding?” It’s really beautiful, and it’s weird, but it’s saying that there is something in this God/man Jesus that, when you anticipate his coming, when you’re open to it — and John’s life led him to a place where he was like Jesus, and they were both really upset with the temple, and it wasn’t going well, and they knew it was so abusive to people and trying to control people with rules and laws and sacrifices, wasn’t working. They both knew this, and they met, in a sense, while they were still in formation, and they were excited about this new life that was coming into the world.

It’s interesting that, when you think about the depth of Christianity and the call that it has for making us into people who are so potentially effective in terms of bringing life to the people around us, unless we have that kind of sense of the — what’s the world I want — the ease with which that happens and the spontaneity in which it happens and the effectiveness of it — when you really understand when you say yes to this God and allow him to live inside of you, people are going to change around you, and things are going to work out around you. And things that you want and long for, they appear. That’s the promise. It’s an amazing new life, and what is it taking the place of? Well, that’s what’s really fascinating about this set of readings, and I’m playing on two images. One is the Responsorial Psalm, which I love, because it’s talking about seeing God’s face. “I want to see your face, and if I see your face, I’ll be saved.” Have you ever done something wrong and had to face somebody, and you maybe tell them what you’ve done, and then you put your head down? You don’t want to look at them, because you don’t want to see their reaction. I think it’s so fascinating. When the Psalmist was caught up in this image of God’s face looking at you, and when you see who he is, and you have to first take into your imagination that he is love, that he is forgiveness, that he is every single thing that every human being longs for, in terms of a companion and a source of strength and life. He’s all of that. If you see him looking at you with that disposition, you’re going to be transformed. That’s a beautiful image of how important it is to have a vision of who God is, not through the Old Testament, not through the temple, not through the rules, regulations, all those sacrifices that had to be done to make up for sins. That is not what human beings are made for, and yet for 2,000 years, that’s what we struggled with. And it’s not unusual to see the same kind of percentage of our life, in a way, spent worrying about rules and regulations and laws and who we should be and what people want us to be and forcing ourselves into being somebody we’re not. All of that is the sign of the Old Testament, and it has to go away. It has to die.

And so one of the things we have then is someone who comes into the world who has that look, that look of God, and when Jesus looked at people — I don't know what it must have felt like. But I’m not saying it was absolutely transforming to everyone, but my point is that there was something in this God/man who was like us in all things, except for doubts and fear that this thing isn’t going to work out or whatever, but this God/man Jesus is the one who is there saying something to us that is so opposed to the whole system of religion that he was such a scandal you can’t imagine why would this be the way it worked. Why wasn’t there a nice, easy transition between the Old Testament and the New Testament? Just like everything in the Old Testament moved us to the direction, and then the New Testament comes along, and it’s just like that’s the normal thing that we would develop into. It’s like first spending most of your life in a direction that is unfulfilling and not fruitful. Is that by just accident, or is that the way it works for you and for me? Do we first, all of us, spend too much time trying to figure out who we are by doing what people expect of us, by following rules and regulations, even though we might not be religious, and we’re not talking about the regulations of a religion but the regulations of a culture, the regulations of a system, of a family, doing what you think you have to do in order to be acceptable? That’s where most of us spend most of our life until some moment when something hits us, and there’s something in us that is awakened, that leaps up and says, “Oh, my God. You mean there’s something besides this drudgery of doing what you’re supposed to do, offering —” Offering sin offerings is like going around apologizing to everybody for who you are and all that kind of stuff. He said, “No. No, that’s not it.” But it seems to me that most of us have to have this moment in time when we move from all of that. Maybe some do it very early. I didn’t do it till really late in my life. I think maybe in my 70s I began to really realize that this God that I work with, that calls me into a life with him, is not interested in my perfection, but he’s given me a body — as the scripture says today, Jesus said, “I’ve got a body, and my job is to fulfill the role of my body, my life in this world. And what I want to do is give that to people as an offering, as a gift, as a source of life that doesn’t come from me but through me, because God dwells in me.” That’s the image of Jesus. And what do we call him? What’s the word for that kind of figure in the world, a person who looks at us with nothing but love and forgiveness? It’s called peace, and that’s the first reading. This mystical creature who’s coming into the world who wants us to see him as one like us, and when we see him for who he is, when we see the look he has in his eyes, which is God’s eyes looking at us and seeing — God sees nothing but the potential of all our goodness. When we can feel that and that something is awakened inside of us, now then we’ve understood something that we’re made for. That’s what we’re made for. We’re not made for being controlled or having demands placed on us. It’s abusive. It’s abusive. So it’s amazing, when you think about it, that we find ourselves often because of the culture, because of a shadow of religion that still wants to control and make people into who they think they should be. We all struggle with that, and it comes somewhere along in our life where we say, “This is not enough.” And the worst thing we do is we walk away from religion and think, “That’s all religion ever offered me was rules and regulations.” But religion offers something so beautifully suited to who we are and so powerful and awakening someone in us that is there always, wanting to be born, wanting to be used, wanting to become an instrument of life to other people. That’s our DNA, our true DNA.

So what a wonderful thought, to say that the — ending these four Sundays with an exciting adventure before us, that we’re going to take this seriously. We’re going to take the look of God that is nothing but love and acceptance and encouragement to become who he intended us to be. We’re going to believe that with all our heart, and we’re going to find a new life. And Luke is going to help us through his eyes, what he saw, and we’ll see it, and we’ll grow. And we’ll become who we’re supposed to be. Amen.

Father, it’s hard for us to fathom the fullness of who this God/man Jesus truly is, but as we recall the moment in history when he came into this world, 2,000 years prepared the world for this coming, and now we’ve lived 2,000 years with this awareness, and we’re still slowly growing and becoming everything that this God/man has promised to be for us. So bless us with a radical openness to who he is, a courageous yes to what he calls us to be, and let us feel the peace that comes from knowing that, no matter how far we drift, no matter how many mistakes we make, he’s right there with forgiveness and understanding. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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THIRD ADVENT OF SUNDAY

Zephaniah 3:14-18a | Philippians 4:4-7 | Luke 3:10-18

Oh God, who see how your people faithfully await the feast of the Lord’s nativity, enable us, we pray, to attain the joys of so great a salvation and to celebrate them always with solemn worship and glad rejoicing. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

That piece of music always draws me into a source, a source that I believe is in me and in you and in all of us, where I go, and I say, “What does all of this mean? What are you trying to teach us? What are you trying to say to us with these images, these strong and powerful images that we just listened to?” And what’s interesting about this third Sunday, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, is that there is this image of a time when we are engaged in something that is lighter, more interesting in the sense of igniting in us a confidence that we should have in our relationship with God. There’s something really interesting about human nature. When we think about divinity, we tend to think of this great distance between a God who created us and who we are, these human beings filled with all kinds of jealousy and envy and anger and sexual needs. If we don’t wash we don’t smell good, all this kind of crazy stuff about how imperfect we are, and yet in the Psalm, there’s a wonderful phrase that is there that says that we should sing to praise the Lord for his glorious achievement — his glorious achievement. What is the glory of God’s achievement? The world, existence, nature, animals? No. No, the greatest thing that God has created, and I say this because he has revealed it to us, the greatest thing that he did was to create human beings. It was an adventure for him, an exciting adventure to create something, and the thing about it that I think we should always pay attention to, it’s the only thing that God created, when he looked at it, he said, “This is a reflection of me. This is who I am, because I’ve made these people in my image and likeness.” Nothing that God created was created in his image and likeness. We’re like God. He’s like us, and it makes total sense that we have that image of a God who has created something not equal to him in any way, shape or form but like him enough that a relationship of intimacy is possible, because that’s the whole core direction I see that the God that created us, from the time of Adam and Eve until this present day, has been engaging us in an adventure with him so that he can say, “I want to have a relationship with you where it is transformative, not informative but transformative.”

It’s amazing how we can take religion and reduce it to something so much less than it is, and there’s an image in the gospel that helps me explain what I mean by that kind of statement, because John the Baptist was considered by many to be the Messiah. He was the one that was coming into the world to save us. So they were paying close attention to everything that John was saying, and he kept saying, “You need to change. You need to go through a transformation of some kind.” And he said, “We’ve got to understand that the real challenge of living on this planet, with a God who is revealing himself slowly to us, is to understand something about forgiveness.” Forgiveness, he was onto something that was core. He was talking about the importance of a baptism of forgiveness, and what is the main topic that Jesus came into the world to discuss? Forgiveness, the awesome belief that the God who created us has come into the world, after having a long relationship with us where we’ve been judged and found wanting and been corrected, and through pain and suffering of our choices. And then we lose God’s relationship, it seem, and then he comes back to us when we turn back to him. And that whole Old Testament story of distance and closeness and distance and sin and regret and all of that, it’s all loaded in there, which leaves us with a kind of understanding of the distance between humanity and divinity.

But that’s all about to change, and it did change with the coming of an incarnate God. He radically changed that relationship so that we can’t go to the Old Testament and learn much about the kind of relationship we’re supposed to have with the God that created us. We have to focus on the New Testament, and look at the image of the old to the new in the person of John the Baptist. He’s the pivotal point between the two. He’s the link between Old and New Testament, and what is it that you could see in this gospel that seems to imply that John is part of the Old Testament? He’s talking about a new birth, a new baptism, a new way of seeing things. He’s talking about a coming of someone who is going to turn everything upside down. I don't know that John understood completely what it was all going to be like, but he certainly knew that he was the one to announce it and he wasn’t the one that they were waiting for. And so you see something in the way in which his ministry was flowing, because he kept talking about a new way of existing with people, forgiving them for their faults, loving them more, all of that. And so when people came up to John and said, “All right, if you’re the Messiah, tell us, what are we supposed to do? What is it we’re supposed to do?” And look at the advice that he gives. It’s so interesting. He gives advice to three groups, in a sense, to the average person that comes up and says, “What am I supposed to do in this new world you’re creating for us?” And he said, “Well, the thing you should be doing is loving. You should be caring for each other.” Now, that’s so core to what we understand Christianity to be, but in the Old Testament, it wasn’t about caring for everyone. It was about having an exclusive membership in a club that was called the temple, and you did things as the temple taught you to. And you followed every regulation, every rule, and you didn’t have much freedom and choices. But your main task was to do what you were told, and so still we see, in the person of John the Baptist, someone who is acting like the temple, telling people what they should do.

It’s like you go to a church, and you listen to a homily, and sometimes a homily sounds like a lesson on what you should do as far as homework between this week and next week, telling you things to do. And that’s not what Jesus is about. He’s not the one that comes into the world to tell us what we should be doing. We’ll get to what he’s really doing in just a minute, but let’s look again at this advice. The first thing, to the ordinary person: do something that takes care of your brothers and sisters, and then for those of you who have a position of a little bit of power over people, you have something you market, something you make, something you do, whatever you do, stop charging more than is prescribed. Don’t be greedy. And the soldiers asked him, and they have real power over people. And he said, “Whatever you do, don’t use this power to abuse someone. Don’t do extortion. Don’t use your power over someone to get something from them, and be satisfied with who you are and what you have.” Those are all really good, solid advice, and then he goes on to say, “But there’s something more coming.” And what he says is coming is the most important thing for us to understand to understand what it is about this Sunday that says we should be joyous, because what he’s going to begin to talk about is something that God is going to reveal to us that was never there before, and it’s going to be radically transformative.

And let’s go back to the first reading and realize that one of the things we were saying is that, when this Messiah comes, one of the things he’s going to do is remove all judgment against us, and he’s going to turn away our enemies. No more judgment against us. What is it most of us struggle with when we think about our relationship with God? That we’re not good enough. The sin of Adam is right there in our face. When he wanted to become just like God and he didn’t want to have to do anything other than the things that he knew were right and wrong, he was wanting an autonomous relationship with God, and God is saying, “No, I want an intimacy with you. I want you to depend upon me, and I work in you, and we will change the world.” And so the one thing he’s saying is coming with the coming of the Messiah is no more judgment, no more condemnation. You know where most of our condemnation comes from? It’s that inner voice, that critic that chews at us all the time, especially at 3:00 in the morning. That’s got to stop. It’s got to end.

And then the next reading, it’s clear that the next thing that he’s saying about this world that Jesus is going to establish is that there is this wonderful thing that he’s going to do, and that is he’s going to take away all of our anxiety. No more judgment, no more inner critic, no more anxiety: that’s the promise. If that is true, if that is what God is asking, we find ourselves in this place of self-criticism, criticism of the way the world is working, why God isn’t doing more. If we start realizing this anxiety that eats away of us, if we realize all of that is what God came to take away through this person Jesus, then we have to say, “What is it I need to do? Do I need to be nicer to other people? Do I need to be less greedy? Do I need to be all these other things we might think that we’re told to do?” No, those are not things you’re supposed to do. They’re things you’re supposed to become, and the difference is you don’t discipline, through your mind and your will, yourself into the person that God wants you to be. It’s not about behavior modification. It’s about transformation. That’s why John the Baptist says, “Look, I’ve come to baptize you with water. It’s a cleansing of the outside of the cup, so to speak. I’m reminding you of all the things that you could be, should be, and yet I know that somehow I am not the one who is — or this process I’m using is not the way in which you’re going to be changed. The way you’re going to be changed is that there’s something that will happen to you that’s like fire and spirit.” Something is going to be burned out of you, and something is going to be infused inside of you. The critic is burned out of you. Judgment against yourself is burned out of you. Anxiety is burned out of you. In its place comes this incredible spirit that’s so delighted in what he’s created that he wants to share in it in the most intimate way of saying, “I want to come inside of you, live in your heart and be the source of the things we need to do together,” totally different than the Old Testament.

I think it’s so interesting that, when we think about this image of being purified, we have to realize that this is something that is not within our capacity, to purify ourselves, but to simply say, “I cannot become the person I am called to be by doing what I’m told, but I can do it if I allow something to happen to me, if I allow someone to enter into me and to do the work for me.” And one would think, “Oh, that’s so much easier than struggling to do it on your own.” No, it is so hard to do, because it means we have to let go of the most basic weakness human beings have of this need and desire for autonomy, to be on our own, to be self-sufficient. It’s so clear that there’s a thing inside of all of us that would say, “I’d rather be in charge of my life than somebody else being in charge of it.” And it’s not that we give it completely away, but we do have to allow someone to enter into us. It’s like living with someone when you’ve lived your life alone all the time. And they’re going to have their opinions and their direction, and it’s going to be very unsettling. Intimacy with God, I wish it was easier, because I know how effective it is, but in my whole life as a priest, I resisted it, resisted it and resisted it and wanted to be just the one who takes care of everybody and does what’s expected of them. And that seems like, “Well, that’s enough, isn’t it?” No, it’s not enough to do your best by thinking through what you should be and trying to be that. No, the thing you need to do is surrender to the realization that the only way you can be who God has called you to be is to allow him to enter into you, dwell within you and slowly, patiently, lovingly, convince you that nothing you can do is ever going to separate you from the joy that God has in you as a creation. He made you exactly as you are, and he delights in it. And when you discard it, when you say it’s not worthy, when you say it’s no good, you’re insulting the one who created you.

So what are we asking — what is God asking us to do then? Well, it’s called love. We have to love God for who he is, allow him to enter into us, trust him that he’s not going to destroy us but bring us into fullness. We have to love everything that God has created, our neighbor, but most especially, we have to love ourselves, deeply, deeply appreciate the uniqueness that we are and not listen to the critic in other people or in ourselves. Instead, listen to something that is stirred inside of everybody by this amazing experience called the descent of the Holy Spirit into the world, not just into the world, into your world, into my world. That’s a brave and courageous and risky thing to do, yet it’s the only way that we can make this transformation from the old to the new, from a place of excessive responsibility of who we are to acceptance of everything that we are, both the good and the bad, and allowing a loving Father to be the source of guiding us through the most exciting transformation that anyone could ask for. Everything in us that’s chaff, that’s lies, that’s nothing important he burns out, and he saves everything that is life-giving. That’s not about separating sheep from goats. It’s separating illusion from truth. Amen.

Father, your love for us is hidden from us by our own misunderstanding of who you are and why we’re here and what this whole world is about. If we are the greatest thing that you’ve created, if we are your crowning glory, then we should be having enormous reverence for exactly who each of us are and know that we’ve been damaged, and we’ve been hurt, maybe, throughout our life. Maybe we’ve inherited that from another, earlier generation, but whatever it is we’re struggling with, we should never, ever imagine that the brokenness that we experience is a turn-off for you. It’s a turn-on, and you want so much to bring us out of darkness into the light, into love, into self-acceptance and into allowing you to transform us. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT

Baruch 5:1-9 | Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11 | Luke 3:1-6

Today we’re going to be reflecting on the readings for the Second Sunday of Advent. One of the fascinating things about the readings I just read, and not just those readings but the story of the Old Testament, the New Testament, is how powerful it is in terms of awakening human beings to who they are and who God is and why we’re here. And when you think about it, it’s really a complicated story of a people that changed from the beginning, from Adam and Eve, to their naive way in which they thought that this life that they were given by God was something that they had to — I guess it reveals human nature, but they had to experience it. They were told they had this gift of free will, and they said, “Well, I want to use my free will. I want to make my own decisions. I don’t want to be told what to do. I want to learn how to make decisions and live by them.” And that’s the whole story of that thing called the fall of the human race, the fall of Adam. It wasn’t so much a fall from grace as much as it was an awakening inside of human beings that they were here with a purpose, and the experience they wanted to have is what it’s like to be free to make decisions. Nothing else that God ever created was able to do that. And it’s hard to imagine that they wouldn’t have gone toward that more than anything else. “I want to be the one who comes into the world and figures it out. Give me a little autonomy,” is what they were saying indirectly, and God allowed it. God allowed them to come into the world, and then there’s this unfolding story, Old Testament, New Testament.

The God of the Old Testament is fascinating, because he seems to be at times loving and caring and, other times, extremely angry, jealous, raging. And so what we have is an evolution in the Old Testament of human beings are and how God has revealed himself. God doesn’t change. I say that to you over and over again, but he does reveal himself in ways that human beings are able to comprehend. He couldn’t have begun talking, let’s say, to Cain and Abel about forgiveness, about redemption, about dying to save someone else. There was no way the human race at that time could have comprehended any of that. So it took a long time for God to reveal who he is and what he’s about. The Old Testament is really an interesting story, because it so much focuses on what human beings are being asked to do, by God, in order to find favor with God. And what they were asked to do was really to live according to their nature, to stop doing the things they were doing, to stop the corruption, the lying, the cheating, the horrible behavior that they had for each other. Whenever they got caught up in that, whenever corruption filled them, then their enemies would overtake them, and then they would be flat on their back, in a sense, and then they’d come back. And that’s what we have in the first reading.

Remember, last week we talked about the end of the temple era, and Jerusalem was going to be destroyed by the Romans. And Jesus predicted it and told his disciples to beware, that this whole system of the Old Testament had to die, had to be replaced with something new, and the new was the mercy and the forgiveness of a God who finally was able to reach the point where human beings were able to receive something from him. And instead of giving them rules and laws and regulations and reward and punishment, he was inviting them into an intimate relationship with him. As you can imagine, the Old Testament was so much about God asking human beings to do the things they needed to do in order to please God. It’s like people trying to get to God, Old Testament. New Testament is the opposite direction. God is now coming to them. God is the one moving toward them more and more intimately, more and more personally, more and more in a way that is shocking and scandalous and even blasphemous. In the Old Testament, there would be no way that anybody, anyone would consider that God could enter into them or that God could be one with them. They were filthy, dirty, ugly. Now I’m just exaggerating, but they were not what you would call very mature. And they were so prone to those lower levels of our human nature that’s — born into self-survival and taking care of our own and taking care of just what belongs to us until finally we learn that all of the gospel is going to draw us into a place where we’re not so much focused on me, myself, mine but on others. And others, caring for others is the core of the New Testament, and that’s what God has come to teach in the person of Jesus. And the only way he could do that, the only way he could teach people to be that way would be to ask them to allow God to be that first for them. That’s the amazing part of the New Testament.

When time was right, if you look at the gospel, when the time was exactly right and people were ready to receive a message that could not possibly have been given before that moment, and John the Baptist, who had been already engaged in this longing of a transformation from the Old Testament system of sin and punishment and reward and punishment for what they did and regulation, 613 regulations guiding everyone’s life — it was a control thing. And he knew, somehow John knew the time was right, and he was going to announce something so brand new, so amazing. It’s what this whole season is about, the season of advent. Something new is coming. It’s interesting. When you think about advent and repeating something over and over again, like okay, now we’re starting again to go through another evangelist, his view of how God revealed himself through Jesus to the people, and he gives his version of it. And we contemplate it, and we wonder about it, and we want to experience the same thing. And that’s a wonderful way to imagine a new season, but at the same time, if it’s just, oh, we’d do this again, it’s not just doing it again. It’s being ready to receive something new that we’ve never received before. Unless you enter into this experience with me of examining Luke’s gospel, unless you discover something you’ve never discovered before, unless you take a risk and find something in it that makes your life so different, we’re not really engaged in this work that you and I have promised we can do for each other when we look at these readings and say we want the wisdom, we want the knowledge, we want the understanding that’s in them. We want to receive this gift that is being given, not something that we’re supposed to work for but that we have to receive. We have to — I know. We have to be passive, and that’s really difficult for an egocentric human being. Adam was expressing that human nature in all of us. “Let me go figure it out. Let me do. Let me figure out what I have to do and what I have to be, and I’ll do that. I’ll make myself into that, and when I make myself into that, I will be rewarded in some level, even if it’s just my own self-esteem that goes high when I say, “I, I, I have done this.” And Jesus comes along and said, “No. No, it’s just the opposite of that.” No, the whole mystery of this season of reflection on the readings is somehow to shift away from that Old Testament goal of achieving something for God, allowing God — in place of that, allowing God to enter into us and receiving who he is — receiving who he is. And until you can receive who he is, you can’t be who he is, and that’s the challenge of the New Testament.

And what is it that God is saying to us through Jesus? He’s saying, “Look, I want a relationship with you where I can come and enter into you and take you somewhere.” And where he wants to take us is so ridiculously weird and strange. He said, “I want to take you into the heart of God. I want you to have a relationship with God like I have a relationship with God where he lives inside of you, and you would live inside of him. He said this over and over to his disciples, and they just were totally baffled and confused by it and said, “This is such a hard saying. We don’t know what to say.” Just say to a group of people who felt that God was so great, so powerful that, if he came into your life, you’d be destroyed, and now find out there’s this God of intimacy that wants to enter into us and dwell there as we are, not, “Clean it up, fix it up, stop all the sinning, and then I’ll come to you.” That’s the Old Testament, but the New Testament is, “No, I want to come and dwell inside of you as you are, and all I want is to invite you into a place where you never imagined you could be.” But the place is, again, in the heart of God and God in you, and then what is that like? Well, Jesus would say, “If you want to know what it’s like, look at me. What I’m telling you, what the New Testament is all about, is you living a life that I have taught you to live by my living it first for you, and what you’ll see in me is not a man who is struggling only.” He struggled certainly to surrender to all the things he was asked to do, but what he’s really saying: “I want you to surrender to a world that I’m explaining to you is your destiny, your purpose for being here, and that is to have a God dwelling inside of you, resonating out of your life for other people.” That’s your core, and that it not dependent upon your performance in terms of whether you’re sinning or not sinning, unless the sin that you’re committing is resistance, complete, “I will not give in to this. I will be in charge of everything that is good that comes out of me. It’s going to be out of my will, my desires, my talent.” God, we’re so addicted to that kind of sense of value in who we are by what we do or how we perform, and that’s not what it’s about. It’s about being a receiver of a gift that is beyond our imagining and letting that gift flow from us to someone else.

That’s an adventure, an adventure of letting go of ego and will and mind and opening up heart, opening up a heart that is so effective and so powerful in terms of its ability to change the world, but you would think that would be an easy thing. “Okay, if you’re going to do something with me, through me, and all I have to do is surrender to that, that should be easier than trying to do it myself.” Well, that’s not the way human nature is designed initially, and it needs to be transformed. And so the only way it can happen is that God has to change you, and this is the most bizarre part of it. He won’t do that unless you say yes, unless you say, “Okay, I’ll stop being the one in charge. I’ll stop being the one in control. I’ll stop being the one who is making it all happen. I’ll let you enter into me and do something new.” That’s not as easy as I may have just made it sound, because I have been trying that for 81 years, and I still can’t do it. It’s still hard to think about me not being the source of these words that I’m saying to you, that I’m the one that’s making these words make sense, and you’re going to be thankful that I did my homework, and I made this homily work for you. And then that’s what I should leave this station with, since I did something wonderful for those people, and I don’t have that anymore. At least it’s not as strong as it was, and maybe it’s finally dying, where I can come in here and say, “I have no idea what I’m going to say,” and then let you speak through me. And that is so hard, so hard. Hard to walk into a situation where somebody needs you and you don’t have anything to say, and you say, “Just use me. Just use me.” And even if you — it may not even be words that he uses. It’s a whole different world, and that’s the adventure, to come into that new world, that new place of surrender, acceptance, of a new life that is only given, never achieved. So I hope these words have been helpful, and now I want to turn to God and ask him to bless you as I ask him to bless me.

Father, humanity is a great mystery. You made us, in a sense, so autonomous and so separate. At the same time, we’re like little children longing for you, longing for your Spirit inside of us, knowing on some deep, deep level that we’re not enough. But to feel we’re not enough is terrifying to the ego and to the will, so bless us with humility, with the ability to sense your patience with us as we struggle with this. And most especially I ask you to bless this work that this program has given to me to work and to find new people and have a relationship with them that I believe is going to be powerful for me and for them. So bless this ministry of mine that is now going through some kind of change that I don’t fully understand, but I pray it will be effective and life-giving. So thank you, God, for your gift of life. Amen.

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Jeremiah 33:14-16 | 1 Thessalonians 3:12—4:2 | Luke 21:25-28, 34-36

Grant your faithful, we pray, Almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming so that, gathered at his right hand, they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen

Always when we begin a new church year, a new season, now looking at the Gospel of St. Luke for the next 12 months, we’re invited to reflect upon the core of this message that Jesus has brought into the world, and if there’s anything that I think you could take from this particular set of readings, the most important thing is the way the gospel ends. Be vigilant. Pay attention. Recognize what’s taking place.

One of the things that happened to me, when I retired 11 years ago from the active ministry for 43 years in the Diocese of Dallas, is that I finally did not have this incredibly enjoyable but, at times, taxing schedule I had running a parish of over 20,000 members. You had a system that was going on, a routine. You knew where you were going to be next week and the week after that and the week after that, and you knew exactly what you were going to do. But one of the things was clear: it was all-consuming. I was always working, always engaged with people, and I love being with people. Doing things for people, I love that too. And struggling with my own struggles, didn’t love that very much, but I had to do that at the same time. But basically it was non-reflective. It was busy, busy, busy, working, working, working, and yet this particular season that starts Advent always starts with the same idea: pay attention, wake up, be vigilant, start reflecting.

Something is going on that you could get into a way of living where you’re not paying attention to what’s really taking place. And what is taking place? What is God doing over and over, year after year in your life and in mine? He’s remaking the world. He’s taking us through radical transformation, change. And I can say this from a zillion ways, but when you have a routine and when things are the way they have always been and somebody just disrupts that, for some of us, it’s hard. For others, it’s impossible. Change is not easy, radical change, yet that’s exactly what the gospel is inviting you and me to experience in this world while we walk this planet. We’re going to be participating in a shift of consciousness and awareness that has to happen to all human beings so that the human race, cumulatively, will figure this out, and we keep growing, growing, growing in consciousness. There’s something in the world that we resist, and it’s oversimplified maybe to say it’s change. But whatever it is, it’s moving more into a truth that God has revealed for us to live in, and we tend to want to live in lies, because they’re more comfortable and more familiar.

So with this set of readings, I want to really focus on the gospel to a great extent, because I want to go back to when this passage from Luke took place in the lives of the witnesses that we turn to year after year in every cycle. We want to listen to the witnesses that were with Jesus, and we want to grow because of what they went through. So we’re listening to somebody tell us about what it’s like to be in the presence of this God/man Jesus who has come into the world to teach us to be like him. So let’s put this in a context. It’s at the end of Luke’s gospel, so pretty much that implies that it’s at the end of the public ministry of Jesus, and it was. And what has just happened in this particular passage is that Jesus, with his disciples, is deciding to return to Jerusalem, because he has an intuition, a sense of something that he has to do. And what it is that he’s already implied it to his disciples, “I know this is going to be strange, but I have to give myself into evil.” Now, they had not concept of what that meant. Give yourself into evil. But what he was going to be doing is surrendering to the way in which God intended his life to be lived, and he was going to do it as it was written. And so Jesus, on the way back to Jerusalem, was not in a great place. He was not in a good mood, I don’t think. The one thing that was interesting about that journey back to Jerusalem, when he came upon a fig tree and the fig tree was barren — it wasn’t even time for fig trees to be producing figs, but he condemns that fig tree, and it withers right in front of them. And so scholars have wondered, “What was that about?” And what they feel it was about is that Jesus was going back to encounter the temple. The temple was everything for a good Jew. It was the place of God’s presence. It was the source of holiness. It’s where the Ark of the Covenant was. In the center of that building was the Ten Commandments, the wisdom that God gave to his followers in the Old Testament, and it was the forerunner of the presence of God entering into somebody. It’s one thing to have knowledge of what you should be. It’s something else to have within you the presence of God that enables you to live those rules and regulations and not simply because you’re told that you’re supposed to do them, but you become them. In Jeremiah’s words, they’re written on your heart. You become who God intends you to be.

And so he’s going back to Jerusalem to confront this whole issue of the radical change that’s going to happen through his death and resurrection, and it’s going to be traumatic. Imagine: these 12 men are following Jesus, and they have been told all along that the kingdom is coming, and the kingdom is going to be wonderful. And if they surrender to God’s gift, they will be able to create this kingdom of peace and joy and forgiveness. It’s just a beautiful message, right? Is the world ready for that message? No. When you have a message of peace and love and understanding and compassion and you walk into a room filled with people that are filled with vengeance and rivalry and competition and a desire to destroy everything that is not what they expect it to be, you think they’re going to embrace you and say it’s wonderful? No, they’re going to fight you, and that’s exactly what happened when Jesus returned to Jerusalem. And he knew that he had to do something really, really, really important, and he took on the entire temple. And so when he comes in, he’s already in trouble. He’s already on the radar of the people that have been watching Jesus, and so Jesus knows giving in to evil is going to be giving in to the egocentric, the dysfunction of the temple that had turned into not a place of life but a place that was sucking life out of people. Does that sound familiar, institutions that suck life out of people? That happens over and over again in political situations, in business, in religion. It’s when the very system that is there to care for people turns out to suck life out of them instead of caring for them, because it cares for itself. All right? That’s what he’s going to confront. That’s the barrenness of the temple. So Jesus comes in as a hero, and he knows that’s going to stir up a lot of stuff in the temple, in the temple leaders. So on — let’s say he came in on Sunday, the Sabbath maybe, whatever day exactly was, Saturday or Sunday, but basically it was Sunday, I’m sure. And he came in, and then he took his disciples — but then he went to the temple the next day, in Luke’s gospel, and starts teaching against the temple, because it was such an embarrassment to his and to his — he knew how wrong it was and how sad it was that it had lost its hope and its direction. Why it did that — it’s only saying that human beings on their own are not ever going to be able to become who they need to be. They have to have divinity living in them. That’s the whole history of the Old Testament. Human beings struggling to do their best to become who God wants them to be are going to end up being egocentric and somehow abusive. So the system doesn’t have within it what it takes to be fruitful. The fruitless tree, the fig tree, symbolized that.

And now when Jesus has gone to the temple and he’s basically yelled at them, tried to make them aware of what they were doing, then he’s with his disciples now where this gospel takes place, and he is sitting — he took them outside of Jerusalem. They’re looking back at the temple that was just completed, and Jesus makes this incredibly powerful statement. He said, “Gentlemen, see that place that everyone looks to as the source of life, which it really isn’t, but people still think it is? It’s going to be destroyed. I am going to destroy it, and I can rebuild it in three days.” What he’s saying is — he’s not getting rid of the temple. He’s not destroying the temple; he’s remaking it. He’s turning it into something radically different, from a temple that was focused on regulations, rules, laws, judgment, condemnation, he turned it into a church filled with people, filled with empathy, compassion, forgiveness. It was so radical.

So Jesus is really aware of the disciples being totally confused at this point, and then he goes on to describe what they’re going to have to be ready to endure, and he talks about the end of the world. It sounds like the whole world is going to fall apart, and everything is going to collapse. And there’s going to be darkness and pain and screaming, and bless those that can survive it. What he’s not talking about — people think this is talking about the end of the world, but it’s not the end of the world. What it is, it’s the end of that tyrannical system of the temple, and these men are going to be caught in the resistance of the temple to destroy everything that Jesus came to establish. And so indirectly, he’s saying, “The world that you thought you were going to get into, gentlemen, the thing that you thought I was preparing for you, this great, glorious Jerusalem back in its place of controlling and guiding the world and being the center of the world and all that, it’s all going to go dark. None of that image is going to work for you guys. You have to surrender to the fact that everything that you have in your head, that you think I am going to bring you through my guiding you into this new kingdom is going to bring you all this power and glory, it’s going to be just the opposite. You’re going to be, all of you —” he didn’t say these words but, “All of you are going to be asked directly to die for me, to lose everything that you’ve worked for, just as I am going to show you what it’s like to give in to what it is that God is asking all of us to do, and that is to surrender to the way it’s written. And when the writing on the wall is that the thing that you’ve come to establish in this world is going to be met with such enormous resistance that you’re going to have to have this capacity inside of you to endure the loss of the power that you would like to have to make the world into what you want it to be.” We just don’t walk into the world and make it what we want it to be. We don’t have children and make them into what we think they should be and that we have the power to make the world into what it is. No, we have the power to bring God into every situation, and when the situation is far from what it should be, we should expect some backlash, some resistance. And when Jesus tells his disciples, “Be aware of all this. Stay vigilant. Don’t get caught up in drunkenness,” all I can think of is, when life is so tough and when you’ve really put yourself out there and you want so much the world to be what you think it could be and you’re working on something, it all collapses. Or just you have an image of your life that you think God has created this wonderful life for you, and then the life that you believe you had is devastated by a horrible accident or by a disease or by some calamity. The world you built is gone. That’s what he’s talking to his disciples about on this mountain, looking back at the glory of the temple, the glory of the perfect world they thought the disciples were going to create.

It’s not about creating a perfect world. Be vigilant. It’s about being authentic and being yourself in every situation, and when you’re in that situation, you’re going to have an impact on freeing the world from whatever is in that space that you’re working in that is clinging to the old way. And if it doesn’t come after you with a vengeance, then you’re probably not doing the real work. But when I talk about the real work, I want to be sure that I’m not exaggerating something that would be confusing to you, because I’m using major images, which have a lot of power in them, like if you don’t do this, or when you go through this process, it’s as if your whole world has completely collapsed, and the sun is no more, and the earth is not under your body, and you’re falling. That’s a lot of drama, and there’s something valuable about using images that strong to say this is really not something that is just easy. When you think about it, life, for a lot of people, it’s pretty ordinary and pretty normal, and we don’t have major, major traumas. We haven’t been through some natural disaster or a war or some horrible personal disease and all of that. So what is it that I would want to give you as advice for how you participate in this mysterious death and resurrection process that is so core to our understanding of what God is longing to do, not so much for us but with us and not to us but with us?

I’m going to just share something that’s happened to me. It’s going to sound really silly compared to all these major issues I just described that you might be caught up in, but basically one of the things I noticed, when I was living alone for the first time after my retirement 11 years ago, is how upset and angry I would get when things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be. Now, I’m not saying that, when I was pastor, that I was raging at times, screaming at people. I didn’t do that very much, but if I was unhappy with something they were doing, I wasn’t screaming at them, but maybe in a worse situation, they could pretty much feel my rejection — my rejection. And that’s a kind of violent thing when you think about it. If you have somebody you look up to, somebody that you want to please, and then they look at you, and they don’t say it so much, but you can just feel something coming out of them — in fact, most of us don’t realize how transparent we are when we are trying to hide emotions and act like nothing’s really a problem. And most people can pick it up. So anyway, I just — what I’m saying is I needed a discipline where I could learn how basically to work on the issue of surrendering to things as they are and not as the way I want them to be. And I started doing it in some of the silliest ways, but I’d get up in the morning by myself, and I would make a cup of coffee, and I would run around and do a few things. I’d go to sit down and reach for my coffee. I couldn’t find it. Then I would look around the house. I couldn’t find it, and I would get so, so angry. “What the hell. Where’s the damn coffee,” and just lose it. Or I’d go and set something on a table, and it falls over, and it’s red wine, and it goes onto the floor, and I have to clean it up, and I get angry. And all of a sudden, I realize, “What is it that’s happening when I get angry? What am I expressing?” And it was resistance, just pure resistance to the fact that I’m a human being and I make a lot of mistakes. And I didn’t accept that. It become — somehow when somebody else is around you and you get mad, like I used to do, they’ll comfort you and say, “Oh, no. It’s okay.” But I didn’t have any audience. I was just doing it on my own. I was thinking, “This is really crazy. What a waste of time, to be so angry over something I’ve done that is really nothing other than an expression of my humanity.” And when you think about the mistakes we make so much, we forget to do something for someone — I remember I had dinner not too long ago with a friend, and I said, “Don’t you worry. I’ll pick you up at the hotel, and I’ll meet you at the restaurant,” because they’re from out of town. And I’m sitting at the restaurant wondering, “Where are they?” And I thought, “Oh, my God, I forgot to pick them up.” And I sat there, after years of this training, and I’m trying to talk to you about where I just don’t get upset at myself anymore. I sat there, and I said, “Well, oh well.” I called them and said, “This is going to sound really stupid, but I forgot to pick you up. Can you call an Uber and come over?” But I found amazing capacity to stop the, whatever, instant, negative reaction, when I’m just being human, by simply giving in over and over to little things.

And so maybe what I’m saying is, in all the big, traumatic events in our life, we might find that the real exercising of our will to surrender to what is, is going to happen in the simplest, littlest things, and that’s not too difficult to embrace.Just why get upset when something goes wrong?Why upset in traffic?Why when somebody is in line in front of you and they can’t find their checkbook or they can’t find their credit card or they forgot to get something?They run back to get something, and you’re sitting there waiting, and it’s just chapping you.Give in.Let it go.It’s amazing how you can develop that, and it just takes off so much pressure, because it doesn’t have to be the right way.It doesn’t have to work out the way you expected it to work out.That’s a kind of inner peace that you can develop when you simply trust in the model of Jesus, who gave himself over to evil.That’s exactly what we’re doing, and believe it or not, it’s not that hard, and it’s really effective.

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Daniel 7:13-14 | Revelation 1:5-8 | John 18:33b-37

Almighty, everliving God, whose will is to restore all things in your beloved Son, the King of the Universe, grant, we pray, that the whole creation, set free from slavery, may render your majestic service and ceaselessly proclaim your praise. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

It’s clear that this God that we believe in, the God that created us is a God who has an intense longing for you and for me to find fullness. He created us in a way, I think, to fulfill a longing of being loved and loving someone like him. Remember Adam and Eve. When God created Adam, he found that he wasn’t enough by himself. He needed a partner. He needed Eve. When God created the universe, it seems that he got to a point where he felt like, “I wanted to create, along with everything else, all the beauty, the majesty of the creation of the universe and the world and the animal world and insect world, all of that —” But he wanted someone in there to be like him, and then he did something to distinguish them from everyone else. He gave them free will. You can make choices. “I will not force you to do anything. You can do all that I ask you to do, or you can do absolutely the antithesis of what I ask you to do. It’s up to you.” He didn’t give that to any other aspect of his creation. So what does that say to you and me about who we are? We are absolutely a unique gift, given by God who created us and this gift carries an enormous responsibility.

You often think that it would be easier — at least I often think it would be easier if he didn’t give us free will, and we could just do what we’re here to do. And like the animal world, we would just exist, but what we wouldn’t have then is — without free will, we wouldn’t have the creativity that we are able to have. To be able to choose is more than making a right decision of whether something is right or wrong, but free will has everything to do with being able to come up with something that no one ever thought of before. And think of the creative energy that has been manifested in the world in mostly recent times. We see human beings being able to do the most amazing feats, whether it’s solving the problems of a pandemic in lightning speed, coming up with a vaccine that nobody ever thought could ever be designed and produced in such a short period, whether it’s the success we’ve had with technology or space travel or whatever you look at. There is just an amazing capacity in human beings to be more than we ever thought we could be. It’s just kind of a wonderful way of imagining human nature, all this potential in seed form inside all of us, and one of the things that we need with a free will, like we’ve been given, is we need direction.

We need somebody to guide us and direct us in the way that we should go, because we have so many questions. Where did I come from? What’s this world about? Why am I here? What really matters to me? And it would be, I think, cruel of a God that would say, “All right, I give you this capacity to ask all these questions, but I’m not going to give you the answers.” Well, he does want to give us the answers, but not like other answers have been given by other leaders, meaning sometimes we have leaders in our life — sometimes it’s a parent; sometimes it’s a religious leader; sometimes it’s a boss; sometimes it’s a whoever — that could care less about what we think or what we feel — the impact of what they’re saying to us. But they will tell us, “This is what you have to do.” And I would call that control. And there’s nothing in human nature that responds very positively to control, because it somehow feels wrong, because it denies one most important aspect that God created in each of us, and that’s the freedom to make our own decisions, to create our own world, all of that.

And so how does God then fulfill his responsibility to take care of us? Not by controlling us, not by telling us what to do. The only real commandments that God gave us are ten very simple rules, and when you look at them, they make total sense to our human nature. Human beings have always needed a power greater than themselves. So to say that we need to believe in a God, we need to spend time with him, we need to use his power in the way that he intended it to, that makes total sense, or that there are things that we need to do in relationship to each other. We should honor the promises we make. We should honor the people that give us life. We shouldn’t steal. We shouldn’t kill. We shouldn’t lie. We should not envy and want things that other people have to the point of being dissatisfied with ourselves. All of that makes total sense. So those rules to me never feel like they’re controlling us. It’s just they’re awakening us to who we are.

But let’s face it. Living in the world today, more than any other time, we have voices all around us that try to tell us what is real, what is true, and the thing that’s so unique about this Feast of Christ, the King is that we are celebrating the fact that we do have a King, someone who has power over us who could do anything he wants, in a sense, because he created the whole world. But what he does and who he is, is so radically different than we see so many rulers that are in the world today and have always been in the world, where they become tyrannical and completely disregard one’s individual human freedom. Then we have a God that believes and trusts in our human nature that he created, that deep inside of us we have a capacity to make the best possible decision about any situation that comes up. We have that in us in a seed form, but what he does, what he promises to do, as our King and our leader, is given to us in the gospel when he is standing before Pilate and there is this question: “So you’re a King?” Jesus said, “Yeah, I am a King. You say I’m a King. I am a King, but my kingdom is different from your kingdom. My kingdom is a kingdom of truth, not power over people but truth. What I came into the world to do was to awaken people to who God the Father truly is.” He is a God who has a gift for every one of us, and the gift is he will speak to them, share with them the essence of who he is. He is truth. He is reality. He is the source of everything that is.

It’s all — all of this is a reflection of who God is, and you and I are reflections of him. But the thing that is so unique about us, that I love so much, is that he has asked us to be co-creators, co-partners with him in the world as it unfolds in the work that he has as a teacher, as one who shares the truth with everyone. He said, “I want you to be the recipient of my truth, but I also want you to be the one who brings truth to other people.” So we have this flow of — I call it the flow of life. It’s the flow of the truth. If we live in a kingdom of truth, and truth is the thing that is the most core ingredient in everything we do, that’s going to bring us to the place that we, as our very nature has created us to be, that we’re going to find a life of fullness. The fullness of our life is not the way we often think it is. We think fullness might be being the strongest, the most powerful, the most in control, the most effective in controlling other people. All those images that we have sometimes about what it means to be powerful, I guess, needs to be tempered with this voice inside of us, this divine voice that comes in and says, “I want to talk to you. I want to share who I am and who you are with you, and I want to give you the wisdom that you need to make your own decisions.” Isn’t that interesting? In the kingdom of God, God does not want to make our decisions for us. That’s what a lot of leaders do. “You all think this way. You all believe this way.” No, no. He wants you and me to make a decision based on the truth that he shares with us, and what that truth that comes into us through whatever means God is going to use — sometimes it comes through another person; sometimes it comes through an angel. We have these beings all around us that are speaking to us, giving us advice, giving us direction, opening our eyes to see things.

We also have a community of saints, all these dead people, so-called dead people, that are around us, and one of the things I’ve learned is how wonderful it is to trust in the voice of those that you’ve known who have died. We’ve always been taught to pray to the great saints that we know are in heaven, and there was always this fear of turning to somebody who wasn’t in heaven and asking them to guide us because they’re involved in another world that is, let’s say, in purgatory, or they’re in hell or whatever. Think about it. We were always told to just pray to the great saints that were canonized, but it doesn’t make any sense to me that we wouldn’t pray to my mother, my father, my brothers, my sister that died. Anyone in my life that has died, I would want them to be the one giving me insight, and they want to, and they do. Everyone’s had experiences with the dead that are so real, whether it’s in a dream or in a vision or whatever. They want to talk to us, and all these images that I’m using of talking to someone is the image of the truth — the truth, the truth coming.

And here’s the thing that I love about our human nature. Our truth, how do you know it’s true? That’s the most interesting thing, and you know the truth, because you are made in a way that is absolutely hardwired to respond positively to truth and to respond negatively to that which is not true. Do we really need to be told it’s wrong to lie or to steal or to kill? No, that makes total sense. That’s what our nature is. We’re just used to that in a really primitive kind of way or a really over-simplified way to say that, when God is — when you’re struggling with an issue, “I’ve got to make a decision. What’s the truth in this situation? How do I adapt to the situation that I’m now in so that I can find peace, or how do I give to another person the peace I wish they had? What do I do? What do I say?” When we have all those kinds of questions, we don’t know what to do. Ideas come in, and they come in from all different places. Different voices are out there all around us. In fact, there’s probably a voice out there on the Internet or somewhere that — it sounds official — that will tell you every conceivable way in which you should handle a situation, and let’s say the majority of those are going to be disasters.

How is it that you can hear a voice and know that it’s God’s voice, know that it’s God’s voice coming to you through an angel, through a deceased person, through another person, through a situation, through a song you hear, whatever? There’s a million ways in which God will be speaking to your soul when you’re struggling with something that you have to make a decision and you don’t know what to do. And here’s how you know that it’s true: it’s because there’s something already in you that is the truth, and when those two connect, when that voice that comes to you from whatever form that God wants to send it to you, connects with that thing that is placed deep inside of you. That’s when you make the decision. That’s when you know what to do.

Jeremiah said it so, so powerfully. When people kept looking for rules and laws to follow and, “How do we know what to do, and who do we turn to, to give us the direction we need,” he said, “Well, look, God’s doing something for you. He’s going to take his rules, his laws. He’s going to write them on your heart, and if they’re written on your heart, then when you hear them echoed back and it connects with that thing that’s already written inside of you. You know when you have a voice that tells you something, “This is the right thing to do,” and all of a sudden — it’s not because of who they are or their authority. It’s all of a sudden you’ll say, “Oh, my God, you’re right. That’s it. I feel it. I know it.” What is that? Well, we can call it conscience. A conscience is that gift we have deep inside of us that we already know the truth, and so when somehow the voices come that are conflicting from outside of us, we go to that inner voice. The inner voice says, “No, this is the way this has got to be done.” Okay, that’s the same thing I’m talking about. We can use the word conscience. We can use the inner voice. We can use the seed of the truth in us. It’s all the same thing. It’s this great, incredible gift that you and I have.

And how do we make ourselves more sensitive to it? What do we do? Well, first of all, we believe that I have deep inside of me a knowledge of what’s real and what’s true in seed form. It needs to be awakened, nurtured, developed. We believe that there’s a God who wants more than anything else for us to listen to his voice. So we have a God, a Father who is speaking to us constantly. If you want a model of what it’s like to be in a relationship with this God, look at Jesus. Whenever things got tough, what did he do? He went away and talked to his Father. Whenever we have a hard decision to make, what do we do? Go to the Internet and look it up. No. No, we go to inside, to the Father’s presence inside of us and just take time, and I think the most beautiful thing that God would ask from you and from me, to be able to listen as openly as possible, is first and foremost we have a willingness to say, “I don’t care what it is that is going to be the answer. I want it to be right. I want it to be the most effective thing.” If you can get yourself in that disposition where you don’t have a prejudice, “Please don’t let it be this, or don’t let it be that,” — no. “I’m open to whatever it is that I am supposed to do in this situation.” And then wait and listen and wait and ask again, and go to authorities that might help you with understanding the issues involved. The church has always been that sort of wonderful source of wisdom when it comes to moral issues, particularly in difficult issues, and you need to get the information that’s necessary to make the right decision. And that can be done objectively through going to read something or to study something.

All of that is important, but nothing is as important as believing that you have voices that come to you from God directly, his voice indirectly through other spiritual forces, and they’re there to do the work of awakening you to this kingdom of truth. And there’s nothing like it. When you have a conviction that is so clearly yours and you feel it resonating through your body, you’ll know that you’re in the kingdom of God. And does he keep you there all the time? No. And is there reason for doubt and for struggling to find the truth? Yes, because every time we’re in a struggle and we go back to find it, we discover another aspect of it. It’s like this beautiful diamond that keeps moving and twisting around, and another facet hits your eye and another facet, another aspect. What a gift. What an incredibly wonderful gift to have that promise of our Messiah, our King share his wisdom with you and with me whenever we ask.

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Daniel 12:1-3 | Hebrews 10:11-14, 18 | Mark 13:24-32

Grant us, we pray, O Lord, our God, the constant gladness of being devoted to you, for it is full and lasting happiness to serve with constancy the author of all that is good. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

We’ve come to the end of ordinary time, and next Sunday, we will celebrate the Feast of Christ the King. So in a sense, this is the last chance I have to summarize, if I think I can do that, summarize the thoughts of this amazing story of what God wants us to understand and what he wants us to see. And a funny thing, or not funny so much, but the interesting thing to me is the way the end of each year comes. It’s always a cataclysmic event that’s like everything is going to be exposed and broken open, and the sky is falling, and the earth is opening up and devouring those who didn’t really produce very much to please God and all of these end of the world kind of images. And that’s very, very dangerous, because this is not about the end of the world. It’s about the end of a way of seeing God.

The New Testament is so radical, so much a departure from the Old Testament that, when one opens one’s heart to it, when one’s opened one’s imagination, what is going to happen is there’s this falling apart of a whole system that we’ve created around us, and that system is fundamentally a binary system of right and wrong, good and evil, saved and unsaved, dividing the world into two parts. And it’s interesting that the Old Testament is designed and was always designed — well, all of God’s revelations are perfectly timed for where human nature is, and you have to go back 4,000 years ago to get a sense of what the people were like when Abraham was asked by God to call a people together. It was the Bronze Age, and that Bronze Age was the time when the alphabet, or I should say written language was finally put together so people could write stories and not just have them as oral traditions. I think the wheel was even discovered during that time, or at least came into use very much. So human beings 4,000 years ago, when this God began to reveal to himself who he is. They were pretty simple people, much like children, compared to the consciousness that we have today. So it makes total sense that the thing that he would do is create a world in which there would be a kind of simple message that fit their brains, their understanding at the time, and when we’re younger, we understand things in a very simple, binary way. When you’re two-years-old, you understand that your parents are going to tell you yes or no about what you do, good or bad. “Good little boy. You ate your food.” “Bad little boy.” Well, you’re not supposed to say bad little boy to children, but anyway, you might say, “You’re starting on chewing on something that’s going to make you sick. Bad, bad, bad. Don’t do that.” So it’s very much a part of the world in which we are evolving and growing in a relationship with a God who was hidden for so many centuries. There were always gods around, and they were always mean kind of characters that demanded a lot of attention, and I would say not very compassionate.

So what I think we have to understand very vividly is that, when Jesus comes into the world and describes a world that is based in not binary, black and white, right and wrong but in some kind of incredibly mysterious world that is filled with not so much justice — and that’s one way to talk about binary world. It’s right, or it’s wrong. You go to jail, or you’re acquitted or whatever. No, it’s this new world of mercy. Mercy, what is that, mercy? Well, the interesting thing about mercy to me is that it has this quality about it that is so nurturing and so life-giving, and so when I’m thinking about what it is that is so shattering to the world, when Jesus is finally fully revealing who he is, we have that image in the first reading about this work that has to be done for human beings to be freed from sins and that sins are the great downfall of human beings.

Let me go back to the opening prayer is what I really wanted to say, because that opening prayer is so beautiful when it says, “I am so, so delighted, and it’s so fulfilling for me to work for someone who is so good, so good.” And as a priest, you perhaps as a parent, as a person who struggles with ideas in their head that are sometimes unacceptable, we fall into the trap of the binary world that is in the way that God is imagined by us where he is judgmental and angry and condemning when we aren’t really fulfilling what we’re supposed to do. And when you think about that, that is the way the Old Testament is written. In the book of Deuteronomy, which we looked at last week, there’s that image of God being the God who said, “I want you to love me with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your soul, and then I want you to go into a new land.” In the next chapter he says, “And this new land is owned by another tribe, and you’re going to get rid of them, and you’re going to get all the things, which they built,” which doesn’t really sound fair. “And you kick all those people out.” And then God goes on to say, “And if you don’t, if they don’t leave, then kill them. Destroy them, because if you leave them and they stay in that particular place, then they are going to infiltrate into your way of seeing me, and they’re going to rob you of who I’m really trying to tell you I am. And so if you do that, I’ll kill you.” And to us that sounds so awful, but to the people at the time, that was what gods did. And so the God of Israel, the God that is, had to reveal himself like the other gods in order to get our attention so that he can slowly, slowly, over 2,000 years, get them ready, from the time of Abraham to the time of Jesus, to get them ready to understand who he really is.

And he’s the God of mercy. He’s the God that says, “If somebody strikes you on one side of your cheek, then turn and offer him the other. If they come in and rob you and take things away, then run after them and say, ‘You didn’t get this also.’” It’s such a radical change. That’s why the images in this final times of the church years always is about the sky is falling, and everything is falling apart. And what it is, is that binary system is being destroyed, and you take away a binary world from people who are living in it — these are the things you have to do; these are the things you should never do — and you cloud that with, “Well, sometimes that’s wrong.” Well, but what about the intention? What about the person engaged in this struggle? What about human conscience? These are things that a binary world goes nuts over. In fact, you can look at an extremely conservative religious person, and they have this almost — you get the feeling sometimes, when you talk to them, they’re almost happy when they can say, “Those people are all going to be condemned. They’re all going to burn in hell, and we’re not. We’re going to be saved, and we’re the loved ones. God loves us, because we do everything right.”

And you know how God feels about righteousness, how Jesus talked about it in the New Testament. He basically said, “That’s not what I’m looking for. I’m not looking for somebody that has developed and grown into some kind of perfect person and doing everything.” Think of the rich man. When he came to Jesus and said, “Look, I’ve done everything. I have followed every single rule and every single law.” And he must have been so confident and so full of himself, and what I love about Jesus’ response to that was he just said, “God love you. I love you. I know that you think you’re really doing the best thing possible, but you’re so far from the kingdom, because basically the issue is not in making yourself into someone who is perfect but is being freed of all those external ideals that don’t really have anything to do with the heart that is receptive and open to a presence of God that wants to live inside of you and, through you, offer life, goodness to those who are in the darkest places.” We are here in this world to do this work of ministering to those who are not achieving greatness and fullness. Isn’t it funny how you look at the whole focus of the ministry of Jesus went to the people who were in most need of what? Understanding, compassion, mercy, and you look back at the time that Jesus walked the earth.

And you look at the way the Old Testament had formed them, and it was so incredibly off-center for what Jesus wants people to see. If you were a believing Jew and you were following all the rules and laws and you saw somebody who was on the side of the road, in trouble, and you knew they were not following the rules and laws, you were obligated not to go near them. If you were a believing Jew and someone who God really was favoring, you would walk past that person, because they weren’t worth anything. And it was because God was punishing them. Everyone who had negative experiences in life were being punished by God. Well, if you take that system of a punishing God, a God who loves you, who follows every regulation and every rule, and you find comfort in that, and then comes Jesus and starts revealing this message — ad all the negative, horrible things that are described at the end times, they weren’t about — they’re not about the end of the world. They’re about the end of the binary world of the Old Testament, at the end of that kind of over-simplified division of all things, and what God is saying, when you let go of that, you have nothing. If that’s the thing that holds your life together, then it’s like the sky is falling, and the light that you thought was so bright and so clear for you is all of a sudden dark. That is the death that Jesus talks about in the New Testament. Unless you die to that old system, you can’t find the life that is your inheritance. Wow, that’s really, really different.

And why is it that people are so drawn to that binary world? What is it about it that is so seductive? And I think it’s simply that it feeds the mind, and the mind works in a binary way. And so the mind understands either/or, but you know what? The message of Jesus, this message that I long to share with you week after week is not something that I want you to be listening with your mind. And there’s nothing wrong with the mind. It’s an absolutely essential tool. If we don’t have it, we’d be mush and all that kind of stuff, but no. But think about it. It’s the heart that I’m talking to. It’s the heart that understands this world of mercy, compassion, empathy. The mind has really a hard time with it, and so what I’m asking you to do and reflect with me at the end of this year, when we’ve been listening to Mark go through his whole memory of this Jesus figure, what he’s really trying to do, what he would want, if you could talk to Mark right now and say, “We’re still listening to your message.” I think it’s fascinating to think about Mark and the evangelists and who they are, thinking of, “They’re listening to my story again. Here’s another congregation listening to the story. I hope they get it. I hope they get what I meant.” But what he would want them to know is that I am talking to your heart, not your mind.

And it’s so interesting when you find someone who is rigidly living in a binary world. If you bring a problem to them or you ask them to give you some advice, it just always seems so sharp-edged and hurts because in it is always an unconscious condemnation that, “Why haven’t you done it right?” And the expectation that you and I are supposed to be doing everything right, that we’re supposed to be sinless. We’re not supposed to have sexual drives. We’re not supposed to have a desire to break a promise. We’re not supposed to want to lie. We’re not supposed to want to dishonor people that we should honor. We’re not supposed to have that? No, that’s human nature. That’s who we are, and when you start with human beings, with this kind of demanding a certain kind of rigid adherence to an external law — and that’s all that we’re allowed to be in a relationship with somebody who also is following that law, meaning that, if you’re not doing it, you’re kicked out, just like in the Old Testament. That’s the way it was considered. If you were not one of the in members, you were an outsider, and outsiders were valueless, without any value. That’s so amazing that we could actually get into a way of thinking that, when somebody isn’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing, they are of no value. When it’s New Testament, when you understand the message of Jesus, you understand that his major role, the thing he came into the world to do is to finish and complete the message of the Old Testament. And the references to him in the Old Testament are so many that you cannot begin to imagine that the story of the Old Testament is not connected to the story of Jesus. It’s all there. It’s all predicted. It’s all there so that, if you’re following the story carefully, you’re seeing this slow evolution of change and growth, and it brings one into the moment where that catastrophic shift is not going to be so impossible.

I know people today that when you talk about mercy and the individual conscience, the right of every human being that Vatican II so supported to make their own moral choices when it’s not something black and white, a binary issue — it’s not something you can say, “Well, if I do this, it’s all going to work out. If I don’t do that, it’s all going to fall apart, or if I do the other thing, it’s all going to fall apart.” That’s not the way the world is. It’s always — and I don’t want to just oversimplify by saying it’s the lesser of two evils, but that’s part of it, goes into it. But when we have that strict, strict binary world, then there’s something, I would say, that’s — what’s the word I want — abusive. Abusive to the dignity and the beauty of an individual who comes into this world and is affected by everything that has happened to them, and they end up being strong in certain areas and weak in others. It’s not necessary they chose those directions of their life, but when they’re in that situation of growing in consciousness of who they really are, they flourish in an environment of mercy — mercy, not a binary world of judgment, of right or wrong and condemnation.

So it’s amazing to me that we have so many struggles today, even on every issue where people are divided and separated, and it’s one thing to be divided and separated over an issue, over what we believe, but why is it, along with that in the brain, that we come up with this idea of condemnation?And I think you’d say, “Well, you get it from the Old Testament. ”It’s all over the Old Testament. So we get it in sort of a way that reminds us that is the part of what human nature’s like when it’s not fully developed and not evolved far enough. And if we think that the world should be all fully developed and that this life that we’re called to live as believers in a God who longs to use us to help other people. If we think that’s all supposed to have been done by now, we shouldn’t still be working on all these problems, no. No, it’s always going to be that tension between a binary world and the world of mercy. It’s always going to be there, because we are generation after generation that come into this world. And what a joy that opening prayer says to all of us when it says it’s so wonderful and so valuable and life-giving to work for a God that is good. So when somebody is working for a God that is judgmental and demeaning and demanding and threatening, you know that you’re not in the right place. So God bless this world that you and I have grown to understand, the world of mercy, the world of understanding and compassion, and our challenge is to live it in the midst of judgment and condemnation, not play their game but live as God has called us to live. Amen.

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1 Kings 17:10-16 | Hebrews 9:24-28 | Mark 12:38-44 or 12:41-44

Almighty and merciful God, graciously keep from us all adversity so that unhindered in mind and body alike we may pursue in freedom of heart the things that are yours. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen.

So often I go back to the Old Testament, to the book of Genesis and the story of creation and look carefully into that relationship that God had with Adam and Eve, and it’s fascinating what you learn from that. You see something so fascinating, human beings, nature in conflict with the generosity and the love of a God who created us and wanted to do everything he could to care for us and give us all that we longed for. And one of the things that I learn from that story is, in one of the stories of creation, when God created a man, after he created the man, he realized something. It’s not good for a man to be alone. I just want to start with that theme. It’s not good for us to be alone, and it’s interesting. When I think about the image of communion, union with other people, I can’t imagine my life without relationships. I can’t imagine what it’s like to not have someone to listen to me when I’m trying to figure something out that they can see and show me what I’m missing. I can’t imagine what it’s like not to have the feeling of giving somebody something that they didn’t have before. It makes you just feel so good, and so it’s so clear that there is this flow of life that goes between us. And it’s so fascinating that we’re living through something so unique these days with the pandemic, and we’ve been separated from so many normal ways in which we communicate with others. It’s had interesting impacts on all of us. One of the things, I think for sure, we might feel a little crazier than we normally feel, part of the lack of balance, but the other thing is that there’s just something — something so natural about leaning on someone. And yet there’s a part of you and a part of me that often feels that we should be autonomous, able to handle things on our own, to be strong, to be self-sufficient.

Listen to that first part of the story in the gospel when Jesus is talking about the things that people really don’t find attractive, even though the people that are engaged in them think are terribly attractive, and that is, when somebody has a sense that they have a position of power, some control over life, they have money or talent or whatever it is, good looks, and they act as if they have this sense of being without need. They are the source of everything they need, and they want people to acknowledge it and give homage to it and pay attention to it and thank them for it. And yet it’s so clear that that’s not really part of our human nature, the core of our human nature. The core of our human nature is designed to be in relationship with other sources of strength and power and to use that strength and power within us to be able to do something for other people. That’s what it means to be born into the likeness of God, and Genesis tells us that’s true, that human beings are the only creatures that God created that are like him. And that doesn’t mean we just look more like him than other people. No, our nature, the fullness of our nature — animals have a wonderful nature. They can have a nature that’s committed and faithful and, in a way, life-giving to other animals, but there’s nothing quite as complete or full as human nature, because it has the potential to evolve and grow into something so like a god that the model we have for this is the Savior, Jesus, who achieved the ultimate goal of what it means to be a human being. And that was to have this relationship with God that is so intimate and so close that we call him God, we say he’s God. Jesus is a human 100 percent and a God 100 percent. I love repeating that over and over again. I think I said it last Sunday, and it’s simply because it reminds me so much that whatever is at the heart of this relationship with God goes beyond the mind, the binary world of it’s either this or that. No, it can be both. Quantum physics teaches us that. Things can be both matter and spirit at the same time. Well, how does that work? I don't know, but it works.

So what I’m trying to get to is a very simple truth, is that we are never comfortable being not enough, and yet our nature tells us we are not enough. And when that nature tells us that, there’s something truthful in it that we need to embrace and take in, and so we look in the scriptures for images that give us some sense of who we’re becoming, what we’re engaged in. And you see these two women, one in the gospel, one in the first reading, widows. Widows had no resources of their own. They were dependent upon the goodness and kindness of other people, and in the first reading, we know that story well. I believe that you do. It’s the story of this widow who was alone and needy, and Elijah comes and favors her and even promises her that she’ll have a son. And she has the son, and she relies upon Elijah. And then Elijah comes back to her and asks her for something, and she doesn’t have anything to give. She’s absolutely empty. “I have no food to give you. I was just going to take the little that I have, the little that I am, and I was going to basically surrender to the fact that I don’t have enough, and I would just die. I would just cease to exist.” We don’t cease to exist sometimes when we don’t think we’re enough. We just cease to produce anything life giving. We lose energy. We lose self-worth. We lose a sense of we have something to accomplish, to do, and we can do it. We can do it. We can do it. That’s the thing we want to say over and over again, and yet the truth is, unless you can embrace the fact that you’re not enough and that we, the we, can’t do it, not as individuals doing their own thing. But the failure of faith is when we say we, God and I, can’t do it. Then we’re in trouble, because we don’t have the faith we’re supposed to have.

And it’s so interesting that, if you look at the gospel, in the Old Testament and New Testament together, you look at salvation history. You see over and over again people who have an experience of being called to do something really extraordinary, really wonderful. The prophets had that. Jesus had that as a man. So many times a prophet had that in the sense of wanting very much to convince people of something that they couldn’t see, and they often used the power of God to convince people that what they were saying was true. And miracles were performed by these men, these prophets, but the stories of prophets are fascinating, because even the prophet Elijah, who was very, very much aware of God working through him, at times he lost trust in God. And the one that I love the most is Jonah, who when God said, “All right, I will empower you to go to this town, called Nineveh, and you will warn them that something terrible is going to happen. I’m going to give you this gift of conviction. Your voice is going to be filled with such authority and power. You’re going to walk through this city. You’re going to tell them, ‘You have got to change, or God will destroy you,’ and they’ll listen to you. And that’s because I’m in you, working through you, and you and I together are so effective.” And he did it, and he didn’t like the answer. He didn’t like the response. Imagine, he was filled with God’s strength to accomplish something, but he himself didn’t want to see it happen, because he had a different attitude than God did and wanted people to be destroyed when they didn’t do what God wanted them to do. And so he walks away, and he doesn’t want to serve God anymore.

Isn’t that fascinating, this difficulty we have with dealing with our weaknesses and our powers? And that’s what I really want to talk about for a minute. How do you balance the two? Look at Jesus, how he saved the world. How did he make up for all the sins of the world? Some people think that God was such a vengeful God that he needed some major sacrifice to be made. Somebody would have to suffer so intensely, because God suffered every time we sinned. So he created his Son, and his Son had to offer his life as a sacrifice to make up for all human beings’ sins. That just doesn’t make sense to me, and it’s not good theology. No, when God entered into the world in the person of Jesus, he wanted to teach us what he wants from each of us, and this God/man Jesus is the model of what it means to be fully human, God dwelling in us, working through us, enabling us to accomplish the goal we’re here for. And the way he did that in Jesus is he had Jesus to a point in his ministry where he knew that he was in trouble, that there was something not functioning very well. He could feel that his miracles had probably caused more of a stir than he really wanted in terms of angering those who were in authority, because they didn’t have any way to discredit him when he was raising people from the dead, giving sight to the blind. What are you going to do with somebody like that? Say they’re crazy? Well, how do you talk about craziness when they’re so darn effective? And so Jesus must have known that things were getting really scary for him, and he was going to maybe be not so successful in the way he hoped to be successful. Think about it. Jesus as the man wanted to be successful. He wanted to do the job that God gave him to do, to change those people at the time that were lost in their lies and misconceptions of who God is. He wanted to do that. Otherwise he’s not fully human; he’s just playing a part. No, he was fully human, and so when he was in that Garden of Gethsemane, what he had to feel is that, “I don’t want to do this. I don’t have enough in me to do this. I’m scared. I’m so afraid, and I don’t want to be seen as a fool. I don’t want to be seen in the eyes of the people that I love and I’m trying to convince — I don’t want them to lose hope. I’ve given them all kinds of hope that I’m going to be the one who saves the world, and I’m going to look to them as somebody who failed.” And yet he says yes. He says, “Okay, I’ll do that.” He didn’t say it right away. He said no once, and then he said no again, and finally he said yes.

I love that part of Jesus, because it means that there’s a part of all of us that wants so badly to be able to accomplish the thing that we’re set out to do, and we want to be successful. And success is so frightening and scary when you think about it. Success, what does it mean? Accomplishing what I’m here to do? That would be wonderful, but it means so much more than that to an ego. It means being the best, being the best at what we do, being the one who’s better than everyone else, whatever that is, that need that is part of our core human nature that unfortunately never leaves us. I’m 81 years old. I’ve been a priest for over 54 years. I still struggle with the same fears of not being enough, not being able to say something that makes any sense, and all that, you’d think, “Well, that would go away with a lot of practice and a lot of confidence.” Well, I don’t think it’s ever supposed to go away, because it’s when we’re in that moment of saying, “I am not the source of what is going to happen here, but you’re asking me to do it, and you’re saying it’ll be effective. But I’m not the one in charge of it.” What better description could I come up with in that that’s what it means to overcome sin? That’s why Jesus saved the world from sin by giving us an example of the way you do it. The core sin is the sin of Adam and Eve, the sin of autonomy, the sin of wanting to be perfect, just like God, and we never realize that that’s really what it is. We always think it’s our human mistakes. Yeah, our mistakes are not always good. Sometimes they’re terrible, and sometimes they cause people tremendous pain. But at the same time, you don’t grow unless you have mistakes, and that’s why God said, “I’ve got to establish a new relationship with you where I’m never holding anything you do against you. It never harms our relationship, no matter how far you’ve drifted from who I know you are, and I trust that you will be that person one day, or you’ll reach the level that you’re called to reach in this life that you’re in right now.”

Perfection is not on the table as something we achieve. What we achieve is not perfection in the sense of being able to autonomously handle every situation and give the right answer to every question we’ve ever been asked. No, it’s about surrendering to what is, surrendering to the way it’s written, the story that God created with our life. And I can feel it, in a way, right now, just kind of coming into me when I feel like, if I can relieve myself from the anxiety that I am the source of everything that I do. If I can lay back and let failure happen and realize that very likely, not because of me, but because God pulls away his authority and his strength that flows through me just so I remember it’s not me, it’s him living inside of me, not overshadowing my humanity, not destroying it but never, never making it him. Does that make sense? We’re not — if God loves us and says, “I will — you can do all the things I do,” he’s not giving you that human power to do that, though that’s what I would like to do in my lower levels of consciousness, my binary world of either/or, either I’ve got the truth, or it doesn’t exist. We don’t possess things in order for them to be real. All of that needs to be let go of, I think.

Maybe that’s a good description of what it means to be poor. A woman who gives everything she has away in the treasury is seen by Jesus as, “Well, there’s one that’s got it.” And when Jesus saw that, maybe he was even thinking about himself and thinking, “I hope one day I’ll be able to do that, give away everything I have, everything that makes me feel good about myself.” And that’s what he did, and that’s what he’s asking us to do. But it gets hidden, gets hidden and distorted by the most natural thing, that part that the gospel started with. People love to be in charge, love to be the one in the room that’s the smartest. One loves to be the one that gives the best answer. Isn’t it interesting that people who achieve great heights, whether it’s entertainment or sports or any kind of super award — you’re the best. You wrote the best novel of the world. It isn’t fulfilling. It creates anxiety. “Well then, what do I do next? What’s the next great novel?” “I’m no longer the one that holds the world record.” And there’s great depression in that because — not because you’re not the best anymore but that you’ve put so much energy and time into becoming the best instead of doing that so that you can feel, people can feel God’s grace working through you, God being the source of your greatness. No, you want it for yourself, and don’t feel bad, because that’s who we are as human beings, and that’s who God loves the most, the ones that can admit that. Amen.

Father, we are amazing creatures.We have this longing to be everything you want us to be. At the same time, we love to be the best in the room. We have pride, and we also have humility — one is always there when the other one’s there. We’re in tension all the time, and that’s what you’ve invited us to live in. Just give us patience. That’s all I ask, patience and understanding and wisdom. We are harder on each other. We are even harder on ourselves. So bless us with patience and understanding and compassion. That’s what you have for us. Let us have it for ourselves and one another. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Deuteronomy 6:2-6 | Hebrews 7:23-28 | Mark 12:28b-34

Almighty and merciful God, by whose gift your faithful offer you right and praiseworthy service, grant, we pray, that we may hasten without stumbling to receive the things you have promised. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen.

It’s so interesting to me how that piece of music, that was written for this show, has a way of enabling me to put together the thoughts that I have after listening to the different readings and hopefully have something life-giving to share with you. There are two major themes in this set of readings that strike me. One is the image of a promise in the first reading and something about understanding in the gospel, understanding the promise. From the time that God created human beings, he established a relationship with them. It’s clear, from the story of Adam and Eve, that God did not create human beings and then set them off on their own but rather started by having an intimate relationship with them. They lived together in a garden. Adam and Eve were naked as they walked around, completely comfortable with who they were, yet he had something he was asking from them. And the thing I think is interesting about the things that God asks from us, because in some ways it sounds like he’s always asking us to do something we don’t really want to do, and if we do what we don’t want to do for him, it shows we love him much more than we love ourselves, but it’s much more complex than that. No, because the one thing from the very beginning, if you know the heart of God, is it’s fully revealed from the very beginning to the time when the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles. You’re going to find that this God, this wonderful God, has one intention, and that is we become who we’re intended to be, not slaves to a law or rules but engaged in a relationship with him where we understand who he is and what his role is in our life and what he’s asking us to participate in with him in this world.

So it’s important to go back to the beginning then, in a sense, and see that, when God began his relationship with us, the first thing he asked us to do is to be careful with our judgments, the judgment of right and wrong. There’s something so clear about this early story of God’s relationship with human beings that human beings were at a certain period in their own evolution, and the thing they really understood, much like a child understands, they understood right and wrong. Do this; that’s right. Don’t do that; that’s wrong. It’s called a binary world where everything is divided. Even if you look at the creation story, God divided the world up into two parts. There was darkness, and then there was light. There was earth, and then there was sky. There was water and earth. It’s an easy, simple way to understand this mysterious thing we call life on this planet with God engaged in a relationship with us.

And so in that early, early test that Adam and Eve were put through, one of the things they were exposing to themselves, as God always puts us in situations where he doesn’t have to teach us about ourselves. We discover, sometimes with pleasure, because we see we’re stronger than we thought, or we see we’re weaker than we thought, whatever. But basically, he’s always revealing to us, through the events of our lives, who we are and who he is, and what Adam and Eve realize is that they had this over-simplified notion of what was right and wrong. What they gave in to was something that seems so natural to human beings. They gave in to what was best for them, even though it wasn’t what God wanted, meaning it wasn’t the journey that God was asking them to go on with him. They chose to be like God from the very beginning. That was the temptation. The devil simply said, though he isn’t the devil — I think it was human nature — said, “All right, I’ve got two choices: obey God and do what he says, or don’t do what he says. And the promise of not doing what he says is that we will be autonomous, strong. We will be like him.” And that attraction to being as good as you can possibly be and to be pleasing even to God, to present yourself as perfect, you know what that feels like. We all have that. We’re given the option of following a rule that you didn’t quite understand why you weren’t supposed to follow it or becoming great. Yeah, I think we’d all choose, “I’d like to be great. I would even like God to see me as the greatest I can be so he’ll love me,” because that’s what we all ultimately want, to be loved by God, by others. So interesting.

So you take that beginning of the relationship, and it sets a tone, that God said, “All right, this is not the way you’re going to please me, by becoming perfect. You’re going to please me by a very different process.” And that’s what the promise is, and the one thing I would say he likes more than anything else, if you want to say, “What is it that would please God more than anything else that I would do for him,” pay attention to him and let him in your life and let him work with you, in you, for you. He wants intimacy, and when Adam and Eve chose to perform for God instead of allow God to enter into them and help them to grow and change, they wanted to become already what God and only God can help us become, then they had to leave the garden. They had to go and figure this out, and so when Adam and Eve left the garden, it wasn’t because they were so much punished by God, but they chose to live on their own. And so God, in his infinite mercy and wisdom and love, said, “Okay, humans. We’ve set the stage for this entire salvation history story, and you’re going to go off, and you’re going to be autonomous. And you’re going to work for me, you think, by doing everything you’re supposed to do and doing it as well as you can and getting a reward.”

And in a way, you see, as the evolution of the story of salvation continues, we see then God eventually calling the people together and saying, “Look, I want a relationship, not with just one of you but with you as a community.” So Abraham called the people together and said, “I want you to be my people.” It’s so interesting, that whole notion of God’s favorite people. It seems to fly in the face of the fullness of who he is, that he loves everything and everyone he’s created, sinners, saints. In the beginning, he revealed himself as one who wanted a certain group of people to be attached to him in some close, intimate way, and there were many, many gods at that time. So the God of Israel, the God who is, had a hard time convincing these people of who he was, and he is the only God. And so the whole story begins with that intention of God to create an intimate relationship with human beings, and so he decided he would do it by being on their side when it came to dealing with the one thing, at the time, 4,000 years ago, that everybody lived in total fear of, and that was enemies. Enemies, if you had an enemy, that was — everybody, I guess, had them. People were attacking each other. When one community would grow and develop and another community would see them and see they had more than they had, they’d come and pillage their place and take everything and drive them out. It was a rough world, a tough world, and so if God could be the source of their strength to overcome enemies, that would be a very attractive thing for any human being to believe in that particular God. And so that’s how God began to reveal himself. “I’m the God that will conquer your enemies, and I want you to love me for it. I want you to be my people. I want you to forget about all the other gods that you’ve known and all the other gods that people will try to seduce you into believing in. I want a relationship that’s exclusive with you. You’ll be my exclusive group, and I’ll be your exclusive God.” Interesting. And that kind of created a very interesting community, because when you listen to the promises that God makes in this first reading, he’s saying, “I want you to fall in love with me because of what I do for you, and I do conquer your enemies.” So love is the key to this. “Love me, love me, love me,” but the love that God is talking about there is just a mere shadow of what it ultimately will become in the New Testament, because that love is more allegiance. And listen to the way God describes his relationship with human beings, nothing like is revealed in Jesus, but you go to the next chapter in Deuteronomy. What you’re going to hear is God talking about the Israelites’ enemies, and he’s saying, “Now, when you go into their places, their cities that they’ve already built, and they have streets and buildings and cisterns. Go in there, and drive them all out. And if you don’t, you can’t get them to leave, then destroy them. Murder them, and then be sure they’re all gone when you take over their city. And when you’ve taken it over, if you leave them there and they start infiltrating and robbing you of your commitment to me and drawing you to other gods, then I’ll kill you.” It’s not a very warm, loving God. It’s a God of justice. So when he says, “I want you to love me with all your heart and all your mind,” I think it’s when he’s saying, “I want you to trust me, and don’t ever doubt me.” And that’s different.

So there’s an evolution in this whole process of understanding who God is, and so many times we live in the Old Testament where the God that is, is the God that demands us to follow rules and laws. And if we don’t, we’re falling short, and the only way he can love us is not so much that we just have allegiance to him, but allegiance to a misunderstanding that we’re supposed to be perfect, we’re supposed to be without sin. That’s the killer. That’s the one that gets in the way, and so what you see in the whole evolution of this beautiful salvation history story is you see this God over the centuries through the prophets and patriarchs and prophets and scribes and priests and sacrifices and temple. All he’s trying to do is lead us to a person, a man who absolutely was fully human, who’s also a God who is fully God. That right away says there’s something about this that we’ll never fully fathom with our binary brains, but this man/God comes in and reveals a way of working with human nature where it’s not about demanding justice or following rules and laws that can be violently negative to other people. No, it’s about learning something about this mysterious power that is best described as the power that happens to a human being when they allow divinity to enter into them. There is something more than allegiance to a God because he’s going to punish me if I don’t follow him. No, there’s this deep desire to be like this God/man Jesus. That’s our challenge, to fall in love with him. God in the Old Testament is easy to be afraid of, and it’s easy to be motivated to do what he says, because he’s very quick to say, “If you don’t do what I ask you to do, I’ll kill you.” And then you have this invitation to see God in the flesh, in the New Testament, and he’s the one who says, “If you have an enemy, love him. Don’t do any harm to him, and if he does harm to you, he slaps you on the face, well then, turn the face in the other direction and let him slap you again. If he steals from you, offer him more.” Think about how radical this incarnate, loving God is compared to the Old Testament, and the reason I want to stress that is because we so easily fall back into the Old Testament, not simply because we remember those stories of God’s punishing people who don’t do what they’re supposed to do. Not because of that so much, but because it’s our human nature. We’re prone to that. That’s the part that is more natural to us, and you look at the evolution of human beings throughout the history of the evolution of human beings from the beginning. You’ll see an amazing transformation of an ability to be beyond the need to be, let’s say, in control and in power.

There’s a movement in human nature that moves away from autonomy and perfection into a kind of neediness, in a healthy way, for God to be in us, enabling us to be the source of life and strength to other people. And that happens in each human life. That’s what’s so fascinating to me. We come into the world, and we need a God image, a parent image that says no, no to that and yes to this and no to that. Yes and no, that’s what a two-, three-year-old has to live with, and that’s because that’s who they are, and then they evolve slowly and begin to understand the thing that’s more important than being told what to do and what not to do is to be loved. And they understand and begin to feel what it means to be loved, even though they do bad things, and after they’re punished by their parents, they’re held and kissed and loved. And then they learn, by being loved, that they can love other people, and there’s some joy in that. And that joy awakens something in them that is their talent, their gift. And as you mature and get older, you have this gift inside of you, and you want to develop it, and you want to use it, and you want to give it away to people, because the joy of seeing someone grow and change and enjoy something that you’ve created is greater than anything you could do to get attention to yourself. That’s our story, and that’s the story of God revealing himself to us over these centuries.

So loving God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and loving your neighbor as yourself, adding that last part, even though it’s mentioned somewhere in the Old Testament also that way, but think about it. It’s not just loving God and doing whatever he says no matter how painful it is for other people. No, if you love God, then there’s no way to be in love with God without feeling his love in return, and when you feel that love in return, it transforms you. And your love is not simply for God but also for every other human being, and most especially there’s love for you, love for yourself. It goes in the same direction. The more you love God, really love him and feel him in your life as he really is and feel the energy and the life that comes to you through his love, you’re going to find a way of loving yourself beyond anything you ever imagined. And loving yourself is the key to being able to love other people, and so the mystery of redemption, we always think it’s the way that we finally get into heaven. Well, redemption is not that you can live a terrible life and finally still be saved. No, it’s being saved from the kind of selfish separation that sin creates between us and with God. Redemption is being able to love and understand the fullness of what it means to be loved by God and to love God and love your neighbor. It’s a wonderful, wonderful thing to be engaged in that process, and that’s what I pray we do together in this program. Sunday after Sunday, ponder these stories. Try to enter into them more fully and engage in this incredible, exciting process of transformation, evolution until we can feel the oneness that is beyond our imagining. It doesn’t take away pain, but it takes away that awesome, awesome fear that we’re not enough or that God isn’t the one who he says he is. He’s a lover, and we have nothing to fear. Amen.

Father, we are your children. We remain children our whole life. We keep growing slowly, and we think we reach a certain level, and then there’s another level, and then there’s another level. So give us the energy and the strength that we need to continue to evolve and grow and change. It’s not easy for us as human beings. You know that, but all you ask is that we long for the gift, and the gift is you inside of us. So bless us with the consciousness of this great gift that you pour into us. Let us believe in you, and reveal to us who God really is. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Jeremiah 31:7-9 | Hebrews 5:1-6 | Mark 10:46-52

Almighty, everliving God, increase our faith, our hope, our charity. Make us love what you command so that we may merit what you promise. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen.

There’s an image in the response to our Psalm that I think is so beautiful, that implies that, when people are experiencing God moving in their life, they often find it’s somehow like a seed that’s planted. And it just sits there for a while, and it’s not that powerful and not that important. It’s just like the beginning of that song where it’s sort of soft, and then slowly it grows and becomes more full and more effective and more powerful in terms of changing the way we see the world and ourselves. Anyway, I hope each time you hear it — it’s going to be done after each of the set of readings, and I just pray it’ll be part of our time together. It’s not to be so much a time for meditating on what I said, but just let the music say what it says, which is really amazing to me.

Last week, you might remember, we had an image in the gospel that was an image of the disciples coming up to Jesus and saying, “Hey, we’d like you to do something for us.” Well, it was actually not all the disciples but just James and his brother John. They just asked if God would give them a place of great authority and great power, and they just thought that was a really good idea. And Jesus just looked at them and said, “You don’t even have any idea what you’re asking.” So as Mark’s gospel continues then, we have another person that asks Jesus to do something in the gospel, in this set of readings, and it’s just exactly what God would like everyone to ask him. “God, I want to see. I want insight. I want to know what this whole thing is about. Show me.” And so what we see in that story, a beautiful way in which it’s described by Mark, is that he’s sitting there, and he’s a beggar. And that right away sets up something really wonderful, because people who are most likely to open their hearts to the mystical and the mysterious are people who feel that the practical world is not enough. And so he cries out, “Help me. Have pity on me.” He must have heard about Jesus. He knew that he was a miracle worker and probably said, “I just want to have my eyes back.” But then there’s something so much deeper in it.

If you think about these stories, they’re not just about the people who are in the story, but they’re about us, humanity, about all of us. And so it’s so interesting that, in the time that Jesus walked the earth, there was an image of God is the source of everything. So if you were doing exactly what God wanted, your life was rich and full, and you were very happy, and you had no disease, no problems. But if you were blind or leprous or bad, that was because you sinned. So anybody that was in need would not be responded to by the people who were believers, because they were considered being punished by God, so they were ignored.

So here’s a man who’s probably sat there forever, people just passing him by and looking at him, saying, “He’s worthless.” But he hears this voice, or maybe he just — you couldn’t say he saw Jesus, but he must have been able to hear his voice or know that people were yelling his name. But he had a sense that he was there, and so he calls him Son of David. So he knew the scriptures and stuff, and so he just called out and said, “Please, please have pity on me.” And what’s so beautiful about Jesus in this story is that — let’s just say, there were other people shouting. So why did he hear this one voice? One voice, “Have pity on me.” It’s like the woman that he bumped into in the crowd where he felt something going out of him and when he healed her. But anyway, he turns around, and he calls the blind man. And all of a sudden, he hears these words that are so beautiful, and we think, for anybody who’s on their own and wondering why I can’t figure things out, when he hears, not only is God answering my call, but he’s calling me. Jesus is calling you. God is calling you into a life with him. God is asking you to open your heart and believe and see what he’s really about. Take courage. And then I love this.

You know the word enthusiasm? Enthusiasm is such a cool word. I have an Oxford English Dictionary in my office, a great gift someone gave me, and I love looking at words. And the word enthusiasm means entheos. It means — actually the official translation is filled with God, filled with divinity, and so there’s something about divinity, truth living inside of you that just — it’s a lot of energy. And so you see this man throwing aside his cloak, springing up. I know it’s always interesting that blind people do have a sense of direction and where they’re going, whatever. He knew where Jesus was, so he just runs over there, and when he stands there before him, he said, “Master, I just want to see,” because Jesus said, “What do you want me to do, give you authority and power like my other disciples?” “No, I want to see.” And he said, “Go. You have it. Your faith has saved you. Your faith has saved you, not the state you’re in, not the sin that they claim you’ve committed or that your parents committed that put you in a place of punishment. No, it’s your faith that has saved you.” So in his blindness — this is what’s interesting. Faith, in a way, is kind of blind, when you think about it. You have a way of understanding or seeing something, and somebody says, “Well, show me. Show me that — prove to me that God exists, or show me that the God that is often absent from people —”

Like take the beginning. The first reading is about this relationship God has with people. It’s weird. You want to say, “God, did you really want to have this kind of relationship with us,” where he’s absent, and then he’s present? He’s absent, and he’s present. Your life is going well, and it seems to be blessed. And then all of a sudden, everything’s falling apart, and he’s gone. And there’s this image in the Old Testament particularly, which is the great journey to freedom, from slavery to freedom. You see this God always somehow saying, “Trust me. Stay with me while things are not the way you want them to be. See if you can trust me when I’m absent, because if you can’t trust me in my absence, then somehow you won’t have the relationship with me that I want, because I have to put you through times that are empty and dark. And if you can’t endure those, if you think I’m only present when things are light and bright, then you won’t grow.” There’s this mysterious thing about the pain and suffering, experiencing darkness in your life that is so crucial for you to live in the light, and so you have this difficulty, often, trusting in God. And so faith is a belief that isn’t based solely on the experience of something that’s happening that proves to you right now that the thing that you want is there. Faith is believing in it when it’s not there, believing in something that you can’t explain, that you can’t figure out. And in those moments of darkness and weakness, you just sort of say, “All right, I’ve got two choices. I can give up on this whole thing about God and divinity and all that, or I can stay with it and wait, because somehow, when I’m in that experience of having nothing or nothing around me has any light or I’m just staring into darkness,” and you still believe, that’s when it happens. That’s when things change. Amazing.

And Jesus, when he was walking this earth, he was teaching that to people. Accept the emptiness and the darkness as part of your life. It’s just God’s plan, and so you have in Hebrews this strange reading, in a way, where it’s talking about Jesus, saying that Jesus had to make up for his sins. Well, how do you do that? What are the sins that Jesus would have committed? It’s he had to do something to offer a sin offering for himself, and what it would mean is that Jesus, as a man, had to experience the same experiences we have in this world. And when I think about Jesus being sinless as a man, and Mary also, being in our Catholic tradition Mary was without sin, did that mean they didn’t make mistakes, that they didn’t fail at something? Did they do everything perfectly? No, that couldn’t be possibly right. No, what they didn’t ever do is doubt in their brokenness, in their inability, and when Jesus did some things that you could say objectively weren’t so wise — he yelled and ranted and raved at the leadership of the church. Try that out even today. Attack the leadership, and they’re going to, of course, listen and embrace you and say, “Oh, what a great new idea. We hadn’t thought about that.” No, they’re going to come back with vengeance. In a way, you say Jesus was shooting himself in the foot, in a way, when he didn’t have more patience with the leadership of the church. Well, that’s his humanity. That beautiful thing about Jesus is he’s like us. He loses it. He gets upset. He doesn’t want to do what his Father’s asking, and so he has to make up for that in a sense. And how do you make up for that? Well, I don’t think it’s something you have to do that’s good. I think you make up for it by simply enduring it and not imagining that you are, you are the failure. You’re not the failure. Human nature fails us, in a sense, if we’re going to expect to be all that God wants us to be immediately. Human nature is a process of growing, losing everything and then finding more and then losing it again and then finding even more. It’s this dark and light, dark and light, emptiness, fullness.

It’s why in the first reading you have this image of — there are moments in God’s relationship with his people when they have been gone, and they have gone in the wrong direction, and they’re blind, and they’re lame, and they’re wounded by their mistakes. And yet he calls them back. There’s this wonderful image of fullness out of emptiness. So important for us to believe that’s the way it works. It isn’t that we move from level one to level two to level three, level four, level five. No, it goes level one and two, and then you go to zero and below zero and then back up. It’s patience and understanding and compassion for our human nature that God wants us to see and believe in and believe that he, God, is always in charge. He’s always able to be the one that enables us to go through the darkness and not lose hope — not lose hope, not lose faith, not lose trust.

I don't know what Bartimaeus must have felt as he sat. From the time, I guess, he was born, he was blind, but his whole life was being a blind beggar. When you think of that, that’s not a bad image of some of us when we get to a certain place where we don’t see anything like the truth, and all the things that we choose to fill us with are emptiness, nothing but emptiness. That’s a pretty good image of that experience. So faith, faith, faith, when we’re in those moments, is what God will give us. That’s his gift. It’s not earned. It’s a gift, but like anything that God gives, it is something that you can’t count on having an experience that proves that it’s there in this moment. In fact, he almost on purpose — well, I say yes, on purpose, gives you a feeling that there’s nothing there for you, and yet you’re supposed to believe that that nothingness has a purpose, has meaning. And you can’t miss that. If you look at the Old Testament and New Testament, the way God works in human beings, it’s this constant cycle of death and rebirth and death and rebirth. So whenever you’re in darkness, in the darkness of blindness and can’t see what God is really doing, remember this story of Bartimaeus, because in the midst of the darkness, God is calling you into the light. You just have to see — you have to be in the darkness before the light can become as strong and as bright and as life-giving as it really is. Grey is the worse place to live, but fullness and emptiness is the cycle. And when you embrace it, believe in it and trust in it, there’s nothing that sort of like is hopeless, it’s all dark, it’s all black. You’re free of that forever when you have faith and trust in the one who’s guiding you. Amen.

Father, you are, in a way, a taskmaster. You’re not easy to be with. You’re not easy to work with, in the sense that you really do put us through test after test but always with a heart filled with love for us, knowing that these tests and this darkness bring such light and such growth and such truth. Help the part of us that’s like Bartimaeus to reach out and trust in you, call on you, and when we do, help us to recognize how much the truth is that you’re calling us always, through our faith, into new life. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Wisdom 7:7-11 | Hebrews 4:12-13 | Mk 10:17-30 or 10:17-27

May your grace, O Lord, we pray, at all times go before us and follow after and make us always determined to carry out good works. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen.

I want to start with the images in the first reading about wisdom. What is it? It’s something to do with a way of seeing the world, seeing yourself in it and having an amazing ability to make decisions that are going to bring about the thing that you long to see happen. Wisdom is that mysterious understanding of the way the world is. It’s a kind of surrendering to reality. It’s — the best way I can describe it is a person who is filled with wisdom is the most real person in the room. And if there’s a decision that needs to be made about an end that you’re trying to achieve, the person with wisdom is the one you want to lean on the most, because they have this sense that there is a way to accomplish the goal that you have, but there’s lots of obstacles. And if you can get to the place where you understand something about the way the world works, then you have this amazing, this amazing quality, and what you’re being told in this first reading is that this kind of insight, this kind of knowledge, that I believe comes to you as a gift from God, is essential if you’re going to be able to find the place that God has created for you and me.

There’s one thing that I want to teach always and always. It’s this whole idea that this world that we are called to live in is a world that is supposed to be — how would I say it? Enjoyable doesn’t quite capture it, but it’s something we should be participating in, and our participation should bring us some kind of enjoyment — enjoyment, meaning there’s some kind of joy in the whole process of growing and evolving and changing and understanding the world that God has given us and the way in which we’re supposed to live in it, and who he is. All of that I would call wisdom. And the responsorial Psalm picks it up, and one of the things about the responsorial psalm that I like so much is the way it describes something. And it says very clearly that the thing that we are asked to understand is that, if we know we’re loved, if we know we’re loved — and love is a way of, I would say, of imagining the effectiveness of God in your life. When he loves you, it’s not just that he’s looking at you, like he did in the gospel to the rich man and just said he’s just filled with love for you. That’s a beautiful image of God seeing a goodness in all human beings, where we really do want to do the right thing. We may not know how to get to the goal that we want, but we do have that desire.

He loves that in all of us, but the thing that’s so interesting about that love is that, when it’s really directed in exactly the way it’s supposed to be received by us, it gives us a kind of confidence that, in the midst of the work that we have to do in order to grow and evolve — the pain that we have to go through, if you can feel, when you’re in that pain, that somehow this God who’s in charge, who knows how everything goes, who is wanting to make sure that you experience the experiences you need to be able to grow and to change, when you know that that’s basically the way in which God is looking at you, wanting nothing more than for you to evolve and grow, then whatever is painful, whatever is difficult, you can say, “Help me see, when I’m in pain, that this is something that should create in me some kind of gladness. Make us glad for the days when you afflicted us, for the years when we saw evil.” What an interesting line, and this is Old Testament. The Psalms are obviously Old Testament, but think of the struggle that was there for the Israelite people in that long, long journey and how many times they complained and complained and complained and resisted the whole process. And when you think about it, what is it that causes the most intense pain in our life really? Is it the experience of something that’s difficult? But if you add that experience to whatever is painful to resistance to that, you’ve doubled the stress. You’ve doubled the amount of energy that’s needed to overcome it. And so how do we enter into the world that the Psalm is inviting us into when we can say, “Lord, if we know you love us, then our song is always going to be a song of some kind of joy”?

Now, when I say live a joyous life, it doesn’t mean that you’re happy all the time. It means there’s something deep inside of you that knows that there’s purpose and there’s meaning and everything is moving in the right direction. And then when you endure pain by accepting it, by surrendering to it, it is an incredibly valuable moment in your own individual evolution as to who God wants you to be.

So what are we opening ourselves to through suffering? What is it that, when we surrender to something, we receive? Well, you might say it makes us stronger. So we’re more effective and more capable of doing what we’re supposed to do. Watch out for that, because that’s not exactly what’s going on. When you surrender to the way the world is, when you give in to the things that aren’t the way you want them to be, what you’re inviting into your life is the truth, the truth. Wisdom is another word for truth, and what does truth do? What is it there for? Well, the reading for the Hebrews gives us a beautiful image of that. What it is, it is something that comes into you, something that is invited to come in and to break through whatever is hidden. It penetrates even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It discerns what’s really going on in your heart. It’s called being busted. When something is coming, when something enters into you that exposes some part of you that you don’t really want to see and you don’t really want to acknowledge, when you see that event happening inside of you, you know that you’re being loved by a God who said, “Look, here’s the reason I caused this pain for you: because there’s something in you you’re hanging on to that’s going to keep you from the prudence and the wisdom that you need to live and make decisions in the world — prudence and wisdom, the ability to know the best solution for the problem that you’ve got on your plate. The prudence is that understanding of there’s a certain way in which you have been given a certain priority, and the priority is, “I want to do whatever is ultimately reality, the truth.”

I don't know why it’s so hard for us to do that. Maybe it’s because we grow up in a world that’s so filled with lies, and we see all these images around us of people achieving things that we think is good, and yet they’re doing things to other people, hurting them, destroying them or doing whatever. It’s confusing, but think about it. It is God gives us this gift, this living, effective gift that penetrates into this, the heart of everything, and gets us to see the truth. Okay, so we’re set for the gospel, the one that we’re invited into by the hallelujah verse. “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Who are the poor in spirit? What does it mean to be poor in spirit? Well, we could say that one of the things that poverty is, is the opposite of being rich, being filled with what I would say would be an amazing amount of power and control. So let’s look at Jesus in this gospel passage, but before I go into this, I want to give you a little bit of background about rich. Why is it the disciples are so confused when Jesus is criticizing a man who is rich? You have to understand, in the Old Testament, there was something going on that was radically shifted in the New Testament. And in the Old Testament, God was the one who gave favor to those who did what was good, and he gave evil to those who were bad. He punished those who failed to live according to the way he invites us to live. That’s not the New Testament. That’s not the God that we understand, that we’re engaged in in a relationship now. It’s very, very different. There’s a passage in the Old Testament where it says, if anyone slaps another man on the face, they should be executed. Take that line from the Old Testament and compare it to the New Testament, and we see Jesus who says, if somebody slaps you on your face, you should turn and offer him the other side of your face so he can slap it. What the — what does that mean? It means there’s a radical, radical difference in the New Testament from the Old Testament.

So let’s go back to this gospel passage and realize why the disciples are so confused over this man who seems to have done everything. He followed all the commandments, did everything he was invited to do, by his mind, by the commandments, and he didn’t — he missed it. He missed it. So let’s look at the dialogue between Jesus and this man. First of all, he comes up and says to Jesus, “You are so good.” Jesus is setting the tone. “No. No, only God is good.” So he describes himself. “I’m a good man. I do everything that I’m told I should do. I’m in control of my life. I possess my life. I have chosen to follow the commandments. I do it perfectly, so I am basically, I know pleased — I know you are pleased with me. So I’m coming to you,” and in a way, you have to say that this guy that’s coming is actually trying to say, “I know you’re going to give me some really kind of wonderful response of saying, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You’re amazing.’” And Jesus looks at him, knowing that he’s wanting so badly to do everything he’s called to do but subtly says, “You’re lacking one thing. Go let go of everything you hold on to. Let go of the treasure that you’re holding on to.” What is his treasure? Performance, perfection. It’s the most subtle evil that slips into our spiritual life when we think that the gospel is calling you and me to do exactly what we’re told to do and to absolutely control our behavior and avoid all sin, all evil thoughts. It means that we’re going to have to use our will and our mind to control who we are and make us into something that is pleasing to God, and nothing could be further from what God longs for. He’s not interested in your perfection, not interested in your performance. So when he tells the young man, “Here’s what I want you to do. Get rid of all of your possessions.” What are his possessions? It doesn’t say anything about the things he owns. What does it mean to have a possession, or what does possessiveness mean? Possessive means that you have control over something.

Isn’t it interesting that we use — in our religion, we use an image of evil possession or the devil possessed someone, or evil possessed them. What does that mean? It means they had control over them. So when a person has a possession, it’s something that they own that gives them a sense of their value, and that’s different than ownership. Ownership is, “This belongs to me, but it’s not me.” But the possession this young man held on to so tightly was his performance and his perfection, knowing that’s the way you get to heaven. That’s the wide gate that we’re going to hear about in just a moment, the wide gate. It’s the easiest thing for the ego to understand that your relationship with God is based on performance. I don't know what your background is in your family of origin. I know what mine was like, but I know that, in my life, I was always under the pressure of pleasing people in order to be accepted. And the way I learned to please people was to do whatever I think they wanted me to do. So if your image of God is that he wants you to avoid all these negative actions, all these negative feelings, if you feel that he’s asking you to live this kind of perfect life, and you think that that’s going to get you into heaven, you’re making two mistakes. You’re missing the goal he’s really giving you, and you’re putting yourself in the position of earning salvation. We don’t earn salvation. It’s a gift.

And so the narrow gate that is so beautifully described by Jesus to his disciples is this way in which he’s saying, “Look, it’s difficult for you all to understand exactly who I am and what I’m doing. It’s hard for you to understand that, in a short time, I am going to surrender my goal of being everything that I believe that the gospel wants me to be, being successful, changing the world. All those things I’m going to be asked by my Father to surrender to something that makes no sense to my ego, and when I do that, I’m going to save the world, and I’m going to show you what it means to enter into the kingdom of God. It’s not what you think. It’s not about being perfect. It’s not about doing everything right. It’s about somehow surrendering to a process of being loved and listening carefully to the image that comes through, that loving, beautiful face of God looking at you and saying, “I’m not interested in you doing the right thing over and over again. I’m interested in you becoming who I call you to be, who I want you to be.”

If wisdom is something that we learn, if it’s something that is required for us to achieve, and yet the way in which it seems these set of readings is making very clear that wisdom comes through suffering — suffering comes through acceptance, accepting the relationship we have with God. He’s not asking you to control your life. He’s asking you to surrender to the life that he will show you that is yours. And I don't know how exactly you’ve experienced this, but I know the thing that is in my life and my experience is I resist more than anything else those events, those times in my life where I’m being told by God, through an experience, that I’m not enough. Isn’t it interesting to think there’s something wrong with not being enough, enough for the people around me, enough for my God, who I think is demanding certain things of me, enough for the church that asks me to do all these other things? What a terrible evil to get caught up in when we don’t even realize what we’re doing.

So what is it that’s at the heart of this beautiful relationship we have with God the Father? He is my brother. He’s my lover. He’s my creator. He’s all three of those things, and in terms of you understanding his creative qualities, understand that he created you exactly as he intended you to be. You are, with your weaknesses, with your strengths, exactly the person he’s created you to be. He even talks about knowing you before you were created. So you are exactly, with your strengths and weaknesses, who God has created you to be. And then his lover, he loves exactly who you are. It’s a reflection of him. It’s a unique reflection of him, and what he’s inviting you to do is to celebrate that, to create an environment in which you embrace it, surrendering to it. It means — and I know this is hard for me, so I hope it touches something inside of you, but there’s something about that image of liking yourself in your imperfection, looking at it the way Jesus in the gospel looked at that young man. And I’m feeling that what you’re doing, when you’re looking at yourself and you’re seeing it not as perfect, the fact that you want it to be perfect is endearing to the God who created you. Yes, you want to be everything you want to be, called to be, but it’s not perfection. It’s not performance. So then there’s this wonderful, creative God, the loving God, and then this brother, this spirit that lives inside of you. What a beautiful image of a comforting advocate called the Holy Spirit. He’s always there pleading your case. Imagine this part of you that’s — well, the part of God that’s in you, that is there saying almost, if you had this image of a strong and powerful God demanding so much, he’s the one who’s saying, “Hey, hey, this image of this God that isn’t really there, that’s demanding, here is your advocate, the same God answering that image that you have of God and answering this God with, ‘Hey, you created this person exactly as they are. You love them. I know you won’t hold anything against them.’” That’s the beauty of this Trinitarian, loving God that we have.

So what we’re called to be then, through this set of readings, is a beautiful image of the God — we have this beautiful image of the God who is and the God who is calling us to be who we’re called to be. So my challenge for you in these readings, my longing for you in these, in my heart, is that you will understand more and more fully the truth of who you are, the truth of who God is and somehow allow that to penetrate into every part of your life that is clouded by some kind of misunderstanding, some kind of need for control, some kind of need for autonomy, all those things that are there that get in our way. Our challenge is to embrace this new life.

I don't know if it feels the same for you as it does for me right at this moment, but what I can feel in my life, if I can understand this mystery that I’m trying to share with you, I can feel something relaxing inside of me, something that relieves the tension, relieves the pressure. For anyone that’s listening to me that feels the pressure of their God asking them to be more than they are at this very moment, please let go of that and embrace the God who is and the truth that is and the wisdom that is there for you and me to drink of and to allow it to enlighten us, and see the goodness that’s all around us.

God, your gift is our life exactly as it is, exactly as you allowed it to be, and whenever we find ourselves judging it, whenever we find ourselves not happy with it, remind us of who you really are and what you’re about and what you call us to enter into. And it’s a journey that is not expected to be so stressful but rather enlightening, experiencing something, growing, changing. It’s different when we know that the events that we go through that are difficult are there for a purpose, and there’s a meaning, and there is a gift in it all. Bless us with that awareness so that we can find the peace that is our inheritance. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Genesis 2:18-24 | Hebrews 2:9-11 | Mark 10:2-16 or 10:2-12

Almighty, everliving God, who in the abundance of your kindness, surpassed the merits and the desires of those who entreat you, pour out your mercy upon us to pardon what conscience dreads and to give what prayer does not dare to ask. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

The readings for this particular celebration that takes place on the 27th Sunday in ordinary time is loaded with some wonderful, wonderful images, and my intention, my desire is always to draw from these images and put them together in a way that awakens in you something that you already know, something that you already feel deep inside of you. When God created us, he created us in a way that enables us to grow and to evolve and to change. That’s the nature of what it means to be human, and the direction that this evolution is taking always is in the direction of you and I becoming more like the God who created us — like the God who created us. If there’s anything fascinating about God that I think we don’t always think about, it is why did he create the world. Why? This God, this being that is like us, so when we think about who is he, it’s not too hard to imagine somebody like us who has all the power in the world and can do anything. We don’t have the depth of his understanding, wisdom. We have a sense of what it’s like to be powerful. And so he has this capacity to do anything he wants, and so sitting around with nothing, it seems that wouldn’t make a human being very happy. So he creates, and creativity is one of the core issues that human beings possess. We want and enjoy doing things, making things, and so this God has that same quality. And so what he does is he creates a world.

Four and a half billion years ago, there’s this explosion of some kind, and there’s this material world. And then slowly, over centuries and milleniums, life is there. Now, I know there’s some controversy on when did God create human life, but let’s just say it’s up for grabs, in a way, whether it happened in one single moment, where poof, there was — or when God formed clay and then breathed into it in one story. We have another story of creation in this particular set of readings, but however it happened is not as important as it’s absolutely clear that everything that happened in this world was intended by a divine force, a divine God that is able to do anything. And what he was doing was creating something that reflected who he is, just like you paint a painting, and you step back and look at it. You make a piece of furniture; you step back and look at it. You do a project; you step back and look at it. So he did that, and then when he created human beings, he took a chance, because what he decided to do is create something that’s going to be enough like God that we were given this one quality that nothing else in creation has — freedom to make our own decisions, freedom to make our own decisions, freedom to say no to God, to reject him, to work against him. Why would he do that? Would you want, if you had your choice of a relationship with someone, would you want one that has no control over whether or not they freely wanted to be with you or they freely chose to love you? No. No, we would want to know that there was something about us that another person saw that was valuable, and when they see that, it awakens something in us that’s valuable.

So that leads up then to the main theme of this set of readings. Human beings are in need of relationship, because the God who created them was in need of a relationship. He wanted to have a relationship with something like him, more free, freer than the angels, more conscious than the rest of creation. He wanted someone like him to love him. If that makes God seem needy, then get over it, because he describes himself as needy. It’s not that that’s a weakness. It means that that’s a desire, a longing he has. So in the very first reading that we have in the Old Testament, we go back to that time when God created human beings, and one of the things we find out about them, which is like God, is that they want a partner. They want somebody to work with. God wants a partner in this world. He created this world and wants to care for it, but he didn’t want to do it just automatically. He wanted someone who could freely decide whether or not they would work with God. That’s the plan, God working with human beings, then creating a world that continually evolves and draws more and more people into the fullness of what they’re intended to be, like God.

So we find this image, and I love — this is the word I want to take from that first reading: a suitable partner. Suitable partner, what’s a suitable partner? Well, if you stick with the story and the images in the story, a suitable partner is somebody like you. The animals were not exactly like Adam. The birds weren’t like Adam. He couldn’t have a conversation with them, didn’t understand much of what they — how they did what they did, but basically God, who then knew what Adam was looking for, realized, “Oh, what he wants is somebody like him.” So he took something away from him, some part of him, and formed it into somebody else. And I want you to see if this works for you, because it works for me. Could it mean, in that very simple action of taking something from man, wo-man, woman, that the partner that God created for human beings is somebody who already is, in a way, a part of them. There’s already some connection. Did you ever notice, when people fall in love with someone, they almost will say something like this, “I feel like I’ve known them forever,” or, “I feel so myself when I’m with them,” or whatever. And maybe that’s in the throes of the beginning of a relationship when it’s all so perfect, but nevertheless, think of it. You are attracted to people that have something that I think you need, and maybe in a very mysterious way, there’s something in the destiny of you meeting that they need from you. So then we get to the heart of what it is when we live on this planet together, and that is it’s all about relationships — all about relationships. The Ten Commandments that were given in the Old Testament, they’re all about relationships, your relationship with God, your relationships with everybody. So intimacy is the key. So when we look at this first story, we’re saying, “Okay, intimacy is what God intended to have with his people, and he intended his people to have it with each other.” Now we’ve got the setting. That’s existence on this planet.

Now, there’s something else about the Hebrew reading, and that’s this: Jesus, who is the one who comes into the world to awaken us to everything that we are, he’s the model of a human being filled with divinity. That’s what our destiny is. That’s who we’re going to be becoming. That’s who we’re always in the process of becoming. So the author, and we don’t know who the author of Hebrews is, but he’s saying, “It seems appropriate that this model of who God wants us to be is exactly like us, and it seems appropriate that the one who comes into the world to save us by doing something gives us a model of what we have to do if we’re going to be in relationships.” And what is it that Jesus did that saved the world? He surrendered. He suffered. He allowed the world to be the way it is, the plan of God the way it is. He surrendered, and he said, “Yes, if this is the way it’s written — it’s not the way I want it. It’s not what I looked forward to. It’s not the way I wrote it myself, but if this is what has to be, and you are the God that I trust, and you wouldn’t allow this to happen unless it was for the reason that I want to accomplish, even though my way of accomplishing it is not to be crucified but to be successful —” And he gave into that. Now, if that’s the way we’re made holy, if that’s the wisdom piece that we need to become whole, giving in, surrendering suffering to the things that we can’t change, if that’s it, it’s perfectly in Hebrews, in the author of Hebrews, it’s perfect that the person that came to teach us that was exactly like us. He calls us brother. Okay?

And now I want to go to the gospel, because the gospel is — every time this comes up, I just shudder, because I’m saying, “Oh gosh, we’re going to talk about divorce from the pulpit.” So everybody in the room who’s had a divorce is going to listen to these words, and it says that anybody that gets a divorce commits adultery and is going to go to hell. That’s at least the way some people read it. It’s not what it means, but I always hate it, because should I talk about annulments? What should I talk about? Well, I think God gave me an insight unto this reading that’s for all of us that are listening, including myself, because when I say these words, I’m listening to them coming through me as much as you’re listening to them coming out of me. But anyway, in this reading, what we have is a statement on the part of Jesus that is radical, and it’s not so much about the idea of no longer allowing divorce. It’s about changing dramatically the value and the dignity of a woman, of the feminine, of the part of all of us that is there that needs to be nurtured, developed, honored. And one interesting thing about this is, when the disciples are kind of confused and they all say, “Wait a minute,” and the Pharisees are approaching Jesus, and they say, “Is it lawful for a husband to divorce a wife,” it’s a setup, because all that was needed in the time of the Old Testament, before Jesus came, was that all a man had to do was write a little note, and the woman was out, and she had nothing. And so she was like a piece of property. So Jesus says, “No. No, the woman has the ability to cause the husband to commit adultery.” In other words, she has the same rights to the marriage as the man does, and that’s what Jesus is really underscoring when he says, “No, you just can’t divorce for any reason whatever.”

Are there reasons why husbands and wives should not be together? Yeah, sure there are. Of course there are. The interesting thing about marriage, just for a moment, is that the marriage, the whole notion of marriage is, in the Catholic tradition, and in the Christian tradition, I should say, not just Catholic, but the minister is not the one that makes this sacrament happen. It’s the intention of the individuals involved in this. So it’s always considered that the minister is a witness to the sacrament being performed by each of the people engaged in this relationship. “I give myself completely to you for better, for worse, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health, until death. That’s my intention.” And the other repeats it. So what’s going on is —there’s a line in this that I think is so important. When Jesus said you can’t have any divorce, what he’s saying is, “Anything that God has joined together cannot be broken, should not be broken — anything that God has put together.” Well, when you think about the ways that people marry and the reasons that people marry, would that necessarily be the one that you might say, “Well, it’s clear that God really wanted these two people to be together.” Why would he want two people to be together? Pretty clearly he’d want them to be together because they have something for each other. They have a gift somewhere buried inside of them that they don’t even maybe know is there yet, but the other person who needs it, that God has put them in touch with, that other person is going to draw it out of them, because they’re going to need them. And the person who’s watching this person they love who is in need, they’re going to want to give this gift. And maybe it’s just in seed form, but they’ll develop it so they have something that they can give to the person that, in a way, they see as part of them. So when they give to them, they give to themselves. That’s the beauty of this whole thing called marriage, and it’s so interesting. When you have somebody that comes to you, someone who has experienced this — as a minister in a parish setting, I was a pastor for 43 years, been ordained for 55 years. I’ve listened over and over to the struggles people have in marriages, and I know what they always will come to me and say fundamentally is, “There’s no life in this. I have no feeling of being fed or nurtured,” or, “I try to feed and nurture someone, and there’s no way in which I feel they’re receiving it or appreciating it or responding to it.” Is that what God calls into, that kind of relationship? Of course not. So there is a thing, at least in the Catholic tradition of annulments where we say, “Well, in a way, if they say it’s not a valid marriage, which is pretty tricky, let’s use another language. This is not a relationship that it seems that God has been engaged in calling these two people together. God has not joined them together.” And that doesn’t mean that marriage doesn’t work, but how can a ceremony bind two people together when they don’t intend to be together? The sacrament of marriage is a grace poured into a couple to enable them to do the work that we’re here to do, which is to be these nurturing figures to one another.

And then that gets us to the heart of really what I want to say. How is it that we can be these agents, this flow of life flowing from us to one another? How does it work? Well, the minute you think that it’s up to you to come up with all the things your partner needs or to expect them to come up with all that you need, it’s not going to work. So what works? Well, the last part of this gospel is perfect. Unless you become like children, you have no idea what I am talking about. Unless you have the imagination of a child and the openness to things you can be told that you will believe in but you don’t have to be told how it happens or why it happens, you might be able to understand all these things that God is trying to awaken you to seeing about him, about you, about the relationship you have with each other, but primarily, the heart of it all, the foundation of it all is the relationship you have with God. It’s all based on that, your relationship to God. Jesus is the model, as I said earlier. What is he? A fully human being, and don’t confuse this with the idea, yes, he was also God, but no, he was fully human and fully divine. Now, that’s not going to happen to you and me, but what is going to happen is that we are human, a human being filled with shame, fear, anger, sin, all this stuff. We’re imperfect, but into that imperfection comes this incredible generous gift of a God who says, “I want to dwell in you. I want to be in you.” Jesus says it so beautifully, so powerfully. “Eat my flesh. Drink my blood.” What? “What I’m saying is, unless you take me, this image of me, this truth of me, unless you take it in and understand it like a child and listen to it and can believe in it — wow, if you can do that, you can experience my presence inside of you in a way that will be the source that you need for the things that you require to be for one another and the relationships, not just in marriage but in friendship, in family, everywhere.” That same principle that belongs in marriage is in every friendship and every relationship.

It’s interesting. How many people do you think in the United States are married versus those that single as adults over 18? Half. Half of the people that are potentially over 18 listening to me right now are living a single life, and so we can’t take this image of marriage as the model of the perfect way in which life flows between people and make it too literal, saying your life is not complete, because you’re not married. That would be a horrible thing, yet that’s what it used to be like when I was growing up. There was even a derogatory name for a woman. I think it was spinster, that she wasn’t married. At least it sounded derogatory to me. No, the wisdom in marriage is the wisdom that we need to embrace and take in that has to do with every relationship that we’re engaged in.

So back to the image of a child’s imagination. I want to close with one little story. There was a movie that I love called Crash. Many of you maybe saw it. It was a couple, I don't know, four, five, six years ago, won the Academy Award. And there was a little girl in it that was terrified and scared, because the neighborhood she lived in, there were gunshots, and her father found her bed one night, scared to death, and he went to see her. He found her under the thing, and he said, “Why are you down there?” And she said, “I’m scared. Those sounds scare me.” And he said, “Well, I’ll tell you what.” He said, “I have something for you. Come out, and I’ll show you. I found — I have a cape. I have a little cape that I was given by a fairy princess, and she gave it to me to protect me. She said, ‘Whenever you wear this, you’ll always be protected.’” And the little girl said, “I don’t see any cape.” He said, “No, no, it’s invisible. It’s an invisible cape.” He said, “Let me give it to you.” And she thought, “Okay.” So he unties it carefully and takes it off slowly and puts it on her and ties it and said, “Now you’re going to be safe.” Well, later in the film, there’s a horrible experience where this man is holding his daughter, and a man has a gun pointed at him, and the gun goes off, but there’s no bullet. But the man thinks the bullet went off, and he thinks his daughter was hit, and he screams and screams, and he thinks she’s dead. And then he realizes all of a sudden, no, no, it didn’t harm her, and he’s so sobbing, happy that he realized that the man missed her if it was a bullet. It really wasn’t a bullet, but nevertheless, the point was the little girl says to her dad, “Daddy, you shouldn’t have been worried. I have the cape on. Nothing can harm me.” That’s what I child can understand about something as mysterious as divinity inside of you, protecting you from everything that might harm you by keeping you from being who you need to be for other people.

God, in the response of a Psalm we acknowledge your power to bless, to bless us, to consecrate us, set us apart as instruments of your grace. Bless all of us with this great gift, and let us feel the strength and the wisdom and the power that we do not possess but can flow through us whenever it’s needed. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Numbers 11:25-29 | James 5:1-6 | Mark 9:38-43, 45, 47-48

Father Don: Before I begin the homily today, I have a special announcement. Nothing is dearer to my heart than reaching people that are longing for a deeper understanding and appreciation of who God is, and I truly feel called to share whatever wisdom shares with me with those who are open to receiving this great gift of God’s indwelling presence. And so now I find myself in a position in my ministry where it’s growing rather rapidly, and I’m excited about these changes. And I want so much to share with you what they’re about. So I’m asking you to go to my website, pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com. I’d like you to watch a video that describes the growth that we’re going to experience in a very, very short time, and one of the most exciting parts of it is that, along with my regular weekly program on this station, I’ll be broadcasting on Sirius XM on the Catholic Channel at 9:15 every Sunday morning starting next week. So there are other changes about the format of the show that I’d like you to understand more fully, and so if you watch the video, you’ll have a real clear understanding of the direction God is leading us right now. So I hope you enjoy the changes, and I hope they enrich your experience. Thank you.

O God, who manifest your almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy, bestow, we pray, your grace abundantly upon us and make those hastening to attain your promises heirs to the treasures of heaven. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

We’ve been listening to Mark’s gospel these last couple of Sundays, and it’s clear that one of the things that this section is speaking about is the distance between who the disciples were at this time and who they would become after Jesus’ death and resurrection and the Spirit descending upon them, radically changing their understanding of who they are and who God is and why they’re here. If we go back to the very beginning of the story of salvation history, we have this interesting story about a garden called Eden, and the first human beings are there. And they’re in a situation where they’ve been told one thing, and they had been tempted to do something else. And the way we’ve interpreted that story varies, but I think the thing that I’ve grown to understand about it, it’s not so much about simply saying that the real problem with human beings is that we don’t do what we’re told. We don’t follow the rules. We break the rules. We disobey, and it’s much more nuanced than just simply saying human nature has a resistance to being told what to do, because some of that is really valuable, because we should not be governed by something outside of ourselves but by our own inner decisions. And that’s the goal of Christianity, to change our heart so that we’re not being told what to do, but we do what we know we should do. It’s who we are. But the interesting thing about the sin, as it’s described by many people, is it sounds like it’s just about breaking the rules, but basically what it’s about is a deep longing in human beings to work to become everything that God wants them to be. It was a temptation to follow the ego, to be as good as you possibly can, to be as good as God is. When you think about that, it’s a little bit less attractive in a way. Well, I’d say it’s more attractive than thinking that we just don’t want to be told what to do. What we’re seduced into is a misunderstanding of how it is that we serve the God that has created us, and we tend to want to do it by being the best that we can be, to be like God. And then if we’re like God, if we’re as good as he is, then he’ll like us. It’s almost like we don’t have a comfort level with the way in which God describes our relationship with him, where the only way we exist in that relationship is because of God’s mercy, his understanding, his compassion. That’s why he had to teach and preach the fullness of his message with the idea and the ideal of forgiveness. His whole focus is not so much to look at whether or not we are who we should be but rather can we allow God to enter into us as we are and taking us where we are to the next level. It’s very different. One takes humility; the other is all bound up in pride. So in this particular part of Mark’s gospel, we’re watching, in a way, Jesus pointing out the selfishness, in a sense, but it’s the humanity of the disciples. They’ve been arguing about who is the greatest. They’ve been trying to figure out — they know that God, Jesus is going to save the Jewish people, and he’s going to put them in power, and they’re going to run the whole situation, all the ego, ego, ego stuff. And so in these readings, we’re having a kind of refresher course about the way human nature is and what it’s really made for.

So you take that first reading. One of the things that we love is not only to be the best that we can be or better than other people, but we want to be in the in group. We want to be among the chosen, and so it’s interesting. When God called Abraham, he said, “I want you to choose these people. I want you to tell them that they’re my choice, and they’re my favorites. They’re the best.” And so right away, you have this image in the followers of Abraham, the followers of God under the direction of Abraham, that they are the special ones. So you can see, in this first reading, that when they think that somebody outside of this group is able to do what God asks them to do, it bothers them. It says, “Wait, this isn’t fair. God does not favor anybody but us.” But by saying that, “I’ve taken you as my chosen people, it’s not to say that I haven’t chosen everyone, in a sense. It’s to say I’m working with you as a special group so you can understand who I am and what I’m up to and why I’m in your life so you can tech it. I need to get — I need to form community.” In a way, that’s the way we grow in anything. Education about anything, you get a community together, a group of students that are studying something. We work together. We feed each other. So that’s why God called this community of the Israelites together, not because they were better than everybody else but just because that’s the way it works, to be a part of a community. So when there’s a complaint, Moses stopped them, stopped them. He says, “If they’re for us, why should we be against him?” Nobody that is working for what God is calling them to is considered to be an outsider. That’s what Moses is basically saying. “Look, if they’re doing what we’re doing, they’re not against us, so leave them alone.”

And then the next thing that comes up, in the reading from James, is the whole idea of wealth and riches, and in the Old Testament particularly, and in the New Testament also but more in the New Testament, there’s this condemnation of people with wealth. The reason is not because they happen to have money, because wealthy people can be extremely valuable and philanthropic. And there were wealthy people that took care of Jesus and things like that, but the point is that so often, when you look at the way wealth was developed in the time that James was writing this letter, is that simply they were always, in almost every case, rich because they were stealing from someone who was poor. They didn’t run great companies and end up developing a wealth that they earned and struggled for and then shared with other people. That’s not the image that is being condemned in these words from James. So what basically this is underscoring is that there’s a part of all of us that remains greedy, and we want the best of everything.

So right away, we’re looking at images in this set of readings that have to do with our ego, and we get to the gospel. And basically we start off with the same theme, exclusivity. The followers of Jesus were special, and they were the ones who were able to do the things that God enabled them to do, and no one else could do them, because they were in that special group. Well, the same thing is in the gospel that says, “Look, someone’s driving out demons in your name, and they’re not part of us.” So John’s saying, “Stop them,” again. No, anyone that’s out there, whether they belong to our company or not, if they’re loving, if they’re forgiving, if they’re doing anything good, they’re part of us, and so don’t get caught up in this image of being part of the exclusive group that God loves in a special way. And that is such a shadow of all religions.

Catholicism, we used to do it in spades. When I was growing up, I thought that my Methodist friends, my Baptist friends, my Presbyterian friends, they were all going to hell, because they weren’t part of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, and other religions have done the same thing. Isn’t it ironic when you think about it? Believing in this generous, loving God is the heart of every Christian religion, and yet we like the idea that he only really loves us. So what are we dealing with here? A universal problem of what we would call basically undeveloped, unevolved — or low-level of evolution of human nature. “I want to be special. I want to be really, really good in the eyes of others and the eyes of God.”

So then we get to the part of this gospel that is the heart of what I want to talk about today, because I’ve looked this up in commentaries on the gospel, and sometimes they just skip this section, a weird, kind of, little statement — not a little statement, a powerful statement coming from the mouth of Jesus. “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. Better the life entered maimed than with two hands. If your foot is your problem, cut it off. Better to be lame than to be — than to enter into — and if your eyes are your problem, pluck the other eye out.” It’s crazy. Where does this come from? Why would he make such a dramatic statement to people about self-mutilation? And it’s got such a beautiful piece of wisdom in it if you can just hear it, but he used something so dramatic. And I know in the scriptures, when Jesus does this, when he throws out something, he just completely flips your mind, like, “Unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you can’t be a part of me,” things like that. This is one of those kind of statements, and can you imagine the discussion of the disciples after he finished this? “What are you talking about? It’s better to be lame, to be half-blind, to not be able to do work? Is that the best way to be in life?” Well, maybe what he’s saying is unless you embrace, unless you accept, unless you recognize that our human nature, by its very nature, is never going to be enough to accomplish the work that we’re here to accomplish. We’re not capable of any of the work that God is calling us to do, in terms of the real depth that it has as a potential. We have to be guided with and filled with and aware of a Spirit dwelling in us, dwelling in us, giving us the wisdom that we need, the insight that — we can see so much. We can see so far, but we can’t see the depth of what’s out there. And so we only have one eye. If we can accept the fact that we have only one eye, then we know that we need two eyes to be full, and the other eye is not ours but God’s. Same way with your hand. How do you do and accomplish all the things that you’re called to do? The gospel makes it so clear that you and I are called to care for the needs of other people. Do you think that then that’s up to you to be the one who does everything for someone? Do you realize that, when you actually reach out and give someone something, your time, your energy, your love, your advice — do you think that that’s all that’s being given through you to them? Or do you really believe than, when you have an intention to give something to someone, you’ll give some things that are valuable, but they’re more than what you can give, though I’m not diminishing that. It’s what God gives you through the intention that you have when he flows through you, because when you’re in the flow of life between you and someone else and God is in that trio, he is so powerful and effective. And if you don’t feel that the little you did is not all that’s been given but so much more has been given, unless you have that, you’re not going to really feel the fullness of what it means to be his follower.

And the image of a foot, we’re on a journey. We have to go and move and evolve and change, and all of that seems so beautiful to me, that we do stretch our imaginations and try to find the newest insight. But at the same time, if we think we get those — they come from us, that’s where we’re limited. So the image of entering life maimed is the image of entering life needy, never expecting you to be enough for the things that you’re called to do and never using your gifts or your talents as a sign that you are loved by God or that you’re esteemed by other people or that you’re part of a special group. Wow, that’s not easy. Who said it was supposed to be easy? It’s impossible. All the things we’re asked to be are impossible without him, but with him, everything is possible.

Father, without you, we cannot achieve the goal that you’ve set for us. Yet we struggle, and we try to please you by attaining it out of our own energy, our own strength. So bless us with the humility that is key to being able to engage in a relationship with you where we can find the peace, knowing that we are the instrument that you’ve called us to be, feeling the effectiveness of us working with you, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Wisdom 2:12, 17-20 | James 3:16—4:3 | Mark 9:30-37

O God, who founded all the commands of your sacred law upon love of you and of our neighbor, grant that by keeping your precepts we may merit to attain eternal life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

One of the things that we all deal with, whether we want to or not, is our human nature, and one of the things about our humanity that I think helps all of us understand more fully what we’re dealing with is looking at the history of the evolution of the human being. We came from a very low level of consciousness that was always focused primarily on self, self-preservation, self-survival, procreation. It was very, very, in a sense, primitive, yet we know that in this whole process of the evolution of human beings we’re being invited, by the God who created us, to move more and more in a direction where we become more and more like the God who created us to be like him. So we’re moving more and more out of a sort of selfish, self-centered world into an other-centered world. Instead of serving self, we learn that our goal is to serve one another, and yet this human nature that we all have is not something you can necessarily completely — how would I say it — destroy it so that you no longer have any selfish feelings whatsoever, no jealous feelings, no envious feelings, no competition. The beauty of living as long as I have is you know that there is a desire in all of us, when we’re younger, that we’re going to get rid of all of this negative, selfish, self-centered parts of our life, and then we’ll overcome that, and we’ll become these loving, selfless people. And I have not yet seen that happen in my life. So 81 years into the mission, I still struggle with jealousy and envy and self-centeredness, and I think to myself, “Does that mean I haven’t grown at all, or does that mean that that’s exactly the way we are asked to live in this world?” We are not asked to become, through God’s grace hopefully, but if even less selflessly, we just said, “I am going to make myself into this person who never has any jealous or envious or selfish thoughts. I will do that, and then I’ll present that to God as my performance is now free of all selfishness, and I, I , I become what, his favorite? Or at least I can go and claim my salvation and my place in heaven after it’s over, because it’s all about me and what I’ve done.” That’s the danger. No, we live with weaknesses all of our life.

The first two readings do describe those weaknesses pretty clearly. When we’re being attacked, maybe, by another idea, another way of seeing things, we get pretty defensive and often attack the one who attacks us. And so in that first reading, we see the image of a prophet who comes to speak the truth, and then the response to that is not to ponder that truth, to wonder about it, to question ourselves as to whether or not that truth has any value. No, let’s attack the messenger, and just in a sort of casual way, let’s see if we can torture him and threaten to kill him to see if he’s really, really authentic. I don’t think that’s the way you question authenticity, by trying to destroy the person who’s bringing you a new idea. And the next reading is about the kind of thing that happens when someone else in your world does better than you are, and there’s a kind of feeling or tendency of jealousy or envy. Or you see someone with all the things you want, and you can’t have them. There’s this separation that is created by your envy and your jealousy. This is all human nature, and it doesn’t go away. That’s the hardest thing for me.

So what is it that we’re here to do? How do we work with this lower level of consciousness? The one thing we have to do is accept it as part of what it means to be human. The other is to forgive it, meaning that we have to have patience with ourselves, and that encourages us to have patience with other people who have not yet achieved this perfection that we all get caught up in, which is really not what the gospel is asking us to become, perfect. We’re asked to become forgiving, loving servants. Patient, understanding, compassion, empathy are all the signs of a person who lives in the kingdom, and the kingdom is a world of two elements: the dark and the light, the selfish and the selfless. And we struggle with those things throughout our life, and so what’s the key? What do you have to do? I think the gospel is loaded with some beautiful images. First of all, the gospel is pretty much presenting — and this is Mark’s gospel. He’s presenting to us the image of, a not-so-attractive image of the disciples. Jesus is finished with his public ministry. He’s done everything he can to bring the people that he wanted to teach and preach into a place of life and goodness, and they’ve rejected him completely, and they’re ready to kill him. And Jesus knows that, and he’s predicted it to his disciples. “Get ready. Everything you think we’ve been working toward that’s going to put us in a position of power and authority, it’s not going to work. We’re going to be — I, as your leader, am going to be destroyed, but I’m going to surrender to my destruction. And when I do that, something radically is going to rise and change in human nature.” Well, they didn’t understand that at all, but in a sense, maybe what they did understand is that, when Jesus was saying all that, it questioned their own images of what it was going to be like to follow Jesus through the whole process that he was here to accomplish. And their initial thoughts were always that it was going to be — we were going to be in positions — the disciples were going to be in positions of great authority. They were going to have an incredibly powerfully position in the way Jerusalem was run and the temple. They must have dreamt and thought about all the esteem and power they would have had. And so in the process of thinking about their future, they were on this journey with Jesus, which is — I love when Jesus teaches people while they’re walking. I love that, because it’s like the journey will teach you. Keep living each day, and learn something each day. It’s going to be more and more insight as we move along. And so he’s overhearing them, and it’s interesting. In looking at different translations of this, some people say the disciples were discussing who was the greatest. The one I like better is where they were arguing about who was the greatest. I would loved to have heard that conversation. And they were obviously caught up in their humanity of wanting and needing to be in a position of authority and power and esteem. It’s in all of us, and we’re never going to get rid of it. But it can be tempered, and we can see through it. And when it comes up, we don’t have to surrender to it and act on it.

And so what Jesus does, which is so fascinating, is after he’s kind of basically exposing who they are, then he does something. He sits down. There’s a child nearby, I guess, and he takes the child. And I love the details of this. He takes the child, and evidently they’re sitting in some kind of circle, as they must have done when he was continually teaching. They must have been resting on their walk. He puts his arms around the child. He just doesn’t place him in their midst but puts his arms around the child and said, “If you receive one child in my name, you receive me, if you receive me, not just me but the one who sent me.” What’s he saying? Well, one of the things it might seem at first he’s saying is that here is a child. A child is vulnerable and has no rights of their own. So you should always go out there and take care of children and anyone else. It’s a way of saying, “This is what you should be doing. You should take care of people. That’s the whole notion of who I am as the Messiah. I’ve come to awaken people to the joy and the challenge and the joy of being there for others.” And it flies in the face of our self-centeredness, but nevertheless, what I love about the way Jesus continues to use this image, he shifts it away from simply saying, “You should take care of the people who don’t have anybody taking care of them,” and it goes something like this. The child is not just someone who should be served, but he says, “Unless you receive this child —” Now, what does that mean? What? Serve him, or does it mean become like a child? I really think what Jesus was doing was saying, “Look, I want you to understand that there is something in you that, like a child cannot accomplish, doesn’t have the wherewithal, the wisdom or whatever, or the position of power in the world to be able to accomplish what they want to accomplish —” And so what he’s saying is, “What you have to do is become like a child who is in need of something outside of themselves to be able to accomplish the things that they need to accomplish, and if you can become like that, then you’re going to be able to do something that is so crucial and so essential for this journey you’re on. You’re going to be able to receive me.”

Now, what is he saying? Think of it. Jesus has been giving them information, information, information, insight after insight and saying, “Take this in. Receive it. Ponder it. Wonder about it. Try to figure it out for yourself, because I’m giving you not a simple, clean answer to all your questions. I’m giving you a way of finding a wisdom that can only be accomplished by your own figuring it out and your coming to a decision that this is the way it is. I know it is. I feel it in my gut.” And so what he’s saying is, “If you could allow me to enter into you —” Let’s take that as, “Take everything I’ve shown you and everything I’ve been. Take it in and ponder it. Hold it inside of you, and when you receive who I am and what I’m teaching, you know what’s going to happen? You’re not just receiving me the messenger. You’re not receiving me, Jesus. You’re receiving the one who sent me, meaning you’re receiving the one who gives me,” Jesus is saying this, “Who gives me the strength to do whatever I am asked to do.” And Jesus had to be so conscious at that moment in his ministry. He knew it was going to end badly. He knew he was going to have to be crucified. He knew he was going to die, and it was a struggle for him to be able to accept that. And so he knew he couldn’t accept it on his own. He had to have someone in him enabling him to accept it, and that’s what he’s trying to tell the disciples.

You will always be selfish. You will always have these struggles. You will always — there will always be something in you at war with the person you know you would like to be or who you should be. That’s always there. So how do you deal with that? Well, because human beings are so fond of autonomy, the way I’d like to do it is, ”I’ll work on it. I’ll get myself past all that selfish stuff, and I’ll be this wonderful, loving person. And then I present myself to you, God, and you’re going to say, ‘Wow, well done, good and faithful servant. Come in. You deserve heaven.’” That’s what an autonomous, kind of self-centered human being wants to do, and Jesus is saying, “Look, guys, gentlemen, my beloved friends that I’ve spent my life with, don’t fall into that trap. The only way you can become who you’re called to be is allowing something to be inside of you that’s like inside of me. And every time you see me doing something that goes way beyond my human nature, I point to God. I keep saying to you, ‘This is not me. This is God in me doing this work.’” So he’s trying to teach his disciples, “Can you really grasp this? Receiving a child is like becoming like a child where you don’t have the ability to handle your life in the world. You don’t have enough stuff. So you become like I am.” It’s funny. Jesus is actually saying, “I am a child of the Father. I am able to do the things I do, because the Father is in me.” At no time in his ministry could he have been more sensitive and aware of that than the time that he had to face the ending. The fact that God says to him, “Instead of being the one who accomplishes all these great things and becomes the hero of the world, I want you to surrender to all the enemies out there and let them do all the negative things they do to someone, destroying them.” And when you say yes to that, meaning a human being has a really hard time saying yes to being destroyed because of its deep, deep commitment to being self-preservation — self-survival — he surrendered to all of that and said, “No, the only way I’ll be saved is my God, my Father in me enables me to do this. That’s the key, gentlemen. That’s what you have to understand.”

And you wonder if this moment couldn’t have been the one they might have turned to most when they realized what had happened in those days between the death of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus and the sending of the Holy Spirit into these men, and they understood and saw things finally as they really are. And they knew God was in them. God was there for them. God took them from a place of arguing about who is the greatest to men who wanted nothing more to do but to serve each other and other people. That’s the transformation that is the will of God. It’s the transformation we work with as we struggle with these scripture stories. It’s the thing I pray most that I’m able to share with you and learn it myself, and we enter into an entire new world of peace, confidence, not in our self, but in the God who made us and who loves us.

Father, the key to everything that you invite us into is a relationship with God the Father. Help us to feel his presence in us as you knew and felt him in yourself. And enable us somehow to be able to convey to others the goodness that we find in this relationship and to never get caught up in our own self-importance, our self-value, but know that everything that you call us to be, everything you call us to do is through you, with you, in you so we can find peace, a peace that’s beyond any kind of understanding that human nature has by itself, but only that can be taught by you. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Isaiah 50:5-9a | James 2:14-18 | Mark 8:27-35

Look upon us, O God, creator and ruler of all things, and that we may feel the working of your mercy, grant that we may serve you with all our heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

In getting ready to reflect on these readings with you, I was thinking about the amount of time that I have spent in my life going over these same stories over and over again. It’ll be almost 55 years that every Sunday I’ve been working on a gospel, the first reading and an Old Testament reading, trying to figure out what is at the heart of this incredibly powerful book. It has two parts, an old part and a new part, and all we know about these works is that they’re packed with a certain kind of wisdom that, for centuries, people have gone to this source and have said, “I know there’s a truth here.” And if you know the scriptures well, it’s in a way always hidden. You have to dig for it, work for it, try to get to the heart of what it’s saying, because it doesn’t make it that clear in a sense. It’s almost like it’s there, but unless you find it yourself, you’ll never own it. You’ll never live it, and so there’s a wisdom in this second reading that I’m so drawn to. And every time I go back into these stories, I see something I didn’t see before, and I say to myself, “If you’ve done this for that long, you would think by now you’d say, ‘I know exactly what this one’s about. This is exactly — I’ve got it down.’” No, every time I go to one of these — and I think you feel it if you’ve been listening to me for a long time — is that together, you the listener, me the speaker have been working toward digging into these stories and finding what’s hidden. When we see it, when we know it, it’s not because it’s been told to us that we should believe it. No, we know it, because it makes sense on some deep, deep level. This is the truth. We’re made for that. We’re made to live in the truth.

In fact, I love the phrase in the Responsorial Psalm that we live in the land of the living — the land of the living. What does it mean to be alive? It means we’re a seeker. We’re trying to figure it out. We’re working always on this idea that we’re here for some mysterious reason, and we’re here for a purpose. And the more we enter into the fullness of that purpose, the richer and the more potent our life is going to be in terms of experiencing life and sharing life with other people.

So in this reading from James, we hear this idea that there’s something about how you believe and how you live, and he’s saying a person’s belief is going to affect how they live. If you believe in the world as, say, a place where you’re called to be, by your faith — and this is a shadow that I certainly found in the early years of my life, living as a Catholic, that Christianity was calling me primarily to be sinless. So I had to do everything I could to be better, and the way I chose to be better was a combination of control — I will not give into that desire that I have — and also, in a way, presentation to other people so that I could kind of get some feedback. And if they’d say, “Oh, you’re such a wonderful person,” then I’d kind of work on that image and present that to the world. But I noticed how self-centered that all is. If Christianity is calling you to be a better person and to be less engaged in things that are offensive to people or, let’s say, that harm people or whatever, it’s — if you’re doing it just for the presentation value of it so you’ll look good, you’re really not living out of the faith that you should be living out of. You’re living out of a faith that says perfection is the goal.

So what is the goal of Christianity? What have I discovered? What have we discovered together, hopefully, about it? It’s not about being better in that sense of more perfect, more sinless but being more authentic, more yourself, more alive, more vital, more connected. If there’s anything about Christianity that we learn from this set of readings and so many other places in scripture, it’s that this whole thing is about the way we relate to other people, and the way that we relate, if we believe in the God that has created us, he said it has everything to do with intimacy, which has to do with compassion and empathy. We care deeply about the darkness and the pain in other people’s lives as we do with the same kind of concern for the darkness in our life, and darkness to me is separation from who you are, from who somehow you deeply know you are. But you’re addicted to something that isn’t really you, and you know it, and it keeps you up at 3:00 in the morning. And it is a kind of death, and we’re in a land of living. We’re in a land that we’re called to understand with our hearts. In the opening prayer, understand with your heart this message, and the heart is the place of empathy and compassion. Where the brain is more about understanding things, the heart’s all about connection.

So if we are living out the faith that is, the faith that God has invited us into, we are going to be the kind of people that James said we should be. If we see someone who has no food, who has nothing to wear, what’s our reaction? Our reaction should be, “We want to help you. We want to sustain you. We want to be there for you. We want to help whatever it is you need.” Now, that implies to me that there’s an understanding at the heart of our faith that we are here for a reason, and let’s go back to the image — I love it — not perfection but authenticity, to be who we’re called to be.

And if you look at then who Jesus is, we’re going to see in this God filled with divinity the model of what it means to be a person who is authentic, authentic to who God created us to be, and so in the Old Testament, when we listen to prophecies — just a side note. Whenever you go to the Old Testament — I used to think that was the old story, the story that we no longer pay attention to. Now we’ve got a new story. The new story is the New Testament. No, the wisdom found in the Old Testament is essential for you to understand the New Testament, and there are 300 references to who the Messiah is going to be. It’s so interesting to me that the Pharisees, who are supposed to be absolutely grounded in their understanding of the Old Testament — they should have understood that Jesus represented, in a most perfect way, what was being prophesied about who the Messiah would be. It’s a little frightening for me to think that there were those who did understand that Jesus really was, and because he was going to turn the world upside down, especially the world of the Pharisees, then they rejected him, because they realized he was the one. That would be even more scary, but this Old Testament, if we understand it clearly, it’s going to enrich our understanding of who Jesus is, therefore who we are and why we’re here.

There’s a series of beautiful prophecies in the book of Isaiah. In fact, most of the prophecies about Jesus are in Isaiah, and one is the suffering servant. So we have that in the beginning, the first reading of this set of readings, where you listening to the suffering servant figure, and he’s saying, “I have this task to do, and I know that God is there with me, but my life seems to be in constant tension with the way the world thinks. And so I’m sitting here as one who speaks a truth radically different than the world is living out of.” The truth of the world in the past would have been, again, some kind of self-centered world. It’s all about me. The suffering servant takes on all the pain and all the suffering. It happens in a culture and in a world where there is no compassion, no understanding, no connection with other people. Everyone is out for themselves, and so the suffering servant, in some mysterious way, said, “I want to take away that pain that’s in people who are not loved and cared for, and I’ll take it on, and I’ll allow that pain to be my pain. And in doing that, I’m going to heal the world.” And that still to me sounds strange. How does that work that he takes the sins of the world upon himself and therefore he changes the world? Well, I don’t even know if I’m going to be able to say it clearly enough. So listen as attentively as you can, because I’m always working out of my — I don't know — this weird place that I go to, when I’m preaching, where I don’t really know what I’m going to say next, but it’s something like this: When there is suffering in the world, there is some kind of justice that’s demanded. If somebody is imposing pain on someone else, it creates this place of darkness for those that are being afflicted, used, abused, and somehow when Jesus takes all that pain on himself, what he’s doing is somehow equalizing the world so that this negative energy is stopped by somebody saying, “I’ll take it on myself. I will surrender to it and not return revenge. I will stop it.” When a pain is inflicted upon you, there’s a way in which you are angry, and you want to get back at them. And what Jesus is saying is, “No, I’ll take all that pain on, and I will not try to punish the people who have harmed me.” And what he’s saying is, “That’s the model of who you’re supposed to be as a representative of who I am in the world. If you want to follow me, you’ve got to understand that you have got to not return evil for evil. You’ve got to allow evil to happen to you in the world, and you have to say, ‘I will take it on. I will suffer it, and I’ll learn from it. I’ll be changed by it, but I will not return evil for evil.’” And that’s the image of the suffering servant. “I take it all on, and I sit there without any resistance.” Wow, that’s amazing.

Think of how many things you and I resist, are angry over, because the world isn’t there for us, being what it’s supposed to be for us, taking care of us. We’re going through a pandemic. We’re going through something that the whole world is having to deal with. Think about the way we’re dealing with that. When things are not the way we want them to be, we’re often depressed, angry. “It’s not fair.” When people aren’t pulling their share of what they should do, we want to attack them, and is that really the way we live out this faith? It’s like we have compassion and understanding for the people who are not who they should, and when we — I don't know how this work, but when you somehow will not go back against them, you will not attack them back, that changes the world. And you’re authentically living the world that Jesus teaches us to live, a suffering servant, allowing things to be as awful as they are, enduring it, recognizing it, learning from it, developing a kind of strength inside of you because of it, but you will not return evil for evil. That’s who the suffering servant is. That’s who we’re supposed to be, and when you don’t have anger and you don’t have this feeling that you’re being abused and you somehow see value in this entire crazy world we’re living in, there’s a peace that you cannot describe in words. Somehow it’s all okay. Everything’s going to work out, and somehow, if I’m patient in enduring all that isn’t what I want it to be, I’m living out my faith in works.

Father, you have created for us a challenge to open our hearts to the wisdom that we find in this God/man Jesus. Bless us with an open heart that we might be able to see what he’s teaching us and what he’s inviting us into so that we can be a participant in saving the world from darkness and inviting people into a life of light and peace and goodness. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Isaiah 35:4-7a | James 2:1-5 | Mark 7:31-37

Oh God, by whom we are redeemed and received adoption, look graciously upon your beloved sons and daughters that those who believe in Christ may receive true freedom and an everlasting inheritance. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

The scriptures this week begin with an issue that I think is probably one of the most important issues for all of us who are believers in the God that is revealed in the Old Testament and New Testament, and that is the issue of fear. There is nothing stated more often in scripture than the phrase, “Be not afraid.” It’s 365 times. I think that’s so interesting, a time for every day of the year, and yet there’s so many of us that live a kind of fear-based life, and it’s an interesting thing. Why is it that we human beings have this sort of anxiety in the core of our being that somehow we’re not enough, or the relationships we have will not be there for us, or that financial security in the future won’t be there for us? There is this voice that I always talk about, this voice that is a critic that comes along and constantly tells us we’re not enough, and if you’re told you’re not enough and you have to look at your future, you’re wondering, “Who outside of me or what outside of me is going to take care of me?” And then you end up with a severe to mild case of anxiety, and it stays with you. And I never thought of this before, but one of the reasons why we get addicted to things that relax us, be it some kind of medication or alcohol or activity or whatever we choose that keeps us from thinking and feeling things, that the root cause of so much of that addiction is simply that we have this unsatisfied longing for something that we think needs to be there in order for us to make it. And I’m thinking to myself, “What is it about believers in God that doesn’t trust the most simple, direct statement that he’s made to us throughout the history of his story revealing himself to us?” For the most part, he’s there for us. He’s there to care for us, to awaken us to things that will satisfy us. There’s a life that he’s created for us, and he promises that we’ll be able to be in touch with it. And it’s core value is that it has a resonance of peace and well-being. When he says over and over again, “Don’t be afraid,” another way to say that more positively is, “Be at peace. Relax. Everything is going to be okay.”

Now, what’s interesting to me about this notion of not trusting God, one of the reasons, I think, is because the God of the Old Testament had a way of entering into our life and being there for us. And it’s not as comforting as it is in the New Testament, but basically, when God entered into people’s lives through Abraham and then the journey to freedom from a place of slavery, the core gift that God gave to his people to give them a sense of hope and well-being was a law, the Ten Commandments. We talked about them last week, and when you think about it, basically the law was given to people, and its effect, how it worked on them, it was controlling their behavior. And it controlled their behavior with a certain motivation, and the motivation was reward or punishment. So the most part, you look back at the Old Testament, and you see a God who is dealing with people who, I would say, from the way he dealt with them, were very childlike. I think it’s interesting. Just recently I’ve been doing research on how long ago was Abraham. When did he appear in history? And it was 4,000 years ago. That was the time when the wheel was invented. The alphabet was invented. The government, the kind of control of a government over people, all that was brand new. So to have a God entering into the lives of these people at a time when, in a way, they were just beginning to understand the fullness of who they could become, it made sense that he had to treat them like children. “Do this, and if you don’t —” What he’s really saying is, “If you don’t do this, your life is going to be miserable, and you’re going to be living in fear and anxiety and worry, and blah, blah, blah.” But basically he said, “If you don’t do it, I will punish you. I will destroy you.” And that doesn’t exactly instill in a person a lot of confidence, because if a God who is giving you the things you need to do, if you have to do them in order to please him and you don’t do them that well, then you’re always going to be, in a sense, anxious over whether or not you’re going to be condemned. So you’re afraid of his judgment.

Now, take that as something that is in the Old Testament. Take that as our origin in our families. Often we have — it depends on the parents that we have. I know when I grew up in the ‘40s, disciplining a child was the smartest, wisest thing you could do. Punish them whenever they do anything wrong. That’ll teach them both what’s right and wrong, but it’ll also teach them how to be disciplined, control their behavior. And that lingered, still lingers in people’s imagination. That’s what we’re here to do, control our behavior so that we act in the way that we’re supposed to so that people accept us and God accepts. And that isn’t very comforting, because you know what it’s based on? My performance, my ability to do what I’m told.

So in the New Testament, it’s very, very different. In the New Testament, we have a God who is revealing not simply the wisdom of a law, a way of life that we’re asked to live and if we don’t we’ll be punished. He brings something else onto the scene, and it’s very different. I will call it the gift, a gift that he wants to give us, not a rule to live by but a gift, and the gift is something that he’s going to give to you and to me that awakens us and empowers us. The law had the role to awaken, awaken people to what people really basically want. They want to live in a community where people are grounded in something besides their own egos. They want to live in a community where people are caring and loving and supportive, but when we come to can you do that, what’s the motive to do that, well, it seems like the motive that you need, in the New Testament, which is where we are supposed to be living now, the real core challenge is not to follow a rule or a law but to believe in a promise. And the promise is, “I will really take care of you. I’m not any longer going to hold you responsible for your actions.” This is something that’s really hard for people who are grounded in the Old Testament to believe, that God comes with this most amazing gift. He wants to be the one who comes, and he just basically takes care of you and forgives all of your sins and releases you from everything you owe. And all you then have to do is allow him to take away all your faults by just not paying attention to them, and then he’s going to be there to take care of you and guide you and lead you and empower you.

And if you want to know exactly how we’re supposed to imagine that fulfillment of who God is — because he talks about it in the Old Testament, but the Isaiah piece we have today is part of the Old Testament, but there’s so many other passages in the Old Testament that sort of fly in the face of that. So it’s interesting about the New Testament and Old Testament. There’s 300 references in the Old Testament to the New Testament, but the New Testament didn’t happen until God entered the world as a human being, and this incredibly [sic] connection between humanity and divinity, this God and this man were in such union. And they did something for the human race, and they took away all of the punishment, all of the retaliation that is due us because of our faults. It’s all gone. Well, if that’s all gone, then I guess we can do anything we want, right? Well, that’s probably what they would have thought back in the Old Testament 4,000 years ago. They had to have some kind of punishment. What we have now is the image that we have in the gospel of a healer, a miraculous healer. This is the image of God now not just holding us against a law that we have to — that controls our behavior but a God revealing to us a promise, and the promise is, “I will awaken you into who you are, and I will empower you to live out of that awareness you have of your core nature, your authenticity.” And so that’s the miracle.

And the one we have in the gospel today is the one that I think might be the most interesting. He basically is saying that the gift — I don't know if this makes any sense to you, but I think it’s interesting that I heard this this week, but it’s the idea that of all the senses that we have, the last sense for us, if you’re dying, let’s say, and your brain is shutting down, the last sense to go is hearing. To the very end, you’re listening for something, listening. So in this gospel from Mark, we have one of the miracles of Jesus, and it’s the one in which he enables a person to speak clearly by improving the way he listens. Now, think about speaking as proclaiming something that is true and authentic. That’s what we’re here to do. We’re here to speak the truth, and the thing that keeps this figure in this gospel that’s healed, what keeps him from doing that, he can’t hear. He can’t hear right, and it’s true. Speech is a — how would you say it? It is established in our brain by what we hear. So if you live in a certain country that has a certain language, you’re going to speak that language, but let’s just say the speaking that we need to hear, in God’s plan for us to grow into who we are, is the truth. So the man can’t hear. He’s not ready for the truth. When you tell someone the truth about who they are or what they’re doing, they’re very likely to say, “That’s not true, because I can’t hear it. I can’t accept it. I’m not open enough to it.” So he opens his ears with his finger. It’s interesting. And then he does something else interesting. He takes spit, which is considered to be breath, which is the Spirit of God in a tangible form, in saliva, and touches his tongue. Your tongue is now touched by Spirit, by truth, and the other interesting thing about this thing is that, when Jesus does this, he does two things. He looks up to heaven, which is to say, “This is not me, the man Jesus, doing this. This is God.” And he groans, and I don’t know what the groan is. It’s fascinating. What is — was it difficult for him, or was it risky for him, because he knew, if he did this, it was going to get in the way of his ministry, and that’s one of the reasons why he would always say, “Don’t tell anybody about this. Don’t tell anybody”? But he almost had to do it, which is a beautiful image of God. He can’t resist the healing that he wants to give to people. So in this story, we see then the man who can hear the truth is able to speak the truth, and everybody is astonished. And you look at all the miracles of Jesus. It’s so interesting. Every single one of them has to do with awakening and empowering some natural quality that we have from God in terms of being a human beings, eyes that see, ears that hear, tongues that make speech clear, hands that get the work done, legs that get you going. Every one of them, if you think about it, direction of awakening and empowering human beings to be exactly who they were intended to be.

The law, it seems, in the Old Testament was controlling people, and they weren’t yet able to understand the reasons perhaps that they had to follow these regulations. But the New Testament is all about somebody now who realizes these regulations are nothing other than who I really am and who I want to be to the people I love and what I want other people to be to me. And all of a sudden, the healings don’t sound so like they’re magic and out of the realm of what happens naturally. No, to me, the miracles that Jesus performed are the natural ways in which grace works in your life and mine, and that’s what we trust in. We trust in that, and if we live in that kind of life, with all of those senses active and alive, we’re going to have the capacity to surrender our anxiety and our fear and be free of our addiction to whatever we have. Another glass of wine, another big deposit in our bank, another absolute certain sign from a friend that they’re not going to leave you, all of that kind of melts away into the fact that, if this is the God who I believe in, if this is the God who I believe is real, he’s doing all this for me, giving me all this capacity to handle it. Why wouldn’t he be able in doing that to give you everything you need to deal with whatever loss or whatever struggle you’ve got in your future? God doesn’t promise to not have difficulty, not have us go through difficulties, but if you understand how he’s always about empowering people to handle whatever comes their way with a kind of — not without pain and the need for grief and all that and loss, but never are we going to have that experience that fear sets up for us that we’re going to be in a situation where we will not survive. That’s impossible to believe if you know who God is and you trust him and you allow him to be exactly who he is for you. That’s peace.

Father, you tell us over and over again not to be afraid, but it seems to be something that we tend to fall into more quickly and more often than we wish. So bless us with this confidence that comes not so much from how the world is going or how our situation is unfolding but rather in a deep conviction that you are there with us in everything, and empower us to be able to cope with whatever comes our way. So bless us with confidence. Take away our fear, and we ask this is Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8 | James 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27 | Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

God of might, giver of every good gift, put into our hearts the love of your name so that, by deepening our sense of reverence, you may nurture in us what is good and, by your watchful care, keep safe what you have nurtured. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

Today we focus on one of the first times that God truly spoke to his people. In the Old Testament, we find God speaking to Abraham and to Moses, to the patriarchs, not so much to the people, for in the Old Testament, the image was, if people were sinful, then God could not be connected to them because of God’s holiness and their sin and their corruption. So in the beginning, God only spoke to the people through someone else. In the New Testament, we have a completely different way of communicating with God. He speaks to our hearts.

But what’s interesting about this particular theme of the Ten Commandments is this came at a very interesting point in the history of humanity. It was during the Bronze Age. It was 4,000 years ago. This was a time in the history of human beings when civilization was beginning to be formed. Governments were beginning to be formed, and the alphabet was created during this time. The wheel was invented during this time. So it’s interesting to think: what were people like 4,000 years ago? What was their moral life like? Well, there’s something in scripture that says something that I always find fascinating. Before there was a law, there was no sin. So in a sense, you could say there was no clarity of making a wrong decision, because there was no sense of what the right decision was. So people basically lived the way they intended to live, the way their ancestors lived, and what they did to each other was considered the norm. But God enters into people’s consciousness with this incredibly interesting Decalogue. It’s called the Ten Commandments, and so what’s fascinating about these Ten Commandments is what they are and what they’re asking of people. And so this first reading makes it clear that, when God is giving the Ten Commandments to people, he’s giving them what is considered to be the truth. And the truth, according to James in the second reading, the truth is something that is already in all of us. It is a sense of what is our nature, and so it’s clear that what James is saying is that, when the Ten Commandments were given, it was igniting us, connecting us to a truth that’s inside of us that was perhaps underdeveloped at the time the Ten Commandments were given, inviting people to understand, “This is who you really are. These are the things, if you did these things, you would find a community that you wanted to live with, people guided by this wisdom.” And when people — in the first reading it’s clear that what we’re being told is, when people see the wisdom of these Ten Commandments, they’re going to say, “Wow, these people are really intelligent. They’re smart,” because somehow there’s something already given to everybody. You might say the Ten Commandments are already written on our hearts. So it’s almost like — well, it’s not almost like. It is that God was telling people, when he gave them the Ten Commandments, that, “This is who you are. This is your nature.”

So let’s look at it, these Ten Commandments, because they’re clearly describing this life force that’s in a human being that, when it’s ignited with divinity, when divinity enters into it and the two become one, as it does in the New Testament, there is this force of life coming out of a person, divinity and humanity working together, living out these Ten Commandments. And so let’s look at them, as I said, and it goes like this: the first thing is that we need something more than ourselves. So we need to believe in something beyond ourselves. So the first commandment is you need to believe that there is a God who is there for you, not so much a God that you have to serve. That was the way it was basically described in the beginning, but here’s a God who is there for you. And the first thing he wants you to do is believe in him, believe he exists, then to allow him to be who he is, and who he is, is somebody who wants to enter into you and awaken your nature. And what he needs you to do is spend time with him. So one of those first three commandments is keep holy the Sabbath Day. That just means take some time to spend time with God, listening to him, and in the other — in the Ten Commandments, it’s all about our relationship with God. It’s don’t use his power, don’t take his power in vain. In other words, don’t take the gifts that he has given to your nature and use them in a way that is destructive to other people. Don’t use God’s name in vain, and when I was a child, that always meant you can’t say, “God dammit.” And in a way, that was kind of a primitive way of saying, “Don’t use the power of God to harm anyone or to have power over someone.” So the first three are about our relationship with divinity, intimacy with divinity, the rest primarily about our relationship with each other.

And if you listen to the gospel carefully, when God is — excuse me. When Jesus is talking about the law and about the hypocrisy of the pharisees who have not paid attention to these core laws and have replaced them with human traditions and all kinds of regulations, what we’re hearing him saying is that, when these laws are not followed, inside of human beings, there is this list of things he makes, and they’re almost exactly the same list that the Ten Commandments are asking us to not get engaged in these things. And so he’s saying the opposite of these laws is living inside of a person’s heart, meaning their very core, then there’s always going to be horrible destruction. And what he’s saying to these pharisees is, “You’re not teaching the Ten Commandments anymore. You’re teaching customs that keep you in power, and you keep people doing the things that they think are pleasing to God by these 600-plus rules and laws, and these are all customs.” But the core of what it is they’re supposed to be — the scribes and pharisees decided not to focus on, the Ten Commandments. It’s crazy. Because they weren’t living them, and so they put something in its place, because people in a way, in a relationship with God, always want to say, “Well, what is God asking from me?” Well, the 613 laws that they had were all about these customs about — many of those rules and laws made sense in terms of — it made for a better diet. It made for better cleanliness and all that, but you had to watch how you washed your hands, how you made your bed, how you cleaned this. All those things had become their religion, and the heart of it was missing.

So let’s look at those other seven commandments that are talked about in the gospel in a negative way, but let’s just listen to what they’re asking, because it’s really beautiful. First thing is there’s people around you that have given you life. Respect those people. Respect anyone that gives you life, increases your enjoyment of life, opens your life to what is true so you can live, in a way, engaged more in the things that mean the most to you. So the first thing is just honor those who are there giving you life, and we tend to think, of course, parents. It’s so interesting. Our species is the rare species that demands so much care on the part of those who create us. Animals can sometimes give birth to an offspring, and they get up and walk away and start eating, and they’re on their own. I haven’t had children, but I know people that do, and it’s a commitment where it’s 24/7 for years and years before the child is able to do much of anything on their own. Honor that. They may not have been the best. They may have been abusive in some ways, but honor that privilege of bringing life into the world and nurturing it. And in your relationship with each other — it’s so simple. Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Don’t kill. Don’t break your promises. Those, when you think about it, they’re so basic to human nature that any one of them, you know, if you don’t follow them, there’s no real integrity in the relationship. It would destroy — any one of those left unchecked would destroy a relationship, and it’s all about relationships. And the last two are so beautiful, in a sense, because we don’t pay much attention to them. It’s just be satisfied with the life you have. “It’s your life. I created it for you.” The people in your life, they’re there for a purpose, and we can be jealous of other people’s relationships, jealous of healthier families, jealous of people who have, I don't know, more of something that we don’t have. Or there’s just that simple thing of, “God, look at the things they have. I wish I had those things.”

All of these commandments then are things that, I think, anyone with a little bit of consciousness would say these were a good idea, but what happens when regulations and rules get out of control, in particular religion, and people are asked to do things that, when they think about it, don’t really match up with these Ten Commandments, things that aren’t so essential. All we need to do is look at the world today. It’s so fascinating to see how many people in the world, when a rule and a regulation are place on them, and they don’t believe that it’s necessary or they feel they have a right not to do it — wear a mask, don’t go to these places, don’t do this, don’t do this, all of that. Look at the reaction in human beings when they are told to do something that they really don’t believe is important, and they are violent against that sort of thing. And you might say, “Well, come on. Get a life. Understand the thing more.” All I want to underscore is the fact that there’s something so negative about a regulation and a rule that one doesn’t feel is the most essential thing or isn’t an essential thing and it impinges upon their freedom, and that’s what’s happened to religion. So many people have left religion, and they say, “I’m no longer religious.” Well, they usually mean I’m no longer Catholic, or I’m no longer Methodist, or I’m no longer Baptist, and every one of those religions have certain things in them that are customs that you have to do if you’re a part of that religion. And people say, “They don’t make any sense to me anymore,” and therefore they leave, and they go off to find something else. And all I’m saying is there’s a wisdom in what they’re doing that is worth paying attention to as a religious leader that I am, a Catholic priest. I need to listen to what they’re saying, because as I say, these regulations don’t make sense to them anymore, and when the church refuses to change them or refuses to listen to exceptions, it really creates a tremendous, unnecessary separation between that religion and that person. Most people don’t leave a religion because of the Ten Commandments or even because of the ritual, because ritual is so powerful. But they will leave a religion that’s asking for things that they no longer believe are the right of a religion to refuse to allow you the freedom that you feel is yours to be able to accomplish something. It’s interesting and fascinating to me how many people are in that position, and what’s the solution? Well, the solution is to always go back to the religion that you left perhaps. Not that you have to go back to it necessarily. I’m not pushing that as a have-to, but there’s so many things in religion that are valuable: the rituals, the community, all that kind of stuff. And just it’s so important to somehow understand that the core of what religion is supposed to be, and Catholicism tries to really stress this, is your human conscience. And you have a right to be able to make decisions about things that really matter to you when they don’t seem to matter that much to the institution that you belong to, and they’re more of a custom than they are a commandment.

So we live in a very fascinating time, but I think the most important thing is to keep in mind, at the heart of all religion, in terms of regulations and rules, there are just ten, and those ten are a connection to your essence, your nature. And as long as you’re living in those and as long as your religion primarily is focused on those, it will be a relationship that brings an abundant life. And it never will tend to feel like it is an obligation that is unfair and there is then resistance that is so natural to human nature that, I think, for it to be written off is selfish, is a mistake on the part of religions. We need to listen to the heart of people and what they really believe in, what they know, and trust them.

Father, your will, your desire is that we become who you created us to be. The rules and laws, the only ones you’ve given us are those that awaken us to that nature that is so embedded in everything that we choose to do or decide not to do. So bless us with the wisdom that comes from these Ten Commandments. Awaken them so they are no longer obligations but simply the most wise, prudent and loving thing that we can do to care for one another and to bring your life to fullness in one another. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Joshua 24:1-2a, 15-17, 18b | Ephesians 5:21-32 or 5:2a, 25-32 | John 6:60-69

Oh God, who cause the minds of the faithful to unite in a single purpose, grant your people to love what you command and to desire what you promise that amid the uncertainties of this world our hearts may be fixed on that place where true gladness is found. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

I’ve said to you often that the opening prayer sets the tone for whatever a man like me, wanting to communicate to you what these readings mean — it just sets the tone, and it’s saying what I want from God. Would God please, please give me this? Give me this, God, and that is I want to understand what you ask of me, what you command me to do. And I want you to remind me always what it promises when you say I need to do what you command, and then you also promise me that there’s going to be a gift, something wonderful. I love the way that opening prayer sets it in this way. It says the world is filled with uncertainties. We turn to the world for understanding, for protection, for all the things that we need, and we know that it’s wanting. So we need something, something that we can go to that’s going to nurture us and remind us of a promise that there is a place where we can find wholeness, gladness, joy. So with that focus for the homily, we’re going to be looking at what is it we turn to, to give us some kind of sense of stability and strength in the midst of all the uncertainties we deal with.

Let’s take the first reading, because the first reading says everything about who God is, not so much about what people are supposed to do for him but who he is. Joshua has gathered all the people together, and what’s interesting about gathering the people together, it’s the ordinary folks, but it’s also everybody that has any kind of authority over them. So there’s everybody, judges, leaders, elders, and they all gather together. And he wants to say something to them, and he’s basically saying, “All right, you need to be able to turn to a source that’s bigger than any individual or any other of these authorities that I’m gathering together. Everyone needs to turn to a power beyond themselves and invite that power to come into them.” Now, whether Joshua understood or the people understood all that that meant, but what he was saying, “I want you to choose the God that you believe in, that you trust in, because that’s going to say everything about who you are and what you want in the world. The God you serve is going to be the one that has formed you, given you everything.” So what you hear in this story is what’s the motive for surrendering to the authority of someone. Well, it’s not just because they’re the boss. It’s because you see this authority giving you something that you couldn’t have on your own. You’re being served by it, and so these people are saying, “Okay, if we think about it, who do we want to serve, a false god or a God who’s taken care of us and shown us all kinds of kindnesses and fed us and is guiding us on a journey? He’s been taking care of us. Why would we pick another God? So we’ll serve the God who serves us.” And that’s exactly what we do. The God we choose, the truth we choose to live by is a truth that we believe, when we choose it, it will produce for us everything that we long for, everything we want, everything we need. And yet the truth is there’s only one truth. There’s only one God.

There’s only one message, and everything else seems perhaps valuable and interesting and something we desire, depending on what we believe in, depending on how we see the world, but here’s the weakness of human nature. It was there at the very beginning in the story of Adam and Eve. What was Adam and Eve’s basic sin? I’ve said this to you over and over again. Autonomy. God said, “Don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Don’t ever think that you can have an understanding and a complete comprehension of what is and then you determine the rules and laws, you yourself will set them.” An autonomous person is free of any outside authority, any outside law, and they can create a world of their own making. It’s like an author can write a novel, and a novel can be a comedy or a tragedy. And basically he can do that. Then he has a book, but basically the image of that that’s terrifying to me is we can write our own book. But then the danger is that we expect like to then be like that book, and the things we’re choosing, that we believe will promise us fullness and wholeness, if it’s not true, if it’s not real, if it’s fiction, then you’re in trouble.

So that’s the fundamental issue in terms of what Jesus asks, or when anyone asks, or when you ask yourself the question: “What do I believe in? What do I believe in? What God is the God that’s guiding me and directing me and showing me how I should live?” Well, it’s the God that serves. That’s one way to look at it. What is it that brings me the most joy and the most satisfaction? Well, depending upon your level of consciousness, you may pick something pretty lowdown, like saying, “When I get everything I want, then that’s the only time I’m happy.” But if you live in that long enough, you lose it. So let’s hope you have a higher consciousness where you realize, “You know what? I really don’t know what will make me completely content and happy, but if I pay attention to what does, I begin to see it.” And it has something to do — like that great mystery that Paul reveals about marries. Everything that God is asking you to live in, when it comes to a truth, is not just about yourself and God, but mostly about you and your neighbor, you and yourself. All of his commands, his commandments are about your relationship to God and your relationship to each other. So basically the wisdom that God wants to give you is the wisdom that will enable you to live in the world as it is, as he has created it, and it’s going to be a lot like a marriage. And a healthy marriage is when husbands love their wives as they do themselves; wives love their husbands as they do themselves. They’ll listen to each other. That’s what the word obey means, to each other, and they will grow from each other’s experiences. And they will be able somehow to feel that they are to each other something so valuable that you want to give back to it, because it’s constantly giving to you. That’s the ideal, to live in that kind of world. And so what Jesus is inviting us into is that kind of world, but then there’s something else he has to do for us.

To tell us there’s a world out there that’s truthful and, when we’re in it and living it, we’re going to be able to find all the gladness and all the joy we want, well, the problem is human beings have never been designed to be able to do that on their own. You’re not given that gift at birth. No, it had to be won for you. It had to be given to you, and so when Jesus is talking to his disciples in the gospel and he’s asking them, “Look, there are a lot of other ways to live out there. I know you have choices. I know you can turn away from me. I know the things I’m explaining to you are so tough.” He’d just been saying, “Eat my body, and drink my blood.” And they’re saying, “I don’t understand any of this.” So Jesus is talking to them as if they had the capacity to understand what he’s saying, and Jesus knew in his heart they couldn’t understand it yet. They couldn’t. They had to be given something, and the whole story of salvation history is what they’re given is given in this thing called redemption, Jesus dying on the cross and, through this death, somehow empowering human beings to see more than they ever could see, understand more than they could ever understand and be closer to their true nature than ever before. And when that happened at Pentecost, the disciples went from frightened young men that didn’t know quite what they believed and didn’t know quite how they could ever accomplish what they were going to do, if they were going to do it, and they weren’t sure they were going to do it, they were like the rest of us most of the time. And then redemption happened, and boom, they changed, and all of a sudden they saw it. They understood it, and their understanding was like a power of communication. Everybody understood everybody, because there was one truth everybody was immersed in. It’s the beauty of living in a community that is grounded in what is real and what is true, and the key is you’re living in a community where everyone is serving everyone else.

So there’s a line that I really want to focus on in this gospel, because it’s the one that I think may be most confusing to a lot of people. We’re talking about faith, believing in the truth of who you are and what will make you happy, and the point is that, in that very thing that you’ve been given, where do you get the conviction? Can you prove it? Do you have examples that are the opposite of it? Absolutely. So what Jesus is saying in this gospel is that God has to give you something that you don’t have, and if you don’t have it, you’ll not be able to comprehend and live what I’m asking you to live. So basically what he says, “No one can come to me unless the Father draws him.” Well, how does God draw you to him? He has this gift of redemption. What is redemption? The Spirit enters into us. What is the Spirit? Wisdom, understanding, knowledge. We have to have some core intuition. I’ll call it first in a negative way. We have to have some intuition that the things the world presents to us, power, control over people and all that stuff, as exciting and as interesting as all that is, it’s never going to work. How do you know that in your gut? Do you have to go through 1,000 experiences? I hope not. Collectively, whenever we go through a bunch of experiences as a human race, we grow, and we change. We evolve, but what I’m saying is there was something that happened at the time that Jesus died on the cross that lifted us to a higher level of a capacity to understand the mystery of what it is that finds — that gets us to the place we need to be, and it’s not by writing our own story. It’s not being the author of life. It’s not being autonomous.

Isn’t it interesting that the freedom we long for, that’s so core to our body, almost gets interpreted like, “Well, if we’re free to be who we want to be and who we need to be, we’re also free to decide what that is.” No. Yeah, you’re free to accept the journey toward that which brings wholeness only if you awaken yourselves and open yourselves to the reality of a gift that comes from God. Some people don’t call it God. They might call it an insight to what is real and what is true. Think about that: something given to you by God, through his death on the cross, that enables you to have in your core a compass that has the right direction branded in you. Now you have something to guide you, to take you, and what it’s going to take you on is a journey with a God who is not only inviting you into a place of wisdom and knowledge and therefore joy but is taking you on a journey where it’s going to take you — it’s going to require of you a deep conviction that the path is going to be challenging, and the key to getting through the path is trust — trust, belief, because belief is not just that God exists or the law exists. It’s I have within me — because of God I believe that I have within me the capacity to find what I need, what I want. I call that God’s presence. Most of us name it God. The reason we allow it is because we know that the intention of this God is that he will give us something that will guide us and give us this focus of where to go and where to find the things that we need. So belief is not just he exists, but he has a purpose in his existence. And it’s the answering into us, which is redemption, the possibility of God entering into us, living inside of us, guiding us on a regular basis. And you know what? The greatest thing that faith promises is not just that you’ll see this as a way of understanding it, but you will experience it — experience it. Until we feel the service of God living inside of us, giving us life, and that’s given to us in glimpses, it never really becomes quite as real as it’s intended to be.

So bottom line, we have to serve someone. So serve the God who has taken care of you, guided you, given you life, given you a destiny. If you believe all that, you’ll serve him without ever questioning it. And when you’re in that, you’re going to feel his service, but usually it starts, because we’re human, with him serving us first. Taste that and know it will never stop. That’s the gift of faith, so much more than just a flat, “I guess God does exist.” No, he lives in you and powers you, awakens you, and you’re a new person. Let us pray.

Father, we are weak. We are longing for your strength and your support, and that support comes in the form of awareness. Bless us with greater knowledge of who you are, how you work within us, the promises that you’ve made, the support you give us so we can see you as you are, believe in you as you are, and find the gladness that is our inheritance. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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1 Chronicles 15:3-4, 15-16; 16:1-2 | 1 Corinthians 15:54b-57 | Luke 11:27-28

Almighty, everliving God who assumed the immaculate Virgin Mary, the mother of God, body and soul into heavenly glory, grant, we pray, that always attentive to the things that are above, we may merit to be sharers of her glory. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

It’s rare that we interrupt a series of ordinary Sundays to bring a feast day, but when a major feast and, in our tradition of Roman Catholicism, one that you should basically gather together and ponder the meaning of it, meaning the times that we ask people to come together as an obligation to worship — so this is one of those days, and it’s a major feast throughout the world in circles that are Catholic. But the interesting thing about this feast is it focuses on one aspect of Mary, one that is not in scripture, and that is that, when she died, what happened? And the tradition is, since there’s never been a place where Mary’s tomb is — and you think about that. We have tombs for almost everyone else that knew Jesus at that time, but there’s not one for Jesus, and there’s not one for Mary. It makes some sense that there was something extraordinary about what happened to her when she died, and so the Catholic tradition is pondering just the logical things that make sense and the tradition that’s always been part of our faith. We come up with this matter of faith that Mary did not die a normal death and buried [sic], and then her soul went to heaven. No, for some strange, mysterious reason, she, like other people in scripture but most especially Jesus, somehow went from an existence here in this life into heaven, body and soul. Okay? Now, whether you believe that or not is kind of questioned. Some people don’t. Some people do. There’s no absolute proof for anything, even in scripture, but I don’t want to focus so much on that mystery of what happened to Mary at the time that she died. All we know is she’s alive, as we all are when we die, and of all the people in salvation history that God has had a relationship with, from all of them, from Adam and Eve to Noah, to Abraham, to Moses, to all the patriarchs and then the prophets, all these — the disciples, there’s not one human being that was ever chosen to take on the role that Mary took on, the role being that she would be impregnated with a seed of some form that created a man whose father was God, in a human being. So I want to focus just on that mystery and just go a little deeper into it with you, because I think it’s fascinating, because it says so much about who God is.

So I want you to just imaging God for a moment in your mind, and what is it that he wants in his relationship with humanity? He created a beautiful world, spectacular universe, and it seems, in the way we understand the stories that unfold, that he was very pleased with all that, but then there was something missing. And so he wanted to create human beings. He’d already created angels even before he created the world. So he had beings that were similar to him, like him, and then he created these incredible plants and animals and insects and birds and all that, and that gave him pleasure. Their very existence is so beautiful that, if you were the creator of those things, you’d have to sit back and say, “Wow, I did a really good job,” just like he did in the creation story. Everything he did was so very, very good. But he wanted something more. He wanted a relationship with something he created that would have the ability to choose him or not, called free will, and he wanted them not only to be able to make that choice, but to make that choice, he designed the world in such a way that the greatest thing he created, human beings, would be able to be cared for not just by other human beings or not God doing it from on high. But the thing about God’s plan is that he said, “I would like to partner with human beings, be like them, be with them, and I would like to ask them to let me be in them and let me use them, not in a way of I control them but in a freely, surrendered to partnership. And we would dwell together for all of our time on earth and then forever in heaven.”

To me it seems very boring, in a way, to imagine life is just nothing but the work of growing up and then the work of dealing with growing old and then all the tasks in between. Some of it’s great. Some of it’s fun. Some of it’s exciting. Some of it’s boring. There’s got to be something more, something that we’re here to accomplish, and that’s God’s plan. So unless you have a sense that you’re part of something really big and you’re not doing it on your own — you’re doing it in partnership with divinity, and divinity’s living inside of you. Well, that takes imagination. That takes a lot of, “Wow, could that really be going on?” So when you look at the way God reveals himself throughout history, you get a real good sense of how it is that we’re supposed to understand who he is. And the first thing he does after creating us and trying to nurture us into something more highly evolved than the way we were at the very beginning, he has this plan basically where he reveals slowly what he’s up to. And one of the first things he does is creates us. That’s one thing clear, and then he tries to guide us. And the way he figured he could guide us is create a family, a community called the Israelites, and he said, “Well, let me get you together as a community, and I’ll start guiding you.” And the whole story of that relationship with human beings, symbolized in his call of Abraham and the Israelite people, is a journey from slavery to freedom, okay? Slavery to freedom, that’s God’s interest in us. He wants to come into us and free us from slavery. Slavery from what? Well, what is it that God had to use in order to start us on a path of evolution, moving from a lower level of consciousness, where it’s all about us, to a higher level of consciousness, where it’s all about service and love and care for others? He had to deal with one major problem. Human beings need to be under some kind of obligation to follow a way of life that is in the right direction. So we had to be given something to guide us when we were not conscious enough of what our choices really would affect in other people. So what we have is the law.

So the first thing he gives us is the law. Before there was a law, there was no sin. So God gives the law, Ten Commandments, and that’s his food. That’s his gift to us, and we look at the Ten Commandments. They’re a description of who God is and what our relationship with God should be, first three commandments, and the other seven are all about how we should treat each other. It’s like a manual for living on this planet. And yet there’s an obligation to follow those things, and if we don’t follow them, since this comes from the authority of God, there’s punishment. And that’s the way it started. The law was holding you to a way of life. If you didn’t do it, you were punished, lost God’s favor, condemned, and so you were a slave of having to do something you didn’t choose to do out of fear that you’d be punished. That’s the slavery that the relationship with God, starting with the Israelite people, has been about from the very beginning. “I don’t want you to do what you should do, what you really want to do if you are in touch with who you really are — I don’t want you to do that because you have to or because you’re going to be punished. I want you to do it because you believe it is the best thing to do, that you’re enlightened, that you have a sense that, ‘This is my destiny, and it gives me joy and pleasure.’” So you have to get free of the slavery.

Now, I want to use an image that is major in the Old Testament, and Mary took over that image in the New Testament. It’s the ark of the covenant. Mary is the new ark of a new covenant. What’s the old covenant? The old covenant is based on the law — that was the nurturing thing about God — and the authority of God over the person who would break the law. Now, what was in the first ark of the covenant that the Israelites carried for 40 years in the desert? A jar of manna, an image of food from heaven. Jesus is the new food from heaven. The second was a rod, and the rod was Aaron’s rod, but the rod is a symbol of authority. A bishop carries a rod in our tradition. The Episcopal Church is the same and many churches. It’s a sign of authority, and the other thing in the arc was the law. Okay? So the nurturing law was there under the authority of God, all right? Now, Mary is the new ark, and imagine her as a symbol of what that ark was. It was made of wood, covered in gold, carried, placed in the center of the temple. Only certain people could go and be around it. It was considered resonating, radiating some kind of amazing spiritual power that human beings were not ever really able to go to other than the few Levites who were privileged to go in very seldom. So this divinity, the presence of divinity in the world was something that was basically kept from human beings because of their humanity and their brokenness and their sinfulness. So something had to change. We had to have a new ark, and the new ark of the covenant, the new presence of God is he’s inside of you, inside of me. And I think of Mary as a human being. She was like you and me. The thing we believe is, when she came into the world, she was uniquely kept from sin. So she had no original sin in her. Well, the only thing we know about the sinlessness of Mary, if you read her story in scripture, is she never doubted, never doubted God. She was confused by what he asked, and she was afraid of the ramifications of it. But even Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane had this problem with God the Father and said, “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this,” which I think is a great image of his humanity. And don’t take this too literally. What I’m saying is there is something in all of us human beings that resists whatever it is that God is asking. Mary never resisted. “Let it be done to me as you say.” Jesus eventually is saying, “Let it be done as it is written.” So Mary has this unique role of no resistance to the indwelling presence of God.

Here’s another thing to think about, which I think is fascinating. What would it be like to be her? What’s it like to think that God has placed, out of pure love, into your body something that makes a child? That makes sense to us in the way human beings procreate. The love that implies about God having for human beings is extraordinary. He didn’t enter into anything else like that. He is — his presence is everywhere, but in a certain way, when you think about it, God entering into Mary is something we should all think about, because as extraordinary as it is with that person, he’s doing the same thing for us, not as dramatically, but the image and the symbol is the same. He comes into you, and there’s new birth. And what is the new birth about? Well, take the image in the Old Testament of the manna and the commandments and the rod. The first covenant, we’re under the obligation of a law that we have to do, and the fear of failing is a great shadow of that whole system. It means that we live in a certain anxiety, and you’re never quite sure you follow the law well enough. And when you don’t, if you lose God’s favor, it’s pretty depressing. What if he comes into you with no, ever, desire to leave you, no matter how bad you are? That’s not in the old covenant at all, and that’s what he does. When he enters into Mary and does the thing he does, taking on all of our sins, he changes the human race into who Mary was when she entered the world, sinless, freed of all original sin, freed of everything. The relationship that God has with you and me in the new covenant that we tend not to move into as quickly as we should or as thoroughly as we should is so beautiful, because it said, “There’s nothing about you that will keep me from entering into you and being there and being willing to work with you and ask you to work with me. The only thing you have to do is have this quality of Mary.” “Okay, it doesn’t make any sense. Okay, I don’t understand. I don't know. If I start acting like this, everybody’s going to think I’m kind of nuts,” but she said, “Okay.” Simple, simple faith, that’s her gift, and if we just have that simple gift of faith the way she had it and can believe that God is living inside of us, like he was living inside of her, and the fruitfulness is not — we’re not going to have a baby, but we have a new person inside of us that’s born. What a gift, and what a shame to miss that in this great mystery and argue maybe about, “Well, did she really assume to heaven or not? Was she a virgin all the time or not?” Those are issues, okay, fine. I’m not saying they’re not issues to maybe think about, but that’s not the heart of the mystery. And the mystery is what transforms us, but not because it exists. We have this absolute childlike trust and faith that that thing that happened to Mary can happen to me, and I believe it with all my heart, and I want it to happen. And all I need is the gift of faith and a great imagination.

Father, your love for us is so beyond our imagining that it’s really hard for us to believe that you overlook the stupid and selfish things we do, but you say you do. And why can’t we just believe it? That’s the gift that we pray for at this prayer. Just please give us the kind of faith that oversees all kinds of normal, human feelings and trust in something that’s beyond anything we could have hoped for. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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1 Kings 19:4-8 | Ephesians 4:30—5:2 | John 6:41-51

Almighty, everliving God, who govern all things both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

This is the fourth Sunday in a row that we have gone back to the same image of the bread of life, and what’s beautiful about this image and why it’s worth going back to over and over again is because it’s talking about who is God in your life. Who is he in the sense of what is he there for. What is he accomplishing for you, or what is he demanding of you? Is there a comfort in that image of who God is, or is it a pressure, along with all other pressures, that just make life a little bit more complex and a little bit more stressful? Well, if you use the image of this God as he fully is, as he longs for you to see him is like bread, like food, like energy, the energy is given to you from this God directly into you as a way of giving you the ability to live the life that he’s called you to live. And the goal of religion is not to get you to live a certain way through a lot of discipline, rules and laws and judgments and threat of punishment but to engage in something that’s exciting and life-giving and, in a way, pleasurable, if I can say that. The life that God wants us to live is good, and if it’s filled with stress and anxiety, then something is really missing. Something is wrong.

So I want to take the character in the first reading and give you an explanation of his little story, because I think it so resonates with so many stories I’ve heard from other people about their relationship with God. And here’s the way it goes, Elijah. Elijah in this story has just had a profound experience. He’s been working with the followers of Baal, which is a false god. And there was a big confrontation between God, Yahweh, and the god of Baal, and it was set up by Elijah. And so there was this great contest to see which god was strongest, and the winner was definitely Yahweh. It had to do with Yahweh’s power coming down from heaven and igniting a fire that consumed this offering to God, and it was so dramatic and so powerful and so clear that this God, the God that Elijah taught, is the God, the most powerful God. And so you would have thought, “Wow, God has manifested himself in such a spectacular way. Everybody is going to believe in him.” Did you ever hear that experience of people who say, “When God has done something great and powerful for me, I believe in him. If things are not going very well, I’m not so sure he’s there,” that kind of oversimplification of the love that God has for you and for me is to take away our pain and our suffering? Well, the interesting part of this story is the people who had seen this great sign, did they turn to Yahweh? No, they turned against the messenger, and they decided they would kill Elijah. So instead of being the hero that changed everyone’s mind and opened them to a new image of God, it backfired. So he finds himself running for his life, but the thing that’s interesting about this moment in Elijah’s life is his depression. Maybe he’s always thought, “If I could just have some great miracle and I could prove to everyone that God is more powerful than anything else, they would all believe in me and my message.” It didn’t turn out that way for him in this scenario, and so instead of saying, “Well, that was their problem, and I know God has proven to me once again he is who he is,” no, he just said, “I’m so depressed. All I do — I just want to die. I want to end this whole life here. It’s just too frustrating.” And an angel comes and starts feeding him and said, “You’ve got to take a journey. You’ve got to process all of this. You’ve got to integrate it into who you are and understand it.” That image of taking a journey is so big in scripture. It means pondering, wondering, seeking truth. And so he ends up on a mount, Mount Horeb, which is also Mount Sinai, and he gets in a cave. And in the cave, you know the story. You’ll remember it, that he goes to the face of the cave, opening of the cave, and looks out and asks for God to make himself shown to him. And there’s a big earthquake, and then there’s fire, and there’s storms and all of these spectacular signs of God in the world. And then the revelation is then came a gentle, gentle, tiny whisper, and the point of the story is there, that’s where God is, not in the spectacular, not in the dramatic but in some kind of whisper. When somebody whispers to you, there’s a form of some kind of intimacy. They lean over and cup their hand and give you a message that’s just for you. What a beautiful image of who God longs to be in your life and in mine.

So what we have in this story then is an image of what it is that we need to understand that happens to us when we open ourselves to the reality of who God really is and we drink of that, and that becomes food, and the food changes us. But it doesn’t change the world that much, meaning if I’m looking for signs from God that show his goodness to me by an image I have of what that means, that would mean that God would take away something that’s awful for me. Say I have lost someone or something and it’s gone, and I want it back. I want it healed. I want it found. I say, “God do this, because you said you will help me in any way you can, and you’re so powerful.” And nothing happens. Then there’s this sort of crisis. “Well, God doesn’t answer my prayers. So why do I mess with him?” Especially if it’s something that’s so crucial to you. Why doesn’t he answer it? Why doesn’t he fix things for us? Because that would make him into some kind of figure that we would use, much like money in the bank, much like a power. It would go to our head. It would be egocentric. There’s so many problems if you have God’s ear and God will do whatever you ask him to do, take care of all the pain in you and other people’s lives. It’s just a bad relationship. So what are you expecting from him? What is it you think that God will give you when you turn to him and say, “I need your help”? Isn’t it interesting that one of the things that we do and are able to do, when it comes to some crisis or something, there’s some way in which you go through a cycle of grieving and mourning, and it moves you from — the famous Kubler-Ross things about — you go from denial to anger to bargaining to some kind of acceptance and finally forgiveness. Well, that process of integrating whatever is happening to you into your story, into your process of becoming who God wants you to be, going through that process, that’s the miracle. That’s the miracle of God working in your life, that he is going to be there to be the source of getting you through something, and then going through it is the journey that gets you to the insight that you couldn’t have without that pain. It’s a very different way of imagining God working with you, in you, through you.

Then I was thinking about depression, and the thing in this story that was fascinating to me is Elijah gets really depressed after having this spectacular success. And the thing that’s interesting about that is depression is a loss of a sense of your own value, your own dignity, your own worth. It’s like whatever it is in you that gives you enthusiasm, excitement, confidence, excitement about a process that you might be going through, something that you’re going to be attaining that’s hard, but you know when you get it, it’s going to be worth all the pain — all of that you might call enthusiasm, opposite of depression, depression, the loss of a sense of value, worth. Enthusiasm, I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, which I love to do, and it’s such a fascinating word. Enthusiasm means being possessed by God — possessed by God, entheos, in God. My preaching, my teaching has always been focused somehow on this very powerful mystery of what does it mean to believe in God beyond simply that he exists but believe that he is in you, with you, as intimate as the one who whispers secrets to you? And when he’s in you and doing that, he’s doing this with an indication and a conviction that he wants us to feel that this is exciting work. This is amazing work. This is something that’s going to bring you and people around you some kind of inner worth and inner value, and so I was just so interested in thinking, all right, the food that God gives you, this bread of life, is not ever to be thought of as a miraculous removal of pain or fixing a broken problem, fixing a problem, that something’s broken. No, it has something much more to do with engaging you in a process where there’s an inner well-being, a conviction that all of this that’s going on, as crazy and as difficult as it is, is for you. And then when you digest it, take it in and hold it with this conviction that there is this miraculous part of you that’s called divinity that has a way of dealing with pain and suffering that brings not depression or discouragement or a feeling that we’re not favored by God, just the opposite, that this is really a unique gift. And it’s designed in the most perfect way for me to engage in it so that I am finding something. Now, in the process of waiting to find it, what sustains you on that long journey? Not your own capacity of, “I can do this, my own drive, my own will.” No, it has to be this mysterious thing called bread of life, grace, a power that’s not yours, not mine but comes to us.

So I know a lot of people that believe in God. They’ll tell me, “Yeah, I believe there’s God.” And I say, “Well, kind of like, what are y’all doing together now?” You ask them some kind of intimate question like, “How is it working?” And they go like, “No —” My favorite line is people say, “Well, I don’t have a personal relationship with him. Jesus had that, and that’s not my destiny,” or they have some kind of oversimplified notion of the limitations of God, as if he’s like us and say, “Well, he’s too busy. He’s not interested in just my little problems.” God, is he interested in your little problems? They’re his problems, given to you by him for a purpose that gets you to a place that he knows you want to be and that he wants you to be, because he created it for you, and it’s going to be really, really wonderful but not in that kind of euphoric, everything is perfect sense but in this kind of calm, easy conviction that every morning you wake up, and you feel pretty good. And when you get in the daily grind of things, there is somehow a kind of unconscious sense that all of this is going to be fine. There’s something I’m looking forward to, but even in the process of doing the ordinary, there’s something in it that just feels like I’m being fed, not starved, not neglected and certainly, certainly not judged. How do we ever turn around this image of this God who is fully revealed by the time we get to the point of Jesus’ ascension into heaven? How do we ever fall back to those old images in the Old Testament of a God who is judgmental and demanding and upset and ready to crush those who don’t do what he says? But that’s sort of in there if we’re not careful, and it leads to depression, and what is God’s greatest gift? It’s found in that New Testament beautiful story about someone like you, like me witnessing what it’s like to be infused with food, and we can do the most amazing things, mostly find peace in the midst of stress and tension.

Father, you have made us for joy and for peace and for a sense of fullness in the midst of all things that might rob us of these great gifts. Bless us with a faith in you that understands the process you’ve asked us to go through with you so we never feel that sense of alienation from whatever it is that we need to find that inner peace. So bless us with that food that is always from you to us. It’s not within our capacity to do it, and when we try on our own, we fail. So let us drink of your presence and find that peace. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15 | Ephesians 4:17, 20-24 | John 6:24-35

Almighty, everliving God who govern all things both in heaven and in earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

We’re continuing the same theme that we started last week, the image of the bread of life. Jesus is the bread of life. So what I’m praying I can do in this homily is open your minds, your hearts to a way in which God has intended us to live in this world with him. We’re not here to please him. We’re not here to be tested by him. We’re not here just to obey his rules and laws and prove that we are willing to surrender our wills to his. No, no. He wants partnership. He wants us to be in him and he in us, and we together work to engage in whatever this mysterious thing is that is called life.

Now, this first reading is a reminder, and it’s a great image of what we’re here to accomplish. The Israelites found themselves in a very negative position. They were slaves, slaves to something outside of themselves. They were having to do what they were told to do and couldn’t be who they were. Just keep that in mind, that image of human beings living in a world of authority is not what we’re intended to live in, and so there’s this image of God intervening in their life and calling Moses to lead these people from this place of slavery to a place of freedom, a land of milk and honey, a place of wonder and beauty. That’s a very strong way for you to understand what we’re here on this planet to do. We’re here as participants in a process of all of us together moving to a place of greater fullness, and so in that story, we can see that there is a part of human nature that doesn’t like to go through a process of transformation that demands a loss of certain levels of comfort and well-being. I think it’s fascinating that even though they perhaps didn’t remember what it was like to be in an environment where they were slaves, they felt that the accommodations in this process of moving to a new place was unacceptable. “We don’t like the food. We don’t like it. We don’t like living this way. We want to go back. Even though it was imperfect, it was more comfortable.” That image of we want comfort is so big in each of us, and so what’s wonderful about this story is we see something in God that is, in a way, a sign of patience and a sign of compassion. He listens to the Israelites, who are really complaining about the food. So he said, “All right, I’ll feed you. Don’t worry about it. I will make sure you have some food.” And so Moses is the one that proclaims to everyone that they will then be fed by God with this miraculous, mysterious hoarfrost on grass in the morning, and then quail will be plentiful in the evening. So they were fed for a very long time. That whole journey was 40 years in the desert, and then they were to get to this new land, this new place. And the new place is, of course, the new life that God promises us when he himself entered into the world to guide us. So you have this image that is a strong image of what life on this planet is for. It is about a journey from one place to another, and the journey is not necessarily comfortable. It’s painful and difficult.

Now let’s go to St. Paul. St. Paul says something really interesting about what it is that we are here to become, and he says we have to become something different. And so he says, “The work of God in your life and in mine is to bring us into a place where we’re renewed in spirit and understanding. We put on a new self-created in God that’s whole and complete, living in the truth.” So let’s just talk about this new creation, this new self. It’s different than the old self, and the old self could be described as a lower level of consciousness where we’re always basically longing for the most simple, primitive needs. “Give me a couch. Give me a beer. Give me a football game,” whatever or whatever it is. We love comfort, but there’s a new self in us that needs to be born of spirit, and it has a different disposition about how we are to live in this world. And so we have it in the gospel, the secret, part of the secret.

All right, now let’s go to where the crowds are. The crowds around Jesus were amazing, and the life of Jesus is amazing, and the one thing about his life that is both confusing and wonderful and challenging for us to understand completely is his miracles. And you have to understand what those miracles are for, because the shadow of misunderstanding the miracles that Jesus performed — and he’s saying, “Anything I did, you can do.” We may say, “Oh, well then, if God is in me and I’m a new person in God and I believe that Jesus was filled with divinity and that that’s the symbol of who we are —” The sign that Jesus gave us was this image of a human being filled with divinity. That’s why the work of God, the work of God described in the scriptures today is, in the words of Jesus, is we believe in the one who sent him. When you believe in someone — we tend to think of belief as just — I believe in God. That means he exists. Well, it’s pretty hard to imagine the world without some kind of intelligence when you understand how the world works, but nevertheless, there is something important about believing that God exists. But believing in someone, if somebody says, “I believe in you,” they don’t mean, “I believe you’re alive and standing in front of me.” They say, “I believe in you means I trust in you. I feel something good in you. I would trust you with my needs and wants. I believe in you.” Well, if the work of God is believing that he came and lived in Jesus and that was the model of the new self that we were going to live in in the New Testament, then we’re getting close to the truth. We are gifted, through this mysterious thing called redemption, which was Jesus somehow, as a human being struggling with all the things that he wanted to do, had to face the fact that it wasn’t going to turn out the way he wanted, and he was going to have to endure the humiliation of failure. And he accepted the suffering that that entailed. He accepted the role that God gave him, and it was the most painful thing he could have endured. And when he did it, there was an explosion of life within him, and that’s our model. Jesus is the model of surrendering to the way things are, and yet we make him the model of a world that he created for us where he says, “I’m in the world with you,” and we put on the emphasis on Jesus. “Jesus did this for me.” But just like the people said about Moses — they said, “Moses gave us bread from heaven. Why can’t you do these miracles for us?” And Jesus said, “No, Moses didn’t give you the bread from heaven. God gave you the bread from heaven through Moses.” Jesus the man is saying, “I am not the source of what I can do for you. God in me is doing it. So my power as a human is just like your power as a human. We’re limited. We can’t do that much that we need to do in order to engage in the world in the way it is, a place of growth, change and development.”

So what are we learning? This God, who entered into a man who’s the model of who we are, performed marvelous miracles, and he said we can do the same thing. So what do you do when something happens to you that’s painful and difficult, or worse, what do you do when somebody you love deeply is going through something really painful and difficult, a disease that will take their life, a struggle with addiction? How is it that we’re to imagine this power of God flowing through me like it flowed through Jesus, doing the work that Jesus showed us we can do? Well, the mistake we make is we think that the miracles of Jesus were to always remove suffering. They did remove some suffering, but what are the miracles about? They’re about this mysterious way in which God is saying, “I came into the world to empower human beings to be all that they’re intended to be.” The healings of Jesus were about physical healings. Eyes that couldn’t see can now see. Ears that couldn’t hear can hear. Mouths that couldn’t speak can speak. Arms that couldn’t work now work. Legs couldn’t move. So it’s all about being fully alive and fully human and being open to the truth, seeing what’s real. “Open my eyes, God. Let me see who I am and what I’m here for.” That’s the miracle. He also drove out demons. It’s interesting that in John’s gospel, he never mentions the driving out of demons, because it’s as if he saw that as something a little different, but John wanted us to know, in his gospel, who he is, who God is, who Jesus is, what it’s like for a human to be filled with divinity, because that’s our task. And if — we think that we have this divinity in us to be able then to accomplish something that isn’t really what Jesus did in his miracles, and we think it’s about taking away suffering. And what if suffering is not to be taken away? If we look at the crucifixion of Jesus, then if suffering is to be taken away, the death of Jesus makes no sense at all. If he’d have trusted more in the Father, the Father would have been able to allow him to conquer everything, destroy all those enemies. And Jesus could have. He said God could do that, but that’s not God’s will. God doesn’t want to be in you and in me, empowering us to be the instrument that, when I’m suffering or somebody else is, he gives me the power to take away the suffering. What would happen to us? We wouldn’t grow. We wouldn’t change. We wouldn’t become who we’re intended to be. So when you pray for yourself or for someone else, asking God to be inside of you, giving you the wisdom you need to be able to make this move in a direction that creates life in me and in everyone around us who knows this story, we’re not asking for removal of the pain, that we long for that, but that the pain will do its work. And the work will be finished, and we’ll surrender to it. And when the work is done, the pain stops. So the pain goes away when we’ve learned what the pain is there for. That’s a very different way to deal with these issues of suffering and the miracle of God’s giving us power to be in charge. If God is in charge of the world, that means he can make it all happen a certain way. Well, he is, in that sense, in charge, but he isn’t going to change the way the world is and the way it’s designed because we don’t want to be uncomfortable or we don’t want to be in pain.

It’s almost like saying, and this is naive, but if we just had enough health, enough money, enough talent, then whatever we’d do would be so successful. We’d just soar into fullness and greatness. Do you know anybody that’s ever had a lot of money or just could do anything or have super success in everything? Have you ever spent time with them? They’re obnoxious. They’re self-centered. They’re self-consumed. I want to be with somebody that knows what it’s like to be changed by suffering and has wisdom and truth inside of them, and they look at me, and they say, “I want to be there with you in your suffering, because I know it will bring you to a new place.” And then you wait, trusting, believing that, when you have turned to God and given him the ability to work through you, dealing with yourself or dealing with somebody else, you will be a powerful agent in moving that person to the place the pain is intending them to be, and it will be less pain. So in a sense, you are healing them in a way that means less suffering, but the most important thing you’ve got to have in your heart is this is in God’s hands, and he will make this work. And we’ll look back on this and smile and say, “Without this, I could never be who I am.”

Father, your presence is your greatest gift to us, that you dwell within us, creating a new person, a new self, and in that presence of you within us, we find the most important gifts we receive is wisdom, understanding, compassion, empathy for the plan that you have for the world. And the honor that you’ve given us to be a part of that unfolding is beyond our imagining. So bless us with the kind of faith that truly opens our hearts so that we take on and become your heart, your compassion, your love, and let us share that with the people around us that we love, that we’re called to be there for. And when we feel the power of this grace flowing through us, give us the confidence that it is a gift, never us alone, always with you, always in you, always because of you. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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2 Kings 4:42-44 | Ephesians 4:1-6 | John 6:1-15

Almighty, everliving God who govern all things, both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

I mentioned to you that we’re reading scripture from the year of Mark, but as you know, Mark’s gospel is the shortest of all the gospels, and there really isn’t enough in it to fulfill all the Sundays of ordinary time, which is about 33, 34 Sundays. So today we have John’s gospel, and I think it’s worth noting how different John’s gospel is than Mark and Matthew and Luke, because those first three are the ones we call the synoptic gospels, and they’re very similar. And one of the things that’s similar about them is they basically are reflections of those who witnessed the actions of Jesus. So what you find in the synoptic gospel is a great indication and a history of what Jesus did, but John’s gospel is different. It’s not focused so much on what Jesus did but who Jesus is. Who he is in John’s gospel is such a strong, clear message that this Jesus is God incarnate. He’s God.

Now, we know that he was man and God, but if you work from the man position, you learn a lot about what it means to be human and the beauty and the dignity of humanity. But also if you focus, and I don’t really do this that much myself personally, but if you really focus on Jesus as God, then you have a lot to learn about who God is in this figure Jesus. And when the disciples would ask, “Show us the Father. Who’s the Father? What does he do?” And Jesus would look at his disciples with that piercing look that he must have had and say, “Hey, you see me? You’re looking at me; you’re looking at the Father.” So when John starts his gospel, he goes back to the very beginning and says, “At the very beginning of time, Jesus was there. Well, how is that, that Jesus existed for all time? Well, the part of Jesus that existed for all time was his divinity, because Jesus’ divinity is God. So it’s like saying — when John’s gospel says that Jesus was there at the beginning, he’s making another statement subtly that this Jesus is the best reflection we have of who God is. So yes, God was there at the beginning of creation. So that meant Jesus, the divinity in Jesus was there, but there’s this mystery. The divinity of Jesus was so integrated into his humanity that it was one. So let’s just go back to staying with this one image. When we see Jesus recorded in this gospel, we’re looking at God and how he works in the world today in your life and in my life.

One of the other things about John’s gospel that’s interesting is how many different ways in which John records the actions of Jesus, because they’re not the same things that we find in the other synoptics. There’s many miracles that John never mentions. Particularly the one that’s shocking, in a way, is he doesn’t mention the Last Supper in terms of the Eucharist. You remember it’s the Last Supper because of the washing of the feet, and he also has some other things that are left out that seem very important, like driving out demons. John never mentions in his gospel that Jesus drove demons out of people. But what did he stress? Well, the interesting thing is the stressing in this particular gospel, which is so important, is the feeding of the 5,000. I found this out, and I never knew this, never realized it, but the only miracle that’s in every one of the four gospels is this miracle, the feeding of the 5,000. So there must be something in this particular image of God feeding people that is crucial to our understanding the relationship we have with God.

If you look back to the Old Testament, you see the image of God feeding people when he gathered the Israelite people together, took them out of slavery, into freedom, and he was — on this journey, the one thing that was clear that he had to do, as well as direct them, is to feed them. And the one thing that they didn’t like and they complained about the most was the food. “We don’t want this food. We’re tired of this food. We want to go back to slavery where we had the right food.” So interesting, people love food, but he was there feeding them. Then he had, in this first gospel from the book of the prophet Elisha, you’ll see — it’s from 2 Kings, but basically you’re seeing, again, the image is there. The prophet calls upon someone to feed the people, and they say, “There’s not enough,” and “Yes, there’s enough. Stop thinking there’s not enough.”

So what is this miracle all about? Why is it so important? Well, let’s start with an image that I like to focus on, and that’s the image that John uses as to who Jesus is. He’s divinity, but he has terms that he uses, light of the world. He is the bread of life, and over and over in John’s gospel, he keeps talking about what God has come into the world to give to you is life — life. Well, what’s he talking about? What is this light and life? Well, it’s more than existence. It’s enlightenment, I think. It’s living with a more clear consciousness of what’s going on in our relationship with God, and it’s about life. Life is this wonderful gift that God gives us that we let slip through our fingers, because we get caught up in anxiety and worry and needing certain things to be a certain way, and we lose any sense of well-being and of peace. I know you, like me, live in a lot of anxiety. It’s so interesting to me that this anxiety that we have is often based on a kind of fear that is not really very logical. Like for example — this may be a too personal example, but whenever I’m doing something and I fear that I might be making a mistake or saying something that’s offensive to someone or not showing up when I promised I would or making some kind of mistake, I feel it physically in my gut. It’s a dread that’s right there, like, “Oh, my God. I didn’t do what I was supposed to do.” And when I have that feeling that I’m out of sync with what I’m supposed to do, there is this dread, anxiety. And when I think about life, when I think about all the things that you have on your plate and I have on my plate, all the responsibilities we have, and then you add to those the responsibilities that we feel our religion puts on us — that we should have a certain way of being in the world and helping people and being good to people — with all that responsibility, it’s so easy to see that there would be a way at times we would say, “I’m not enough. I can’t do this. I’m always failing.” There it is. “I’m not enough.”

Nothing is more important than you believing, and I need to believe more that I’m not enough to do what it is that God has called me to do in this world. I’m not talking now about keeping appointments or making a mistake. I’m talking about the plan of God, what we’re here to accomplish, and what is that that we’re here to accomplish? I don't know. I have no clear indication of what it means that I am living in God’s will, accomplishing all the things he wants me to do for me and for the people around me and all that. But I do know that it exists. There is a plan, and when I’m in sync with that plan, when I feel like I’m part of it and it’s flowing the way it should, there’s a peaceful feeling. But when I don’t have it, when there’s darkness, when there’s a misstep or things like that, that’s when I feel like I’m not going to make it. All right, if it’s natural and healthy for you to believe that you’re not going to make it, then what do we need? We need someone to be there with us, right?

So what is this image of Jesus, i.e. God, being in your life and in my life to be there to enlighten you, to show you the way and also at the same time to bring you this kind of inner peace and well-being and know that you’re safe and that everything is all right? So if that’s there, then why doesn’t God just give it to us, and then we have it? I’m not ever worried or anything like that. It doesn’t work that way. This is really important that I say this slowly, and I hope that you can follow me. When God in Jesus is present, he is feeding you in the moment — in the moment. He’s not going to give you all the energy, all the sustenance you need before you go into something difficult and you know you’re prepared for it, no matter what happens, you can handle it. No, it’s in the moment — in the moment, and so that’s why in John’s gospel there’s something so unique and so interesting. The way John tells the story is different than the way the story’s told in the synoptics, and there’s a very interesting change. It’s the same except for one crucial moment. Who distributes the food to the people that are hungry in Matthew, Mark and Luke? Jesus gives the food to the disciples and says to the disciples, “Give this to the people.” In John’s gospel, it’s Jesus that gives the food to everyone. Now, 5,000 people and one person is handing out the food — come on. Don’t get caught up in the logistics of that. It’s like there’s this little thing that’s in our minds, little, a few pieces of fish and a little bread, and when it’s in the hands of this life force, this presence of God in our life — Jesus represents that. He is God in that moment. He gives exactly to us what we need at that moment — at that moment, and then there is a kind of well-being in the midst of everything. No matter how dark or how hard or how unwelcome or whatever, there’s a way of feeling that everything is okay. Everything is as it must be. That is the most wonderful feeling, and it’s founded in having faith in who Jesus is and what he does. And what he does is he represents — no, he is the presence of God giving us all that we need in that moment.

So that means that our conviction, our faith is that there’s nothing that we won’t be able to handle. Now, what does that mean? There’s nothing we can’t accomplish or fix or improve upon? No, it means whatever it is, there’s a grace in the moment that you and I have that we can say, “It’s all right. It’s all right.” When I’ve been with people who are close to death and they’re struggling constantly to fight this thing that looks like it’s going to take their life away, even though it’s a new birth coming into their life, but they’re resisting, they’re resisting, they’re resisting. And I can always tell you, if I go to visit that person toward the end of their life, I’ll walk in one day, and all of a sudden they look ten years younger. They have a face that looks like it’s at peace, and I talk to them, and they say something like, “Hey, whatever happens is okay. I’m fine. I’ll be okay.” That’s faith in action when this person has the sense that this grace that is there, called the presence of divinity, resonating life into you at the moment when you need it the most, that key right there is the message of John’s gospel. God is in your life. He knows everything that’s happening to you. He knows what’s coming before you know it. Does he give you all the strength and all the power that you need to handle everything? If he did that, if he gave us all the power and we were going around saying, “No matter what happens, I can handle it,” we’d be monsters, ego monsters, because we’d feel like we don’t need anybody. No, we need divinity like we need food, air, water, and without it, we lose something that’s crucial in terms of engaging in this thing, this beautiful thing he’s given us, his life.

I struggle with that so much, to be able to say, “Whatever happens is fine.” And every time I go into a dread and a feeling of failure and I just taste that awful feeling that is just like, I don't know, shame, anger, fear, because I’m not good enough, he’s smiling at me and saying, “No, you are good enough. You’re good enough in your imperfection and your weakness. You’re good enough, because I’m right here in that moment to give you what you need, and that’s my joy. That’s my passion, to be light and life for you.” So we need to believe in it and trust in it. It’s essential to everything that we long for when it comes to the kingdom of God.

Father, your promise — presence that we learn about in this man, God, Jesus is a constant, steady source of all that we need to endure, engage and be a part of the plan that you’ve given us in this life. So bless us with this confidence and his gifts, and let us trust, when we even feel normally that we can’t do it, that’s fine. But just feed us also with the conviction that, with you, with God, with him, we can do all things. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Jeremiah 23:1-6 | Ephesians 2:13-18 | Mark 6:30-34

Show favor, O Lord, to your servants, and mercifully increase the gifts of your grace that, made fervent in hope, faith and charity, we might be ever watchful in keeping your commands. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

I mentioned two weeks ago that I am recording these programs and sending them to WRR from Tuscany, and yesterday I had an opportunity to go to a place that I love dearly. It’s the monastery of La Verne, about a 45-minute drive from where I stay. And when I got there, there’s still obviously in Italy, or maybe not so obviously to you, but there’s a lot more restrictions still in place because of COVID. I remember reading a statement on the interests of the church at La Verne where it said tourists are not welcome to join us for the liturgies, and it just was oh, ouch. And then there are different places that I like to go and sit, and often the door would be there. A kneeler would be in front of the door, and you could kneel and look into the room, but you couldn’t go into the room. It was weird, and it just felt very strange that this place I love so much had so many regulations and rules about where you could go.

And then I prayed that, in my walk toward the chapel that I love the most, the chapel that’s built on the very spot where Francis received the stigmata, it was open. Instead of the many choir stalls that are there, they were all roped off, and just six seats were placed in the chapel. So a maximum of six people could be there, and I got in and sat, and maybe one or two other people came in. So I was able to be in that spot, and I remember just sitting there feeling, I don't know, disoriented, I guess, a little bit. And I thought, “Well, I’ll be here, and I’ll hear Francis’ voice, and it’ll be wonderful.” I opened my heart to him, and I believe in his ability to be an instrument of bringing anyone that wants to get closer to God closer to him. But I didn’t feel or sense anything much, so I just sat in silence. And that was yesterday, and now today I’m getting ready to do this homily. And I know that one of the things about Francis is he had almost a fixation with the crucifix. He loved it. He was one that made it famous to — or made it a custom rather to have a crucifix hanging in your house. That was he, and when Cimabue would paint crucifixes, he would often have St. Francis at the feet of the crucifix, kissing Jesus at the — well, kissing his feet at the — and so he had this love of the crucifix.

And then I get ready to give this homily, and all of a sudden, this crucifixion is the main theme, it seems to me, of this set of readings. And its powerful effect was to change everything. The crucifixion changed everything, and the way its described in this set of readings is there was, at times, two separate things. There was divinity over here and humanity over here, and there was this long history of struggle between the two and animosity and separation and isolation, mostly because of judgment. And when you look back at the Old Testament, it’s really frightening, in a sense, the way you see God treating people. He’s this all-loving, kind, gentle God, but that’s really not his history in the Old Testament. He’s, in many ways, very aggressive. For example, when he was upset that the Egyptian had made slaves of his people and he was trying to get them to release them and he sent all these horrible plagues to them, but the one that was just so horrific, I thought, was the — imagine, the firstborn of every family in that entire country, or that city rather, was murdered one night by God. And think of the pain and suffering in people because God had killed their prize child, and God did that and said, “Okay, now you’re free to go. Let’s go. We’re not going to kill your children.” What? That’s the God we believe in? Well, it’s the God that revealed himself then. It’s the God that was needed in the Israelite people then, but that’s not the fullness of who he is. We don’t get the fullness of who he is until the New Testament, and so it’s interesting. Always in the Old Testament, even through the lives of the prophets and all, there’s always this tension between what the prophets demand and what the people are willing to do. And finally, if they don’t do it, they get punished, and then they change their patterns. It’s not a harmonious gathering of God and his people and guiding them into a new life. No, he demands, and if you don’t do it, he punishes. And that’s the way God first began to reveal who he is to his people, and what it did, it divided his people, Jew and Gentile. Jews were those who followed God. Gentiles were non-Jews, and so at the height of say, about the time that Jesus was coming into the world, there was a great division because of who God is. He had his people that he loved and the other people that he didn’t love, and the people that loved God and God loved them, they were told basically, by their rules and regulations, they shouldn’t mess with the other people. So this demanding, restrictive God created separation, and it’s true.

Think about it. Anybody that gets in a position of power and decides they’re going to make the rules and regulations for how people are going to act, they’re going to be dividing the group between those who do it and those who don’t, the good guys, the bad guys. So it had to change. It had to change. And how did it change? The crucifixion. That’s what changed it. It’s amazing when you think about it. This one act that happened made a radical change, so radical that we heard in the scriptures today that all of a sudden, at that moment when Christ died on the cross, all things were made one. No more separation, no more good guy/bad guy, person you love/person you hate. All that was to go away, because something was reconciled at that moment. And what was it that was reconciled? What I’m about to tell you I’ve never thought of before, but I want to use the word crucifixion for a moment, and it comes from the same word of crucible. You know what a crucible is. It’s a ceramic bowl of some kind in which two metals are put under extreme heat, and they somehow meld together. They don’t work together well except under this great stress and turmoil of the heat, and when they cool, when the tension is over, there’s this stronger, new material that can do things better than it could before. The two things that become one become stronger because of their union. So what was coming together on the cross? Humanity and divinity. What was the division? The demanding God and the weak, frail humanity, and how are these two going to get together? How are they going to work together? And what it is, it happened in a person, in Jesus. What he had to do, when he was asked to go through this powerful experience of crucifixion, it wasn’t — he wasn’t afraid of it because of the pain that was involved in it, but it must have been horribly painful. No, but the agony in the garden, it was not over the pain that he thought he might be coming — that might be engaged in this action, but no, it was, “Father, this is not the plan. This is not what I want. Why are you asking me to give in to evil? Why are you asking me to turn my life, all my work, everything I’m trying to do to save the world — you’re asking me to give in to all my enemies and let them destroy me? You’re asking me to surrender all my energy and all my work and all my desire for the way it’s written? I can’t. Please, no. My human nature is such I want this, because I want so badly to do what changes the world, and I know I can do it if I could just teach them. Let me teach them. Don’t destroy me at this point. I’m just getting started, three years.” And God said, “No, no. You have to do this. You have to do this. This is the way it’s written. I want you to do this.”

What is God then? What’s his part of this struggle? Well, the part of God’s struggle in this crucifixion, what’s going to have to change in God is his demanding nature where he’s demanding that people do what they’re called to do before he will love them. He’s got to give that up. Now, that sounds weird. It’s not that he has to change, but what he is now ready to do is reveal the part of him that was hidden in the beginning, that he is a lover, and he does not want to punish. And so he, God the Father, is going through this transformation of coming out of this crucifixion with a heart that’s always been there but is finally fully, fully revealed. He is now the lover that does nothing but forgive faults. Nothing that you do, no evil action that you would ever come up with that would break the laws of what God tells you, you must do, none of that will ever separate you from his love. Now, think about that. It wasn’t so much that God had to go through a painful experience. That doesn’t fit, but in this moment, when humanity was surrendering to the way that God has created the world, and the way that God has created the world is now revealed in his loving, forgiving nature, human beings are now capable of living in that kind of relationship. They’ve evolved enough to live in a relationship with God where he never punishes — never punishes. Where’s punishment come from? It’s the result of all our stupid, short-sighted decisions, but God is revealing himself fully as he is. And this is the strongest, most important thing I think you can say, because we hang on to that old image of God. And we who believe in him feel justified when we live in an Old Testament way as God did, and so when somebody does something evil to us, we want to do something evil back to them. And that creates division and separation and isolation, and that’s the antithesis of what the crucifixion was intended to create, no longer any division. All is one. There’s unity. There’s acceptance. There’s forgiveness. There’s compassion. There’s empathy.

I don't know why, when you think of the way religion works — I love that image in the first reading when there was a complaint against the bad shepherds, and one of the symbols that the shepherds weren’t very effective is that everybody was afraid. They were kind of broken. Obviously somehow these were demanding shepherds that didn’t care for their flock at all. They just demanded performance, and that’s a shadow of religion. It’s a shadow of love. If I love you, I want you to be who I want you to be, and if you don’t do what I tell you or become who I want you to be, I will punish you by separating myself from you. I’ll cut you off. That’s all part of that old, old system, and unless we can embrace the new, this incredible thing that you see so beautifully represented in Jesus who, when he sees his flock, even though he’s exhausted in the gospel, he can’t help but help them.

Jesus is God, and he’s revealing God for the first time fully for who he is, and it had to be in this crucible moment when you’d have a sense of these two powerful forces, forces of perfection, of divinity and the weakness of humanity. And Jesus, the thing about Jesus that’s so hard for us to remember, when you look at the life of Jesus, he was not a perfect male figure as a good Jew. He lost his temper with the people in authority. He ranted and raved about things, and most especially he showed his humanity when he didn’t want to do what God had planned for him to do. When you have this image of Jesus as the perfect God demanding perfection of people, that just doesn’t exist in reality. He’s never been a perfect human, performing everything just the way God wanted. In fact, it’s pretty clear that, when finally God said, “This is what I’m going to ask you to do. I want you to give up every shred of pride and self-worth that you have in your work and let me expose you to the world as a failure. Trust me. If you can do that, if you can endure that, you can die, that egocentric part of you. You will do that for all of humanity.” I don't know how that works when one man can do it for everyone, but that’s what happened. He died to his ego. He died to that need to be successful. He died to all of that for all of us, which means we have the capacity to do it. It doesn’t mean we’re going to do it automatically, but we have the capacity to do it. What an incredible moment in history.

No wonder Francis was overwhelmed by it when he could see what was happening in that moment was the end of all the division and separation that rules and regulations and judgment create in the world. And that’s why he was just such a loving, loving figure. In fact, many people say that the theology of Francis is nothing really that new. It’s not unique in some special way. It’s the gospel. It’s just simple gospel truth, good news. We humans, as we are, are 1,000 percent accepted by God just as we are, and this God of ours, who in the past has been so demanding and, in some ways, harsh and cruel on those who don’t do what they’re supposed to do, he’s no longer in that mode anymore. He had to be for that time, but now he’s what Francis became. To the integration of humanity and divinity in that moment, the two becoming one united everything in the world. What an amazing moment. No wonder Francis knelt at the crucifix and just cried over what was done for him, for those that he loved, and I pray what’s been done we too can see what’s been done for us and know that the world that is divided between good and bad, right and wrong, that’s all an illusion. It’s been destroyed by the integration of these two most beautiful, made-for-each-other experiences, to be both living in divinity, God in me, and living in myself fully as I am.

Father, we struggle with our own faults, with the faults of others.We struggle with reconciliation, not holding things against others or not hating ourselves for things we’ve done that are wrong. All of that is the past. You have given us a new grace, a new power, a new strength that, if we believe in it, trust in it, surrender to all that it’s asking us to become, we will find this unity and this peace that is our inheritance. You have taken down the wall that divides the world. In its place, you give us peace, unity, community, love, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Amos 7:12-15 | Ephesians 1:3-14 or 1:3-10 | Mark 6:7-13

Oh God, who show the light of your truth to those who go astray so that they may return to the right path, give all who, for the faith they profess, are counted Christians the grace to reject whatever is contrary to the name of Christ and to strive after all that does it honor. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

One of the blessings that I have been given as a priest who is called to preach and to teach the wisdom of the scriptures is that, in my generation, I’ve been able to read an Old Testament reading every Sunday. That was not true before I was ordained. It was always an epistle and a gospel, but it’s given me an opportunity that many priests in prior generations did not have of preaching from both Old and New Testament. And it’s so clear to me that you really can’t understand one without understanding the other.

They’re two parts of one message, and the dramatic change that happens from Old Testament to New Testament is the change that I believe happens in every believer who goes through a particular period of time where I would say they move from partial understanding to what I would call the fullness of understanding of what this relationship with God is all about, because for most of us, we begin a relationship with God, in a sense, earning his attention, his blessings, his graces by doing what we’re told and following the rules and regulations. And typical of most everything in human nature is we strive to do something where we’re in charge of the accomplishing of it, and we do well for a while, and then we start to wane and lose our focus. And we’re going in a direction that is not really who we are and what we really want to do or become, and we start experiencing what you might call suffering, pain, isolation, depression, darkness, whatever. And then we go through that dark time, and then somehow someone comes along at the right moment, a prophet voice, and said, “Look, this pain you’re in is caused by these issues that you’re not seeing clearly or these lies that you are following and thinking they’re going to provide what they’re supposed to provide for, but they can’t.” And so you have this moment of awakening, and then you go through a conversion, and then you grow. Over and over and over, though, it comes back to the same thing. The weakness seems to overcome the strength that we normally have as human beings, and that’s the Old Testament. Over and over again God is giving people what they ask for, a land of milk and honey, a journey to freedom, a place where they can finally find the kind of comfort that they want from a system that is created for them, but that system often fails them. And so whatever, they lose their direction, and a prophet voice rises. And so we have, over and over again, the period of time in the Old Testament where they prophet was the key. He was the speaker of truth. He would come along and say, “Whoa, this isn’t working, and you don’t know it’s not working yet. And soon there will be a disaster, and so I’m warning you, you ought to change.” And most of the time people didn’t until they went through the suffering, and then they changed.

That sounds a lot like my early years as a believer. I’ll do what I’m told. I do it, because I don’t want to be punished, but my intention to do it is not really grounded in something that is so rock solid that I can endure the temptations to go off on the wrong path. So called back again and again and again. But then comes the New Testament, underscore the word new, something radically different. Instead of, as it was in the Old Testament, that we’re working very much on improving ourselves, performing well for God and getting his blessing, instead of that being the focus, the thing shifts, and now all of a sudden, instead of we being afraid of the face of God, who might be very justly condemning us, we’re looking at a new face of God in the person of Jesus. And to see his face, see his look, how he sees you, how he sees me, if we follow the set of readings, it’s always going to be a very transformative moment. There’s a phrase that I love, that when the disciples kept being confused about Jesus, who’s talking about God, they didn’t fully realize he was God incarnate. When he was talking about God, they got confused and kept saying, “Well then, show us the Father. We don’t understand this one you’re describing. The God you’re describing seems different than the one that we’ve all been taught.” And it’s so interesting. When they say, “Show us the Father. Show us the Father,” Jesus looks at them with love, compassion, understanding. He said, “This face you’re looking at, this is the Father. This is God looking at you right now, loving you as you are, wanting you to believe in something.” And the thing you need to believe in is who you are in this incredible, miraculous thing that the New Testament issued into the world, and that is redemption, grace, forgiveness. It changes everything, and the way it changes it is by changing the focus from our performance and whether or not we’re good enough to earn God’s merit to God looking at us and saying, “Look, the whole issue is not about you doing something for me, but now I want to do something for you. I, Jesus, the man filled with divinity, knows what humanity needs.” We don’t need to be challenged into becoming well-disciplined machines doing the right thing. No, we’re destined to be loved, to be understood, to be embraced and to be told that something has been given to us. Something amazing has been given to us that was never possible before, and so let’s look at this image that we have of this voice, the voice of God speaking through Jesus, different than the voice of God speaking through a prophet, because this was not just another prophet. He was the Messiah, the one that would come and change everything, and what he changed is a system, turned it completely upside down. And from you no longer being asked to focus on your performance, you’re being asked to focus on your goodness, not a goodness that you accomplished but a goodness that’s been won for you by God incarnate, in Jesus, called redemption. What does it mean? Well, it’s a transformation of who you are and particularly your image of yourself, because what redemption says is that, “There’s not one thing you have done in the past, nor anything you will do in the future, that could limit my love for you.” You are forgiven, made new, and the shame and the fear and the anger that a life of performing creates is transformed into a kind of sense of being valued and being safe and being at peace, because in such a simple way, you’re loved as you are, and you’re seen as beautiful.

I don't know if you’ve ever had the experience of somebody walking into a room, and they look different to you, and you have this insight, and you say to them, “Hey, what’s going on? You look different.” And they sort of look down, maybe a little embarrassed, and then you ask the question. “Are you in love?” It may not be so much that they’re in love, but let’s just say they feel there’s the potential and a reality of being loved. And when you’re loved — I mean loved not for what you do, what you can do, what you will do, what you didn’t do, all that, no, not based on any kind of performance or anything like that. No, you’re loved, because the person who sees you knows you and knows that there’s something in you that is destined by God to be developed into something beautiful, something effective, something that reflects this incredible, creative, loving God.

St. Paul’s reading that we just had is just amazing to me, because it took me hours to just take it phrase-by-phrase and kind of understand what he’s really trying to say. But what he’s saying is so radically new and different that even the way he said it isn’t that clear. It’s almost like he’s saying it because he heard it, not because he’s experienced it yet. But here’s what Paul is revealing about this person Jesus, that he comes into the world and reveals that the Father is calling you by your name and telling you that this thing you are is filled with the potential of a wholeness that was created there by God, and God’s glory, God’s joy, God’s greatest pleasure is doing something for you that enables that thing that you are to become everything it was intended to be and for you to delight in it, because that’s his delight if that makes sense. When God sees what he creates performing, when you look at nature and it’s in its pristine springtime, when you look at a sky when it’s filled with the warmth of a color that means dawn, whenever a creation is performing exactly as it was intended to be and one is perceiving it as it is and sees it as beautiful, you get a glimpse at what does give God pleasure. Yes, I guess he would be pleased, at least I thought he would be pleased if I worked as hard as I could and suffered and went through all kinds of agony forcing myself to be the person he wants me to be. Maybe that would please him, but nothing would please him more than for me to know how much he sees in me that is so beautiful and good and wants it to flourish, and when it flourishes, he sits back and is absolutely delighted. And it’s a gift. It’s not earned. Why is it it’s so much easier for us to earn some kind of attention or affection from someone than to feel that we have it by just our very nature, that they see us, and they’re in awe of who we are, and they honor it by somehow the way they look at us? That look, when you’re loved, it’s incredible, and if that’s what the New Testament is about, and it’s as radically different as it could be from the Old Testament, then that’s where — well, that’s, I guess I’m saying, that’s what I get excited about in my work as a preacher or a teacher, is how can I teach this — and I think it’s the only way I know I can teach it, is by having experienced it, and that’s true of all of us. But when you are called by God, awakened to your own talents and beauty, see them as what they are, a gift, see them as beautiful, knowing that they can be of value to other people, that you want to share them with someone else, and when you’re doing that, that experience is the richest experience we can have as human beings, being blessed by God’s grace to become who we are. And when we do that same kind of blessing to someone else and we see them develop into who they are, then we’re in the kingdom. Then we’re doing the work, and that joy that comes from being loved as completely as God loves us and turning around and loving another human being in a similar way and watching the changes in them that you’ve experienced yourself, being fully accepted, it’s amazing. And I think to myself how much time we spend in working on our appearance or our performance or our possessions as finding a sense of value, and nothing is as valuable than [sic] who we are.

If God created you exactly as you’re intended to be, if you look exactly the way he wanted you to look, if your talents and weaknesses are exactly the balance that he wanted you to have, if all of that is really true, and I do believe it is, then it’s up to us to believe in it and trust in it and not try to compare ourselves to other people or strive to become more than we are, that we’ll only cease if we see the beauty of, I’ll call it, the ordinariness of it all. The ordinary beauty of everything is so spectacular with the right lens on our eyes. We can see it as it is. So the challenge always is different than we thought. We’re not here out of fear of punishment to straighten out our act, force ourselves to be who we’re supposed to be. No, it’s about repentance. Repentance has to do with regret. It’s regretting the doubts we have about who we are, the doubts we have in the beauty the people that God has placed in our life — that we don’t have the right vision, that we don’t know that the grace of God that we’ve received, once it takes root in us and we find ourselves conscious of who we are and the gift that we are, that then we’re empowered to do the same for other people. Again, that’s the kingdom that God came to establish, and it just slips through my fingers when I try to hold on to it. But it comes back in moments, and it feels so good when I can feel that I see someone else that I’ve seen a million times, and I see them, and they just are overwhelmingly beautiful. Or I have somebody that looks at me or says something or whatever, and I feel that same kind of love coming from them. That’s grace, the grace that calls us to wholeness, fullness, joy, everything the kingdom promises, but it’s not what we expected. And that’s what often lies hidden.

Father, you have revealed through your Son the fullness of your plan, that your desire was not to discipline us into being obedient subjects but to be partners with you, in a sense, lovers with you, that you were longing from the beginning to have a role in our life where that which you created would come to its fullness, and you would see the beauty of your creative love. So bless us with the acceptance needed to receive this great gift and to let it do its mysterious, transformative work and make us into not only all that you intend us to be but all that the people around us need us to be. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Ezekiel 2:2-5 | 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 | Mark 6:1-6

Oh God, who in the abasement of your Son have raised up a fallen world, fill your faithful with holy joy. From those you have rescued from slavery to sin, you bestowed eternal gladness. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

One of the most interesting group of people in the Old Testament and New Testament are prophets. Prophets are essential to the way in which it seems that God has intended for people to learn and to grow, and a prophet is never necessarily a popular person among the masses, because generally prophets are there to talk about how things are not the way they should be. They’re there, in a way, to correct errors and illusions and half-truths and bring people back to something that is truthful, that is real, that is effective. And it’s interesting that, when you look at the evolution of human beings, there’s just always been needs for prophets, and there will always be, because what happens, when a system is functioning as a religion does, it brings people to a certain level of consciousness and a certain level of understanding. And then it tends to get caught up in all kinds of egocentric stuff and institutions that are serving themselves rather than the people, and it drifts from the truth. And the combination of drifting from the original truth and also the evolution of human beings changing and having a greater potential perhaps to hear something new and different, that’s exactly the spot where the prophet walks in and does his work.

And Ezekiel was one of the big ones, and the interesting thing that he started with, which is sometimes what prophets do start with — he started with a realization that there was something negative going on. There was a real problem with people losing a sense of who they were, and somehow, if evil was able to destroy the temple, it meant there was some weakness in the temple that God was not pleased with. And so the first part of Ezekiel’s message was doom and gloom. “The temple is going to be destroyed. It’s going to be awful. There’s going to be a really tough time.” It’s like he was just sitting there telling everybody, “Get ready for some dark days.” And those days came, and then in a way, perhaps you would say that the prophet then became more believable. And then his message would come after that that was probably the much more important message, and in Ezekiel’s case it was saying, “All right, the old order was destroyed, but something new is coming, something different, something that wasn’t there before.” And he came up with this really beautiful image. So let’s just imagine the temple was filled with people who weren’t really functioning as they should. They were empty of life that the temple was there to instill in people. They were like dead men’s bones. And so Ezekiel is talking about there’s going to be a renewal, and he’s saying all these figures that are not life-giving are going to end up — I’m going to use the image of the bones, and soon they will have tendons and muscles and flesh and then hearts. It’s like he’s saying a new generation will come about, one that is more attuned to the truth. They will have not just a new way of understanding or knowing things that they’ve heard but a deeper sort of evolution step towards who God really is, and that’s a new heart. And the heart is always the place of compassion and empathy. So though this horrible time of destruction and everything falling apart, Ezekiel is the one that announces, “Something new is now able to come, and you all have been changed, and what you’re now ready for, you weren’t ready for before. But there is a promise that God has been making from the beginning that’s now unfolding in a new direction, and you are going to have a new capacity for understanding and compassion. You’re going to have a new heart.” And Ezekiel was also a prophet that he knew that the Spirit of God was the source of everything for him. He knew that Spirit entered into him and called him to be a prophet, and so what he’s really setting up, without maybe even realizing it, that the fullness of what Jesus reveals is that he himself will come and dwell in our hearts. Ezekiel knew that, maybe, in a sense, but what he was doing was creating a beginning of a way of seeing that would be fulfilled in Jesus. And that is — I think it was in Hebrews that the writing of Hebrews said, “What happens is that God now speaks to your mind, but also he writes on your heart. He writes on your heart. You will know what’s right. You will know what’s true.” It’s a beautiful image. So you see, the role of prophet is going on all the time. It’s the person in the room who sees what’s really been sort of out of balance. He names it in a way, hopefully without a log of judgment but certainly with clarity and then announces that whatever pain we’ve been in because of this is going to be the source of our transformation.

Now look at the next reading. It’s St. Paul. I love Paul. He’s so human, but here’s — he was a persecutor of religion. He was participating in the destruction of those who believed in Jesus. He never met Jesus. He felt him. He felt a vision of him, but he knew his heart had been radically changed. So he too had gone through this radical change, and what he was seeing and what he was understanding was brand new. And the thing about the Old Testament and even — I go back to my beginnings as a Catholic. It seems like years ago, and then certainly centuries ago, there was this image of God is so pure and humans are so impure that the two really have a hard time coming together, that divinity and sin, it’s almost like they’re like — they will not match. They won’t get together, and so anybody that was sinful was considered to be without God. And so here’s a sinner, Paul, who has been called to this wonderful place of being filled with wisdom that he couldn’t have ever figured out. And of course, anybody that’s really speaking the truth, there’s a certain audience for that kind of person, and they hold that prophet in high esteem. And so he was always kind of caught up with himself, I think, Paul was. He would always talk about, “I’ve run the good race. I’ve fought everything. I’ve done a great job.” But here we see Paul in a beautiful, kind of human way of saying, “I have this problem that I can’t get rid of. I have this thorn in my flesh. An angel — a messenger of Satan has put it there.” I love that. “It’s not me, but it’s in me.” But what it is, it’s some weakness, some addiction that he had that, in his own religious, sort of, sense of the division between divinity and our human nature, feels that, “It’s inappropriate for me to have a sin that I can’t control if I’m up here talking about people turning away from sin. It makes me a hypocrite.” And so when he prays and prays and prays that this thing will go away, the most interesting thing is the answer that Jesus gives to his prayer, and he said, “No, no. No, I’m not taking that away. No, my mercy, my grace, my unmerited love will take care of you. You’re not going to be in trouble with me over your sin. But if I take that away, you’re already a little on the proud side, and I don't know what’s going to happen to you, but I really think you’d better stay grounded in your humanity, because that will help you more than anything in being compassionate and understanding to your brothers and sisters.” And it worked for him.

It was beautiful, and the thing that I think it’s teaching us — and let me just say one other thing, because I think it’s interesting. When Paul is saying, “Okay, I have this thorn in the flesh, and I’ve accepted it, and I’m doing it. So I can put up with my sinfulness.” But then he goes off — on to say, “And I can — I have to put up with being mistreated and laughed at and scorned, and I can handle all that.” He’s like me. He’s like you, that part of us that always wants to be better than we are or at least tries to present that sometimes, and that wonderful line from that reading — it’s only when you’re weak, only when you know your humanity, that the real power that God has given to you, which is not you but is coming through you, has a much better chance of coming across as it was intended to be, a truth, an objective truth and not an opinion that, “I’m going to get a lot of reward and compliments and maybe cash.” A lot of people get up there and preach and get a lot of money, but it’s not about that. It’s just about God using a human being who is as ordinary as anyone else to speak a truth, and when it comes through them without their attachment to it, their ego attachment, it works so much better.

And then we get to Jesus in the gospel, and the thing that’s so beautiful about Jesus in this gospel is he’s, in a way, in a similar place that St. Paul was. But here’s the thing, Jesus — I’ve always been fascinated by Jesus in terms of his hometown, where he lived, Nazareth and what did people think of him. And there’s a lot of theories out there that in a small town — someone once wrote that it was probably not bigger than 2[00] or 300 people that lived in Nazareth at the time. And the women would always meet at the well in the morning to get the water for the house, and I’m sure they chatted about things going on in the village. And when this young woman, Mary, was somehow rushed through a marriage and ended up having a baby in record time, I’m sure there were people that thought, well, very likely Jesus is in the class of people that was considered to be one of the lowest classes, an illegitimate child. And so many think that he lived in a kind of culture that looked down upon him, and he was considered to be an outcast, which would make a lot of sense psychologically that he was so compassionate to the outcasts, to those who weren’t understood, to those who were thought to be something they’re not. So we have, in this beautiful passage, Jesus coming back to his hometown, and he is already pretty famous. He’s been preaching and teaching publicly, and the biggest thing about Jesus that made him so incredibly mysterious and wonderful was his power to heal, drive out demons, open eyes so they could see, ears so they could hear, tongues so they could speak, hands so they could do work, legs that would get people to where they needed to be. All of that was happening already, and he goes back to his hometown, and he probably had been preaching in his hometown before. So he gets up, and he starts talking to them, and they don’t like it. They can’t stand it. They are angry, because, “Wait a minute. Anybody that’s being used by God, anybody that’s a prophet has got to be a person who is perfect, has got to be somebody who is flawless and without fault, and we know this guy is anything but flawless, sinless.” And then they kind of say, “He’s just one of us,” at the same time, which is kind of wonderful, saying he’s not that special. But Jesus being a human being was witnessing not that he was God but that he was a human being filled with divinity, and that’s the point, not that he was divine in the full sense of what we now know he was. But he was so receptive and open and capable of allowing the power of God to flow through him that his ability to do the things that God called him to do were so effective, so powerful. And I love the fact that he says to us always — I say to you always, because I think it’s such a great line, that mystical power that Jesus had in his ordinary, middle-class, carpentry, shadowy background life is the same thing people around you and around me have, the same thing, this gift of power flowing through us from God.

I’m talking now about all these very important prophets, Ezekiel, the preaching of Paul, Jesus himself, but one of the things that’s so interesting to me is, when you see Jesus working as this God/man, and yet he came from such an ordinary background, it strikes me that there’s some truth in this that we need to look at. And that is that we might always think that we have to go to the experts, the few super-, super-intelligent, awesome, the educated experts to find the truth, and what I realize more and more in my life is that the issue is not sinlessness that God is calling us to but truthfulness. And truthfulness is different than sinlessness. Sin is to me a weakness that we can’t always control, and it’s based usually on illusion. But it’s not about getting rid of the sin by disciplining yourself, but usually we outgrow a sin when we see through it as if it is really not what we think it is. It’s not going to produce what we hoped it would produce, and so truth is the best way to get out of a place of addicted behavior that’s sinful. So that truth can come, yes, through great experts and great preachers and teachers but also comes consistently through the most ordinary people in your circle of friends, and it’s usually not going to be in some dramatic pronouncement. But there’s always this incredible promise that God, who dwells in the hearts of all people, is going to speak through that heart and do it in a way that’s really effective for those who are destined to hear exactly what they’re saying. And it’s not going to be in some major pronouncement of a truth, but it’s going to be probably more often in a witnessing that they are engaged in, where you’ll watch them do something that is so extraordinarily right on in terms of truth or compassion or understanding. And it really penetrates your heart, your mind, and you see something you didn’t see before. That’s exciting to me, to think that we live in a world — and certainly Vatican Council open our hearts to the fact that the laity is the church, and we’re not always having to turn to experts to find out how to live or what to do. But sometimes the most ordinary relationships, the friendships that we have, the experiences that we have together can be such incredible, prophetic voices to us, and I guess the difference is whether or not we can imagine that God will work through someone who perhaps we don’t even like or perhaps you don’t even trust. But just if you’re open, if your heart, if your mind is open to truth, you’ll receive it wherever it is, but just don’t limit the way in which God is going to plan to use it, because if it’s his plan, if it’s his power flowing through somebody who doesn’t seem worthy to you, it might be the most effective, powerful way you can come into this great gift of truth.

Father, give us patience with our humanity, with our weaknesses, with our sins, but never let us be deluded into thinking that they are not harmful to ourselves or to someone else. So give us patience and understanding as we open our hearts to the many ways in which you will speak to us, awaken us, encourage us, enable us most especially to be the men and women that you are longing for us to be, witnesses, prophets, ordinary people doing extraordinary work that only you, God, can do. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24 | 2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15 | Mark 5:21-43

Oh God, who the grace of the adoption chose us to be children of the light, grant, we pray, that we may not be wrapped in the darkness of error but always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

As many of you know, I record my programs at the studios of WRR at Fair Park, and I’ve been doing that for 33 years. The interesting thing today is that I’m not recording there, but I’m recording in a beautiful place in Tuscany, a farm house. It’s on a working vineyard, olive trees everywhere. And somehow through the magic of technology, I’m able to record my voice here, and then it’s sent to the radio station. And they’ll tweak it and clean it up, my mistakes, and then present it to you. But the reason I want you to know where I am is because I’ve been, I think, deeply impacted by this environment. As you know, well, I live in Dallas. East Dallas is a beautiful part of Dallas, and I love it, but nothing is quite like being in Tuscany and the hills. And with everything around you producing not just beauty but crops that sustain the families, there’s just something about this ecological system. It so struck me this morning as I was sitting there having my coffee. It was still cool from last night’s 60-degree low, and the high this afternoon will be somewhere around 90. But anyway, it just struck me as how everything working together has created this life force, and no one’s been here since the pandemic, for almost two years. And it just looks fine, like it doesn’t really need a caretaker, because in the very nature of the way this whole system works, everything is cared for by something else that’s in that environmental system.

And that just really struck me because of the way in which I have seen these readings work inside of me as I have worked with them all week, getting ready to share some thoughts, and that is that God has created a similar kind of ecological system within communities. And I’ve always loved talking about the fact that we’re not responsible for the world, though some people may be called to do something that does affect great numbers of people. But most of us live in a circle of friends, and that circle of friends, I truly believe, are not by accident. They are chosen, and we make up our own ecological spiritual system. And Paul gives such an interesting image of what it means to live in community as a spiritual person, as a person who believes in the mystery of what God is trying to share with us through Jesus about his power dwelling in each of us. And Jesus is the quintessential symbol of this indwelling presence, and what an incredibly beautiful thing that we can see in this image of Jesus. He was filled with such strength and power to effect any change he wanted in the world, and he was able to do that in extraordinary ways. And yet it’s so clear that what he was teaching us over and over again is, “Who I am you also may be. The things I do you can do.”

So if you take that image of Paul, he’s talking about the graciousness of Jesus — graciousness, grace. Grace is some way of describing what I would call mercy. Mercy is unmerited love. It is this energy, this life force in Jesus. As you [sic] walk this earth, when things were not as they intended them to be, as God the Father did not want them to be, meaning everything working for life, when he saw something not working for life, Jesus entered in and performed miracles. And of all the things that Jesus did in his life, the miracles are what stand out so dramatically as who is he, and how does he do this, and where does he get the power, and what does he mean that we can do the same thing. Jesus is the model of who we are to become. We are like him, and as he moved around in the world and made a difference, he emptied himself, in the sense that he put himself on our level. He didn’t claim something that would make him more than we are, but he also experienced our humanity. And that humanity, at times where he felt that he was empty and he needed support from his disciples, like the night in the garden — he said, “Why aren’t you with me? Why aren’t you staying with me? I need you.” And at the same time, he’s so full of life that we have in the gospel the story of healing a woman whose life was pouring out of her through a disease and healing her and then also lifting Jairus’ daughter from death to life. He had this power to be able to do that, and what he’s saying to us, it seems to me, that in our ecological system, we’re going to find ourselves, in every situation we’re in where somebody in our circle of friends is going to need something from us, and we are in a place where we’re filled with enough sense of what it is a person needs, and if we are in touch with two things, our own intention and the power that we have as believers, when those two things kick in, we are going to be there to be a source of whatever that person needs. And that’s an incredibly exciting way of imagining life, because it means that you’re not responsible 24/7 to take care of the needs of your friends or your family, but there are times when you have something that they need. And you can give it to them, and they have that need that you can fulfill. And sometimes they’re the ones that are filled with something that you need, and you receive it. And so there’s that beautiful, beautiful flow, and the thing that I want to talk about is how does it happen. How does it work? It takes belief, faith and a conviction that I want to be of service to other people. I don’t want to be a person that takes life out of people. I’m not here to get as much as I want from other people. I’m here to be both receiving and giving, and probably for those of us who are mature in our spiritual journey, the thought of giving is much more comforting than the thought of needing, but both — both are always going to be there.

So what am I asking you to imagine? Well, just imagine that this gift is something that happens in a similar way to the way in which the woman who had the hemorrhages believed so much that Jesus had something for her that she said, “If I can just get in touch with that power, just get in touch with that power —” And I think it’s fascinating that she didn’t touch his body, because so many of the miracles that Jesus did, he would touch people, touch their eyes, touch their ears, eyes so that they could see and their ears so they could hear or put spittle on a man’s tongue so he could speak. There was touch, but then in this miracle with the woman with the hemorrhage, there was no physical touch, just an awareness. “If I could just be close to this man who has this intention of healing and giving life to everyone, if I could just have that, I could be in touch with it.” And the interesting thing is — and I love this — Jesus felt something flow out of him, and she felt, at the same time, something flow into her. And there was no touch involved, which means to me, this work of being a source of life to each other is not something we can take so literally. Nobody wants somebody coming into your life, when you’re not feeling well, telling you what you should be doing to feel better. And that’s probably one of our biggest problems with our desire to help people, is we come up with some very specific idea in our own mind of what they need, and then we force it on them or demand that they listen to us and wonder why they don’t change, because we’ve given such good advice. No, we have to live in a different way than the literal. We have to live in this mysterious, wonderful, spiritual world that God has created where this life flow happens in ways that we cannot describe or even feel necessarily. But think of it as a power that we have within us because, again, we believe it’s possible, and we want it. We want that to happen. I don't know. It changes everything.

And when I think about the other thing Jesus did in the gospel is when he healed Jairus’ daughter, and the fact that — this is a dramatic example, but the power that we have, this gracious, loving power that is somehow capable of overcoming all the negative things that death creates or disease creates — disease, we’re robbed of the use of our body, and we can’t do the things we want to do. Death takes someone away from us, or we are taken from someone. At times that’s the way we think about it. If you can just understand that this gracious power of God that we possess and can give and receive is something not necessarily literally always to walk into a room and heal cancer or go to a funeral home and get the person to rise from the coffin, no, it’s whatever the negativity in disease, the negativity in someone being taken from us, whatever the pain is in that, we have the power, through this gracious act of God, to take away the real destructive qualities of disease and death. And what are they? “I can’t do what I’m supposed to. I’ve lost someone so close to me. I am devastated. I am empty. I am not capable of making it without this person.” Those kind of negative things that happen in those dark moments, this gracious flow of life between us, that’s the thing that works. Without it being described or told how it will work or just telling the person, “This is what you’ve got to think,” and those kind of things — when people lose someone in their life and you come up with these kind of quickie-fix answers, “Oh, they’re so much better off where they are. They had a good life. They were old. Everything is fine.” No. If we step away from the literal and enter more into that spiritual world that is so mystical and magical in a way, we can begin to experience something, and that is a balance in our ecological system of friends, family where people are getting healthier, stronger, not even knowing who’s the one in need and who’s the one receiving.

Sometimes yes, it is literal, but think about it as something that we have the power to do as we pause in the morning and go into the deepest part of ourselves and open ourselves to the God that is dwelling in our heart, and we say, “Please God, use me today for whatever need there is. Let me be that flow of life that lifts someone out of a death, darkness or out of a painful separation from everything they want to accomplish. Do that for me please.” And he will, and when you say, “Do it for me please,” the next thought is, “Yes, I can do that.” And then you sort of forget about it in a way, but then in another way, the day has a different feel. The day has a different spirit, and sometimes you’ll be sitting there, talking to someone. All of a sudden, you get a feel of something flowing out of you, and they get a feel of something flowing into them, and there’s a smile. There’s a sense of something. Maybe it’s a hug. Maybe it’s a kiss, but that experience of that powerful life force, that flow of life that is our inheritance to be like Christ and bring it into — that is absolutely real. And what a gift, to be in touch with it, because when we’re not, then what is it that life fills us with? A daily list of all the things we have to do and the appointments we have to take, and there’s something good about fulfilling obligation in life. There’s something fulfilling about getting a job done. Creating something makes us feel good. All that is good, but nothing quite matches the experience of that flow of life from you to another, from another to you. And that is the greatest gift, I believe, God has given us, to participate in the quality and the growth and the development of our circle of friends. It’s a great responsibility, but what a joy to be a part of making it more than it would have been without us.

Father, your healing presence changed the world, and now you invite us to believe that we, who participate in that same healing presence, can change the world we live in. Bless us with confidence in this great gift that you share with us. Let us not be proud that you use us nor let us — not fall into depression thinking that we have no power over those things that we long to change. We ask you to bless us within this awareness of our participation in your great gift of bringing life. You say that we need to believe, and we do. And you say that we should be this source of life, and we long to accomplish it. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Job 38:1, 8-11 | 2 Corinthians 5:14-17 | Mark 4:35-41

Grant, oh Lord, that we may always revere and love your holy name for you never deprive of your guidance those you set firm on the foundation of your love. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

God the Father, Jesus his Son, the two are often confused, or at least the two cause confusion in people as to who is God or what is God. What is God? Is God a man? Is God a god? It’s really interesting how the two often — the way most people settle it in their minds and imagination and say, “Well, God’s the Father, and Jesus is his Son. God’s the angry one and the vengeful one and Jesus the nice one who protects us from the vengeance of the Father.” No. God the Father exists. He created everything. He created with the most loving disposition. Listen to that first reading, how beautiful it is that he created this world as if it’s a living being. When he talks about he created the sea, it was like he gave birth out of a womb. The sea was born, and then he gives it a place. Then he makes a cloud so that it has a blanket and then the darkness so that it can rest, and then he sets limits for it. What a beautiful way of imagining the earth, as a living being. And with this image, what we find is that God created everything out of love, and he gave limits to everything in nature. Trees can only do so much. Water can only do so much. And then he took this chance and created human beings, and human beings, in a sense, are not limited like nature is. They have this one element that is not in any other part of anything that Jesus — that God created, and it’s free will. He gave boundaries to the sea, and he gives — in a sense, he calls us to live within a certain limitation of who we are and what we can do, but if we think we can go beyond that, there we go. We are a little unruly compared to the rest of creation, and so what’s he do with that? Well, he works with it in the most loving, patient and kind way.

I’d like you to look at the gospel now and see that God, who has power over nature, controls it. We see that same power that’s God the Father now in God the Son, because Jesus, the best way to understand Jesus is he is a manifestation of God the Father in a human being, the same God that created the sea is the same God that’s in Jesus calming the sea. His humanity is with that, and the reason God chose to become also human was so that he could explain to us in a clear way that that’s his plan. He always created us longing to have a relationship with us where we work together. So Jesus is the manifestation of the fullness of who God is. He’s not just the God out there in heaven that creates everything, the master over everything. No, he’s also the partner that enters into our life like he did in Jesus’ life. But the thing about the humanity of Jesus that’s different than our humanity, it’s completely sinless. It didn’t come from another human being. God created the man Jesus himself. So he’s human but not as human as we are. He doesn’t have our weaknesses, but he has free will, which is really interesting.

So here is this beautiful manifestation of God in a human being, Jesus. So we see something that goes on in the relationship we have with God always comes up. Somewhere along the line, we’re doing what he calls us to do. We’re living as we’re supposed to be living, and all of a sudden, instead of calm and everything being the way we expect it to be, there’s a squall. We all know what the squall feels like. “What the heck is going on? Why isn’t this working? Why do I have this problem? Why is the person I love dying? Why is the world so filled with tension?” All those things, we get scared, and so what I love about the image of God in a human being creating calm in the midst of a storm, we have the man Jesus on a pillow in a squall in an open boat, which is kind of humorous to me. Talk about being relaxed, but his disciples are terrified. They realize they’re going to die, and so they scream out, “Help us. Help us. Help us.” And he’s sort of half awake, and he gets like, “What? What are you worried about?” It’s obviously the storm, so he just stops the storm, because he’s God. And they’re just amazed. “What? Who is this guy? Who is he?”

Does that mean that God is saying to the disciples that eventually, “If you let my Father live in you as he lives in me that you can do anything you want, and you can calm storms and things like that”? No, that’s not the point. What he’s saying is if you have God living in you and you believe in him, he will never let anything destroy you. That’s the key. Nothing will destroy you. Does that mean that nothing will ever frighten you or nothing will ever go wrong? No, no. It just means that no matter where and what you’re dealing with, he will never destroy you. Can you believe that? Well, the reason that’s so important to believe is because the power to do that is not in a human being. If you really think something is going to destroy you, you are terrified, and you will resist whatever is going on, because it can, in your mind, destroy you. So hold that thought. There is something out there that can be so terrifying that you will resist it, and let’s look at Paul’s insight, because it’s the most important thing, I think, I’ve ever really been focused on, because what we’re hearing in Paul is a mystery, and it goes like this.

Fundamentally, Jesus, the model of who we are, a human filled with divinity, was asked by God at one point in his life to do something that felt like he couldn’t do it, because he, the God/man, basically wanted more than anything else to save the world. He wanted to do his calling. He wanted to fulfill it. He wanted to bring people into a deeper relationship with his Father through what he could show them, and he knew their frailties. He knew their weaknesses, and now God finally reveals to the man Jesus that his calling is going to engage him in looking, in the eyes of his disciples, as a complete failure and allowing evil, which he always tells people he’s going to destroy — allow evil to destroy Jesus. And so he couldn’t — didn’t want to do it, because he was afraid it would be the one thing that would keep him from achieving the goal that he really wanted to do. Now, this is his humanity now, and so he says, “Please Father, I don’t want to do this,” meaning, “I don’t want my disciples to be tested this strongly because — I don't know. It’s too much.” “If I can’t do what I’m called to do, I won’t exist,” is what he’s kind of saying, and I want you to hear that again. “If I’m not able to do what I think I’m supposed to do, that’s my essence, then I will die.” And that’s exactly what Jesus went through in the Garden of Gethsemane. This is like a death, and can I let go of the very thing that is my core, my essence? Can I let go of that for some promise from God that it’ll be alright? He did it. He did it, but here’s what Paul says. Because Jesus did that, because he did die for others, and he no longer was living just for himself but others — he wasn’t living out of the model he had for who he was and how he had to function. He gave that up trusting his Father, and when he did that and he died, everybody died. What? Meaning he did something in reality, in the human race, being a member of the human race — Jesus was — that his surrender to that moment made something shift that reminds us of a mystery that, whenever we go through anything, we don’t do it just ourselves, but we are engaged in something much bigger than ourselves, and whatever we do impacts everybody else. But his act of selflessness and courage in that moment changed our capacity, and now we can do it ourselves. That’s amazing. Since he died for all and no longer for himself, all of us are empowered to die and not focus solely on ourselves. So that’s grace. That’s what it means to be saved.

Let’s go back to how that works in your life and in mine. So let’s say, if you know a lot about personalities, you know that people have a certain focus of their life for where they find value. Some people are teachers, and they have to always explain things to people. Other people are caregivers, and they’re always caring for people. Some people like me are performers, and they have to perform for everybody. Some people are people who have to control everything, and when I mean they have to, it means that, when they are doing that, they feel most alive, and if they can’t do that, they don’t think they exist. Their identity is so tied up in one of their roles — just like you might say the man Jesus was tied up in his role to be absolutely the catalyst, in his own mind, that he felt the disciples had to experience, someone conquering evil. And God said, “No, I’m going to show them that you’ve conquered evil but not by avoiding it but by giving into it and surviving and then becoming even more than you ever were before.” So follow that sequence, because what happens, when you and I are facing something like the Garden of Gethsemane and we don’t want to give into it, the reason we don’t want to give into it is not that we don’t want to, but we can’t. And why can’t we? Because our identity is too tied into something that gives us value. If I’m not caring for somebody, I have no value. I don’t exist. If I’m not up there in front of a crowd performing for people, then I don’t exist. I’ve heard many people say — they’re entertainers. The only time I really feel alive is when I’m onstage. The only thing [sic] I’m really alive is when I’m caring for somebody. The only time I feel alive is when I’m in charge. But that’s not who we are. So what Jesus set up in motion is the reality that we, as human beings, do have the ability to say to that part of us that says, “I will not exist if I don’t perform in a way that I’ve been trained to perform in order to have a sense of my value,” the life of Jesus is saying to us, and the grace is there to say, “No, you do exist even though you don’t do that.”

So funny. I think all the time, “I don’t want to do something. I don’t want to call that person. I don’t want to go there.” Why? Well, when I find — the reason I don’t want to go there is because, when I go there, I’m not going to do something they want me to do. I’m going to do something they don’t. I’m going to tell them something that they don’t want to hear. I’m going to tell them, “I can’t do that,” or I can’t help them. When I say, “I don’t want to,” what I should really be saying is there’s something in me that can’t. It’s not that I don’t want to. I can’t do it. Why not? Well, because when I’m telling somebody something they don’t want to know, or if I tell them I can’t help them in the way they want — and I have grown up in an environment where my own value has always been on performing for somebody, pleasing them, and then I feel alive, and then I exist. When that’s taken away from me, I’m consciously — I feel like, “I just don’t want to do it.” If I’m really honest, I’m saying, “I’m scared. I’m scared if I don’t do it, I won’t exist.” Now here’s the thing about evil that I think is so fascinating. It always hides the core of what’s wrong in us, the evil we’re hanging on to, which is always an illusion. Remember, evil feeds on lies. So if you have a lie inside of you that you’ve been trained — and we all have it on some level — that my value is found in this, and that needs to be chipped away. God needs to say, “Your value is fundamentally in your essence that I created for you. You’re not valuable because you are in the eyes of someone else approved.” And so how you free yourself from that is to go through the experience that feels like, “If I do this, if I can’t perform like I want, I will die,” and then you have to go through the experience of not being able to do it. Not only do you not die, but like Jesus, you rise. And when Jesus did what he did, surrendered to that which he feared the most, he was empowered to come back and do more than he ever did before. Now, that cannot be just a minor way of the whole story ending. No, that’s the essence of what we’re being taught. If you’re willing to die to that thing that you think you really are, you will become so much more of who you really are, and if you can believe that, you won’t say to yourself, “I don’t want to, because I basically can’t.” You’ll say, “I will.” And the way that’s said in Jesus is, “Not my will but your will be done. Not me hanging onto an illusion of what it means to be the Messiah but allowing your will, how it’s written, what reality really is like. I want to enter into that. That’s what I will, the truth.” And the thing about the truth always is it sets you free.

Father, through your Son, you have made all things new. You have given human nature a power we never had before, a power to trust in you more than we trust in our own illusions, our own fears. Bless us with the courage that it takes to live the life you’ve called us to live without the fear and the shame that so often comes from the patterns that we were taught. Your gift is life. Let us engage in it as fully as we can, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Ezekiel 17:22-24 | 2 Corinthians 5:6-10 | Mark 4:26-34

Oh God, strength of those who hope in you, graciously hear our pleas and, since without you mortal frailty can do nothing, grant us always the help of your grace that in following your commands we may please you by our resolve and our deeds. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

We’ve entered ordinary time, the time when we simply reflect upon one of the evangelists’ reflections on what it was like to know this God/man Jesus, and so this is the year that we focus on the Gospel of Mark. So we’re going to look at his view of this experience with this God/man Jesus, and when you think about it, the responsibility that we have to each other as a church, as a believing community is to witness the truth of who God is and who we are and what we’re here to accomplish. If you go to religion for something, you say, “Well, I’m going so I can have a relationship with God,” or, “I go to be forgiven for my sins,” or, “I go to learn more about the mysteries of my faith.” No matter what focus you might have or what you’re looking for, the one thing that the heart longs for more than anything else, as well as the mind, is truth. Healthy religion shares the truth of who we are and why we’re here and who God is, and when you get a number of people living out of that truth, they witness it to one another, and it grows, and it is more and more fruitful and more abundant. So my prayer is, as we go through these many Sundays of ordinary time coming up, we will grow in our understanding from the witness of this one man, Mark, the evangelist, and to enhance whatever is in the gospel, we have these other two readings. You know how it works. They are chosen because of the gospel.

And the first reading is interesting, because I’d like you to put this whole set of readings in a context. What is God’s role in your life? What is it that we’re asked to turn to him and ask for, or what is it we’re asked to have a strong, strong conviction that he will do something for us, He will be someone for us? So this first reading is about, in a way, the work of God in the Old Testament. What does God do for his people? Well, one of the things, he gathers them together, and he wants them to follow his rules and his laws. That’s important, and they were at such a level of consciousness that they had to be told pretty much what to do. The Ten Commandments, the best user manual for human nature, basically says you have a God that is real, that is true. You need to spend time with him, and you have his power dwelling in you. Never use it in vain. Never use it in a way that is destructive, and for goodness sakes, take care of each other. That’s very simple advice, and that’s exactly what God longs to enter into our life to help us to achieve.

So the question is how much of what we do is what we asked for in the opening prayer, the grace, his help to enable us to do what we’re here for, to achieve what we’re here to achieve. And it’s interesting. There are two forms of, I guess you might say, faith or religion. One is called deism, and one is called theism. And theism is a good description of Christianity. Theism is a belief in one God and that this God is very powerful and very much engaged in the work of guiding us through this journey on this plane that we’re living on so that we can accomplish the task that we’re here to accomplish, and we can’t do it without his grace. So theism believes that God exists and that God is intimately engaged in everything going on in the world. And deism is like that, does believe that there is a God, but it doesn’t believe that he has anything to do with what’s happening. He is completely neutral as far as the way the world is going. Whatever it is that you’re engaged in, it’s up to you to figure it out, how to get out of it or how to make it better, and he just is pretty much of an absent landlord, an absent father. And you say, “What’s attractive in that?” Well, the thing that’s attractive in it is you don’t have to believe in something that you can’t explain, that you can’t prove, but it’s impossible to listen to the Christian message without realizing that God has revealed himself as not only someone who cares about how we live but recognizes how impossible it is for us to accomplish the things we’re here to do without his intimate, personal attention and his presence within us.

So this first reading is from the Old Testament, from Ezekiel. It is about the role that God has in the life of the people that’s, you might say, their political life, life on this planet as it is in a way that humans are in charge. And the interesting thing about the image of the cedar is that that’s the different kingdoms, and if a kingdom fails and falls apart, he takes the top of it off and clips it and then plants it somewhere else, on a higher level of consciousness, let’s say, a higher place. And then it grows into a new kingdom, a new political system, and as those systems go through, as they all do, good times, bad times, times when they’re very, very fruitful and very effective and other times when they all fall apart, what God is saying in the Old Testament through this prophet is, “Look, I’m the one that’s in charge of all that. I can make a kingdom flourish, or I can let it fall apart.” If you need to have in your history right now, the human race, you need — this group of people needs to have a calm, protective government, that’s what they need at that time, and that’s what God has prepared for them. And then if somehow they need something more that tests their resilience and their trust, they’re going to go through a horrible experience of abuse and tyranny, and what God is saying in the Old Testament is, “Look, don’t think this is all just happenstance. I am in charge of the way the kingdoms of the world are affecting you, and I’m careful that they are always there for you for what you need. Sometimes you need comfort. Sometimes you need challenge. Sometimes you need to be at ease. Sometimes you need to be in pain. I’m in charge.” Amazing. How does that work? I have no idea. If he’s in charge of everything, then we’re nothing but puppets? No, we’re absolutely free to choose whatever we want, but in some mysterious way beyond our imagining, everything works for the good of each of us. A pandemic, a time of peace, prosperity, a time of horrible war and conflict, all of those, he knows exactly what’s happening. He allows it. He allows it to the point that it’s just perfect for us.

And then you see in the second reading another image of the way God works with his people, and in that old-time system in the Old Testament, one of the things that’s clear is that there is a relationship with God that’s under the law, and you must perform and keep the law in order to have God’s favor. That’s definitely Old Testament stuff, and yet the New Testament it’s radically different. Instead of a law being the core of what — that connects us to God, following his rules and laws, no, it’s now receiving and accepting his forgiveness, his love, his presence, living in us on a daily basis. The New Testament is so new, so different that it’s often never fully embraced, because we hang onto the old, because it makes sense to the mind, not to the heart. The heart loves the image of being loved and being forgiven, but listen to Paul, because Paul did not ever experience the physical presence of Jesus. He had a vision, and he worked with this vision in his heart, and he worked with Jesus working in him. But the interesting thing about what he’s saying there, if you listen to the words carefully, he’s saying, “We live in this world, and when we’re in this world, we’re separated from God. And that’s painful, to be separated from God. So we look forward to dying, but we don’t really want to kill ourselves.” That’s what he’s saying, because we need to stay here. We need to work with whatever it is, but basically it’s clear that what Paul is simply saying is we’re here to perform in a way that pleases God, and when we finish with our performance, we go to heaven. And then we’re going to be judged, and we get rewarded or punished. Now think about that. That is not New Testament. That’s Old Testament, separated from God and being judged at the end. New Testament, God is in us. God is with us, and when it comes to the end, we go, and we present to God our faults, our weaknesses, and he says, “Oh, by the way, someone has already come here ahead of you, and they paid for all your debts. It’s somebody who died in Jerusalem. Do you know him?” Amazing. We live in a world — if we live in the world that God has intended to live in, there is great joy and peace, because we’re not being held to the responsibility of our failures. We’re being held to a relationship that we have to trust in where God is there for us, and one of the things that Jesus did that has always been God plan, he reveals to us that we flourish in an atmosphere where we really, truly believe that we are safe and that we are loved and we are valued. That’s the gift of God’s presence within us.

So we look then to the gospel, because now what I’m trying to do is put you in touch with how it is that God is engaged in your life in an intimate way. We are theists, not deists. We believe that God has a role in our life, and so how would we describe that role? And then Jesus gives us the image, a parable, a parable about how it is that he is engaged daily in your life and in mine. Well, let’s see if I can dig deep into this parable and awaken it for you, because it’s beautiful. What it’s saying is basically in your life, in my life, God has planted a seed inside of you. It is your true self, your authentic self. It comes in the form of an undifferentiated, unconscious form. You’re a baby. You come into the world, and you don’t know anything. But when you’re not fed and you’re not safe, you scream, and you cry. That’s that low level of consciousness where we need definitely to find a place where we’re safe, and then as we grow older, we realize that we need very much someone to be there for us. And if we don’t have someone who loves us — first, people have created a safe place for us, and then we’re loved and honored. And then as that evolves and we grow into maturity, we discover something in us, the seed in us that now is safe and loved and feels like it has value. A creative force is in us all, and then we have this awakening. The Spirit awakens us to our gift. What is it that is in me, that has been there from the beginning, that God wants me to develop? I know that if I develop it and I use it for good, I will find joy and happiness in my life. So the image of this field is — the field is you and me, and the seed is this gift of God, that unique person that he’s created each of us to be. And how it grows you don’t know. How is it that I evolve from this whiny, little baby screaming to an altruistic, loving, giving person who creates something so valuable to other people and gives it away with the simple joy that I’m doing something that brings me joy? Because when I’m loving and saving and healing, I’m the happiest I could ever be. That evolution, how does it happen? Well, through all the weird things that go on in your life, but there is always the promise that it will happen. You will grow and develop this seed that is planted inside of you. It’s not — you didn’t create the seed. You didn’t create that unique thing that’s you, that you need to believe in and trust in and develop and give whatever gift you have away. You didn’t do that. That was a gift from God, but you, your consciousness is in charge. And what a thing that God would give each individual a role in the communities they live in that is integral to the work of saving everyone and bringing everyone into the truth, and he gives us complete freedom whether to use it or not. And what a tragedy when we don’t, and it’s often because we’ve never found a place where we’re safe. We’ve never found a place where we’re loved. We’ve never found a place where someone gave us value. If we count on other people to do that, it’s pretty risky, but if you understand finally and fully, as a full-blown theist, God is engaged in your life, and he wants more than anything else for you to not only survive but develop and grow and become who you are. And he is so dedicated to that that nothing in the world, no absence of love and no other problem is going to keep you from it. That’s the trust in a God who is engaged daily in your life, and that’s what makes life so much different. And there is such a thing as religion that has peace, joy and love instead of shame, fear and anger.

Father, your goodness and the intimacy that you long to have with us is beyond our imagining. It’s so difficult for us to understand this, because there’s a way in which we don’t feel worthy, but in another sense, there is a kind of frightening part of being so close to someone so powerful that somehow we won’t survive or that we’ll lose our individuality. So bless us with the capacity, which would be your grace, enabling us to embrace something that goes beyond our mind but yet feeds and nurtures and awakens our hearts to a life of true service. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

I’m excited about having a podcast, and I hope you’ve discovered it on your iPhone or your computer. Go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe to Finding God in Ourselves. It’s free to listen to anywhere anytime. So I hope you enjoy the podcast. It makes it very easy and convenient for you to listen, and I pray it’ll be very successful in helping my message to reach more and more people.

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Exodus 24:3-8 | Hebrews 9:11-15 | Mark 14:12-16, 22-26

Oh God, who in this wonderful sacrament have left us a memorial of your passion, grant us, we pray, so as to revere the sacred mysteries of your body and blood that we may always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

In the very beginning of the church, as it became more and more what God intended it to be, there was a time when there was a decision made about how we would gather together to remember the great gift of God’s redemption through Jesus, and there was a way in which we decided very early on that there would be a gathering over and over again where we would celebrate this mysterious thing that happened that we recorded in this feast, that evening where Jesus, with his disciples, initiated what we call the Eucharist. And that has always been the center focus of our worship, but one of the things that had to develop eventually was how are we going to do that. And then there was this thing called the ritual of the church in terms of how we celebrate on a regular weekly basis, and it evolved into a very beautiful process of reliving, reenacting over and over again salvation history through a set of readings. And always when we read the readings and pondered them, we would celebrate and do what Jesus told us to do. Whenever we gather in his name, we should remember him, and to remember him is to engage in the very core of his ministry, his redemption, or maybe I should say, our redemption given to us by him. To be redeemed, what does it mean? Why is it the heart of the whole story of salvation history? Well, I’m praying that in this homily today that focuses on that event that changed the world in terms of a way of relating to God, I want to see if I can get to the heart of what it means and what we’re really celebrating.

So let’s go back, as we did during this liturgical season, and that’s what I’m talking about earlier when is said the church sat down and decided how it would celebrate throughout a year these Sundays. We have what we call the liturgy of the word. It’s the story, told over and over and over again of salvation history. And I’ve said this to you many times, and I believe with all my heart that that is not just the story that happened to people thousands of years ago. It’s our story. It’s the human story, the story of God relating to humans, humans responding to God’s invitation to be a part of his life, to be engaged in something that we were meant to be engaged in. If you go back to the earliest story of God’s encountering human beings, however you want to imagine it, whether it happened over centuries of evolution or whether it happened in a moment, doesn’t matter. But we have the story of when God first encountered human beings, and he invited them into a relationship with him where they would be gathered together with him to tend the garden, to tend the world. And he said, “You may do this with me.” The emphasis is “with me”. “So you’re engaging in this work that I’m inviting you into. I want you to be careful not to fall into a trap that is more egocentric and self-centered, and that is symbolized in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” And what that tree represents is nothing other than the autonomy that every human being feels they need and must have in order to fulfill their longings. That story is not a story about the original sin in so much as disobedience as the original problem, which is human beings prefer to do things on their own. We know the next two stories about human beings in the early days of the whole story of salvation history. We have not only autonomy is a problem but also jealousy and competition, Cain and Abel. We also have that very interesting story of hubris, people gathering together, deciding they can do anything they want. So that’s the dilemma. That’s the beginning, human beings wanting to be on their own, God wanting to engage them in a relationship of cooperation, partnership and doing work.

So we have in the beginning a way that first God decides he’s got to enter into these people, because they’re stiff-necked, to say the least. So he says, “What I’ll do is I’ll establish a relationship with you. I’m going to make you a people that are mine, and so the way I will gather you around me is to give you a law. You’ll be responsible for fulfilling all the things in the law, and then I will be your God, stronger than all the other gods. I’ll protect you, but you must do what I tell you to do. You must do what I ask you to do. That’s the relationship I want with you.” When you think about it, when you have a strong, autonomous kind of streak in you, all right, you might say, “Well, this may be working for me. So if you’re going to take care of me and keep me safe from my enemies, I’ll do whatever you say, but I’m doing it because I want to do it for me. I want to be protected, so yeah, I’ll accept you, God, as the God who protects me and takes care of me. And what I’ll do on my part is I’ll do whatever you say.” And so the law was established, and that’s what we have in the first reading, God proclaiming to the people a relationship based on what they are asked to do. And that’s what’s called the Old Testament or the old covenant. It’s a simple covenant in a sense. “Do what I say, and I’m your God. Don’t do what I say, and I separate from you, and you’re on your own.” So the relationship is based on obedience, doing what you’re told, and that, in a sense, never worked if you look at the story. There is something that humans being have deep inside of them, this autonomous streak or whatever — just to be told what to do by a power greater than themselves and to do it in order to get something back just doesn’t seem to be enough for us human beings. We want more than that, and so this old covenant, Old Testament, was in effect ineffective.

And so there comes a moment when God realizes it’s time to reveal not just that part of his desire, meaning, “I want a people of my own to do what I say.” He goes even further and in a way that’s absolutely unexpected said, “No, what I really want is not a relationship with people where I control their behavior but where I enter into them and I change their behavior. I awaken something in them that is deeper than their autonomous streak, and I open something in there that is intended to be opened eventually as they grow and mature.” And they end up realizing that this invitation, on the part of God, is not just to just do what your told but to become who you were meant to be. You feel the difference? If somebody comes up to you and says, “You must to this in order to keep the relationship,” that makes kind of one relationship. But if you comes up and said, “Look, I would like to enter into you, because my intention is to awaken in you, by my relationship with you, who you are really meant to be. And that thing that you’re meant to be is an intimate relationship with me. So it’s no longer me asking you to do something for me but we doing something together — we doing something together.” That’s the mystery of the New Testament, the new covenant.

Now, the old covenant had the weakness. The biggest weakness of the old covenant was you had to follow the rules and laws, and if you broke them, then you broke the relationship. That’s the first covenant. It was based on obedience, and what the covenant — when you see it established in the Old Testament, it was an interesting covenant, because it was something that was done in blood. And the blood image is this: the relationship you have with God is going to be God taking care of you, and without his care, you will self-destruct. In a sense, you will die. So what God in the Old Testament was promising is, “If you follow my ways and my rules, you’ll find life, but if you don’t, there will be death.” That’s why blood was used as a statement or a way of expressing this covenant. An animal was cut in half. The blood was taken, part of it sprinkled on the victim and part of it on the person, and so that whole image of, if you break the covenant, you have killed something. Then something has to be done to make up for that, and the fascinating thing about the Old Testament is what fixed you, when you had broken the law, what reestablished you with God was the killing of an animal, which seemed strange to me at first. What is that doing? Well, it’s expressing that something had to be sacrificed. Something had to be shown, I would say, by sacrifice, as to what you were doing when you broke the law. You were cutting yourself off from this God in your life, guiding you and taking care of you and protecting you. And so if you offered a sacrifice, if you killed something, it was this — to me it seems like it was a strong reminder of how essential this relationship was if you’re going to continue to live the life that you would like to live, being protected by a greater power than yourself. But again, it had to be done over and over again, and people kept failing and kept being asked to do what they’re told and kept failing. So it never produced anything that made a major difference in the relationship or the capacity, let’s say, of human beings to have a relationship with God.

So something had to change, and then we come to the new covenant. And so it’s interesting to me. This whole review of salvation history that started with Ash Wednesday and ends this Sunday ends with this incredible moment when Jesus does something that changes everything in terms of our relationship with God. No longer does it depend upon human beings offering a sacrifice to make up for their fault to be reestablished with God. Jesus said, “I will be that sacrifice. I will give my life. You will not give just an animal’s life in reparation, but I will give my life for you.” Now, without trying to get too far into understanding exactly how the mechanics of that works, just believe this: there was something that you had to do to fix the relationship that you had broken, when you broke the law, that is no longer necessary. It’s been done for you. So every debt that you’ve ever owed to God or anybody else, in that sense, because of your self-centeredness and your autonomy, your competitive jealousy, all those terrible things we do to one another, they have all been made up for, removed by this one act of Jesus offering his life for the people, for us.

Now, here’s the key, I think, that I want you to feel. There’s a resistance to this gift. There’s a resistance that is still in all of us. It’s part of that autonomy, part of that desire to do everything on our own, but we have to realize that this gift of God’s presence entering into us — and it’s not dependent upon performance? It’s really hard to believe. It’s like having a relationship where it doesn’t matter how horrible you are. The relationship never, in terms of the flow of life coming from the other, never is diminished. That’s the heart of this whole mysterious, Eucharistic gift. You can’t damage your relationship with God, and he’s promising you two things. He’s promising you, “I’m going to enter into you,” because in this mysterious thing called the Last Supper, Eucharist, he said two things. He not only said them, but he acted them out. He said, “I want you to understand that I am giving myself, my body, my strength, my essence. I’m giving that to you, and how I give it to you is not simply by dying for you, but in the act of dying for you, I’m telling you that what I’m doing is entering into you. I’m giving you my body,” he’s saying. “I’m giving you me. I’m giving you my presence in your life, no matter how good you are or bad you are. It doesn’t change my desire to be in you. So please allow me to enter into you.” That’s the essence of, “This is my body. Take it. Eat it. Take it inside.”

It’s funny — not funny but interesting that there’s another feast this week that is kind of connected. Not kind of, it’s really connected to the Eucharistic celebration, and it’s the Feast of the Sacred Heart. And there was a devotion that started in the Middle Ages that was really a wonderful image of this desire on the part of God to enter into us, to be a part of us. It was his heart, his essence that he wanted to say, “I want to come and dwell in your heart.” And there was a very interesting saint, St. Luthgard, and she had a relationship with God. She was a mystic in the 12th century, and she had this experience of God answering her prayers. And so she thought, “Well, gosh, if he can answer my prayers, I could ask for anything.” So she asked if she could be a part of him, if he would come with her and dwell with her in an intimate way, and she has this vision. It’s so powerful. It’s a mystical vision, and Jesus appeared to her, and when he did, when she said, “I want intimacy with you. I want you to be a part of my life,” he took his hand into her chest and took her heart out and then held it and then took his heart and put it in her and put his [sic] heart in himself. How’s that for intimacy, heartfulness, connection, and that was part of that whole devotion to the Sacred Heart, the intense love on the part of God to say, “Look, it’s not enough for me to tell you to do something for me in order to establish a relationship. I realize I want to be more than that to you. I want to be more than a law.”

The whole story of the Old Testament is the failure of the law to produce the relationship that we need with God, and the New Testament, the new covenant is based on something radically different, God entering into you and me in our imperfection, our sinfulness, and wanting to dwell there. And there’s nothing we can do in terms of lack of perfection that will limit his desire. The desire is that intense — it’s like a fire inside of him. “I love human beings. I will offer myself to dwell with them no matter who they are or where they are.” And then the second part of the Eucharist is that beautiful part where he said, “And this is my blood. And this blood is the essence of the new covenant, and it’s poured out for your sins, for all your imperfections, meaning I will absorb all the things that the Old Testament system was geared to perform for you, all those rituals you had to pay for and go through, which reinstated you into a relationship with God. I’m going to do that for you by just shedding my blood.” So the blood of the new covenant is not the blood, your blood, God blood intermingling over a promise that the minute you break that promise you die and you bleed. No, it’s a complete different image. It’s, “I’m making up for every sin you’ll ever commit.”

Father, your new covenant, your new promise of your presence in our lives is hard for us to still grasp. It holds so much power, but yet we’re afraid of the intimacy. So bless us with an open heart, receptive heart, allowing you to dwell there and to do the work that you’ve called us all to do with you. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Deuteronomy 4:32-34, 39-40 | Romans 8:14-17 | Matthew 28:16-20

God our Father, who by sending into the world the word of truth and the spirit of sanctification made known to the human race your wondrous mystery, grant us, we pray, that in professing the true faith we may acknowledge the Trinity of eternal glory and adore your unity, powerful in majesty. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

This feast is one of the three feasts that we end this incredibly important season that started in Lenten and ends week after this, and the three feasts focus on the Trinity. Last Sunday it was Pentecost when we hear the story of how this mysterious, powerful force entered into human beings who were longing for something more than they could ever achieve on their own, and they found themselves being enlightened and empowered to communicate in a way that was just, in a way, mysteriously effective. It was like whatever they were speaking at that moment was understood by people who didn’t necessarily speak the language. So it was that moment when spirit becomes integrated into our human spirit, divine spirit in human spirit. We have an enormous power, effectiveness in changing hearts, in awakening people to truth. Then today we celebrate the Feast of the Trinity, which is the focus on the notion that we have God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit. So this is the wholeness of God that we want to talk about today, and then the next one is the Feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus. It’s that focus on this incredible gift of being able to take this image of Jesus, who is the fullness of God, and take him into our body and to feel its nourishment and its cleansing power. So we focus on the Trinity. We focused before that on the Holy Spirit, and then we focus on Jesus.

So what I’d like to do today is see if I can’t clarify something that I find often creeping into people’s spirituality, and that is a misunderstanding of the whole notion of Trinity. And the big misconception is that there are three Gods or three very different aspects of God, so different that they remain somewhat separate. So there’s a lot of people who will tell me, “I like God the Father. I don’t like Jesus, because Jesus seems too wishy-washy and too easy on people, and I like things clear and black and white. So I like God the Father.” Other people say, “I don’t like God the Father, because he’s so tough, and he’s angry so often and punishes and is demanding. So I like Jesus better.” And then this Holy Spirit figure, well, we don’t know much about that, but I remember one friend of mine used to describe trying to teach the Trinity to American Indians, and they’d say, ‘Honorable Father I understand. Honorable Son I understand. Honorable bird I don’t understand.’” And the Spirit is hard to understand, because it’s a mysterious event that happens in the person who receives both the gifts of the Father and the gifts of the Son, and those are the same God.

So let me see if I can help you integrate these three, because the way to do it is not to ever imagine that there was a God the Father, then a God the Son, then a God the Spirit. These are three stages of the evolution of who God is. And why does he come in the three different images? Well, it’s because of a mysterious thing called the Law of the Three. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but it’s very important, and it’s pretty simple, and I can explain it. It goes like this. There’s a way to see the world in a black and white, either/or binary world. That’s not the way the world really is. It’s a triune sort of thing, and what I mean by that is, when we are seeking the truth, it’s not a matter of finding all the things that are true and following those, destroy all the things that are wrong, and then we’ll find we live solely in the truth. No, it’s the tension between what is right and what is wrong, and that tension creates a third thing called wisdom.

So if you know anything about literature — and you know we live for stories. Without stories, we would be almost not human. We need a story to work on. I go to Netflix, and I go to Amazon all the time, and I want to check the latest story, the latest episode of a story I’m already into. We grow from stories. They’re sources of all kinds of wonderful, wonderful things that we need to see and understand. So if we look at scripture as a story, and it’s the story, and it’s probably the — well, not probably. It is the most read and pondered story ever in existence. It starts with God creating the world and ends with the Spirit of God entering into people. That’s the basic story, and it’s not a story you would go to — and maybe this is more the Old Testament — where you go and say, “Okay, I’m here in the world to do what is right. So tell me what is right. Tell me what is wrong. I will always choose what is right and always reject what is wrong.” That is an incomplete image of what a story does and what it’s for. No, it’s a story about a protagonist and an antagonist. Every story has those two characters. One is the one who is there to make the point of the story. That’s usually a hero. It’s usually a good person who’s there to bring truth to the world, and then there’s an antagonist, a resistant person who wants to destroy that and not allow it to take its root in people and change them. And the story is always about the tension and the struggle between the protagonist and the antagonist.

Well, what is the protagonist and antagonist in the story of scripture? Well, I could use this: the protagonist is God wanting something, and God’s longing is for human beings to become all that they need to be. And he knows and wants to teach us that there’s only one way that can happen, and that’s when he enters into us and works with us. So he has a goal, and the goodness of his goal is our fullness, which can only take place if we surrender to his strength. And the antagonist is human nature. We see human nature revealed so clearly in the Old Testament in those first books of the Torah when we see that human beings, first of all, when told what to do, they don’t respond very well. So the story of Adam and Eve is human beings who really do like to be on their own. They like autonomy. They’d rather be like God than need God. So we see that part of human nature revealed in the Adam and Eve story. Then the Cain and Abel story, again, shows us there’s a kind of competition and jealousy in human beings. We like not only being autonomous; we like being better than other people. And the Tower of Babel story is about our addiction to success. So there’s a tension: a God who wants us to become like him, who we’re intended to be, and human nature that resists it. And then the third part is watching the story unfold and watching how they work together until there’s some kind of integration, and then there’s an ending. And the integration part is what’s so interesting to me, because the integration part is somehow found in that incredibly interesting figure called Jesus. You have God the Father in resistance to human beings resisting each other because of the dichotomy that they can’t come together in understanding what they’re there for, and then in Jesus, this mysterious creature, we find this work. And that’s the work that we’re all engaged in, how to live in the world filled with the Holy Spirit, with God’s presence, and then somehow, in the struggle, you find in Jesus, suffering.

That’s the image I want to focus on that is the work that you and I engage in as people who listen to that story and try to integrate ourselves into the work that the story reveals to us that is our destiny, integration of humanity and divinity. And how does it work? I don't know. I can’t describe it. All I know is we see in the life of Jesus this struggle that he has at one point in his life, and he realizes that he wants more than anything else to take care of the human beings that he loves so deeply. And yet he realizes that their resistance is so strong that they’re going to keep him from doing that, and then somehow he surrenders to that. He suffers it, and while he sees himself being destroyed by the antagonist, when he gives in to it and forgives the antagonist, then it works. Then the Spirit rushes in. Interesting. That’s the thing that I want you to feel with me when we think about this whole thing called how do we integrate this Trinitarian God into our life. And we do it this way. I can describe it as best I can. We listen to God the Father, who is the giver of all truth, and we look at him and listen to him, and he tells us that there’s a destiny that we have and that we are to choose the thing that is right. He wants us to do that. His intention, the God intention of our Father is, “I created you for a purpose, and I long for you to engage in that purpose, because it is there, designed for you that you will find fulfillment.” That’s the role of the Father, and then we look at our resistance to that. And I know it. You know yours. It’s all different shades of those things I mentioned earlier. It’s the shade of I’d rather do it myself, the sort of part of us that likes to be better than other people, the part that really loves to be successful. All that, that’s ego.

So do we just then integrate that? Well, we allow the story of Jesus, which is the heart of who God is — he is God the Father. He has that part of him that longs desperately to bring us into fullness, and when we have no way of understanding it, he turns it into rules and regulations, knowing that that would be better than just leading us into a place of self-destruction. But then he knows, and he reveals to us through Jesus that there is this third way. And the third way is that this beautiful image of God the Father comes out as a God who is like us. So he moves from master to servant, and when — we understand the servant-hood that we see in Jesus is a part that’s always been in the Father and we’re seeing now both a Father who’s a master and a Father who is a servant, and that servant comes in the form of the Son of the Father, because we are to be reborn as his children. And so humanity working out its tension with divinity in the person of Jesus is a description of what it means to be a son or a daughter of God, and then when we’re in that work, there comes this integration. The integration is: how do I understand my humanity and the divinity that is in me? How do I understand those two working together, and what takes away the resistance? Well, it goes something like this, I think. The first part of God’s revealing himself is the sense that he’s asking us to become someone for him. What he’s asking us to become is who we’re destined to be, but we resist that. So we have this tension, and so what he wants to do is he’s trying to say, “Okay, this is the tension I want you to learn to live with and to be engaged in, and then what I’m going to do is I’m going to integrate my Spirit into you. And when you can feel my Spirit entering into you — and it’s going to awaken in you a wisdom.” And the wisdom is not simply that God needs you to be who he wants you to be by telling you what to do. It’s this mysterious addition that he’s saying, “No, you, your nature — your nature wants me to be a part of you. You need me.” So the integration is God revealing himself as a God who wants us to be in union with him, and then we grow into human beings, through the integration of Jesus and the struggle of Jesus, we grow into people who want God. That’s the way it’s resolved.

The beauty of the Trinity is inviting us into a place where we allow God to use us for whatever he wants, but we also ask God to be the source of what we need to be able to do the things that we need. In other words, we say, “I need you God.” And God said, “I need you.” So when you come to that integration of God needing you and you needing God, both of which is to bring us to the fullness of who we are, instruments of bringing grace and life to the world, we become this mysterious, spiritual power that transforms the world by who we are, human beings receiving God as a source and God delighting in we being the source that he needs to be able to reach people. I never thought that God had created a world in which he depends upon us to bring his world, his truth to other people. That’s the mystery. That’s the beauty of this integration that comes from understanding the Trinity, we living in God, God living in us and both of us benefiting enormously where there’s no competition, and there’s no protagonist and no antagonist anymore. There’s just union and communion. It’s a gift to know the integration of all these different parts that we tend to keep separate, but when they come together, there is truth.

Father, the longing that you have had from the very beginning is union, communion with us, you needing us, we needing you. When we enter into that world, we find ourselves engaged in work that is beyond our imagining. It’s mysterious. It’s mystical. It’s the world of the spirit. So bless us with the courage that enables us to go through whatever process we need to, whatever integration of things that we think are separated bringing into oneness. Help us with this gift so we can truly be living a Trinitarian life, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Genesis 11:1-9 | Romans 8:22-27 | John 7:37-39

God our Father, who by sending into the world the word of truth and the spirit of sanctification made known to the human race your wondrous mystery, grant us, we pray, that in professing the true faith we may acknowledge the Trinity of eternal glory and adore your unity, power and majesty. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

This feast celebrates a very important moment in history, the history of God revealing himself to his people and revealing to them who they are and why they’re here. It’s the fullness of the message. It comes in this form of an event that happened to the disciples, and let’s look at the event to start with so we can be in touch with the symbolism that is so rich in this experience called Pentecost and see if we can apply it to the reality that this feast is trying to put us in touch with. And the reality is God entering into you and entering into me in this mysterious form of his presence, his Spirit, and his transforming power, what it does when it enters into us, but first of all, it’s a gathering after Jesus rose from the dead and then spent 40 days talking to his disciples and teaching. And then he said, “I want you to gather in a place and this gift will be given to you.”

Well, the apostles were there. Mary was there, the mother of Jesus. They consider that maybe 100 followers of Jesus were in this room, and all of a sudden there was this overwhelming sense of a wind, a mysterious, powerful wind, which has been used in scripture as an image of the presence, mysterious, powerful presence of God. You don’t know where it comes from. You don’t know where it goes, but it is so powerful. And then there is this image that, while they’re gathered together, that there appeared as if tongues of fire had descended from the heavens and was above their heads. The image is fire, and fire is used in scripture, throughout scripture as a form of transformation, and it’s two-fold. It purifies. It burns out everything that’s not authentic, not real. It exposes half-truths and lies and removes them, and in its place, it adds enlightenment.

So here are the disciples in this room with all these other disciples and followers, and there’s this noise and this happening thing that’s going on. And what happens is that all of a sudden then there are a bunch of observers. All these other people from all over the world are watching all of this, and then all of a sudden, these disciples, the followers of Christ who have these tongues over their heads, start speaking in language that everyone can hear and everyone can understand. And some say it was speaking in tongues, and speaking in tongues is a very interesting thing. I mentioned it last week in my homily, but it’s the idea that there is this language that often can overtake someone where it isn’t — doesn’t make sense to the mind. It’s not words that you recall having heard before, whatever. No, it’s a sound, and it conveys something, even though it’s not a literal thing that your ear hears and then your mind understands. It’s the kind of language, what I call the language of the heart. It’s like this language that carries with it not an information but a sense or a presence of something that goes directly to the heart.

So those are the images. Well, I left the other one out. The people that were around from all different parts of the world understood exactly what they were saying. Now, that’s just really bizarre, so let’s look at it. This is the final piece of salvation history. God began this whole story in a garden when he created Adam and Eve, and in that moment, he established a relationship with them where he was going to be the God that shared with these creatures the garden. God was saying, “Would you help tend my garden with me? And you have just one thing you shouldn’t do. Be careful of that tree of knowledge of good and evil, and just stay away from that, and you’ll be fine.” And we know the story. That tree is an image of humanity, the desire of humans to be in charge, to know what’s right, to know what’s wrong or to be at least in charge enough to say, “This is what I want to do, and this is how I’ll do it.” It’s an image of the autonomy that was also in these humans that God created. It’s called free will, and it looks like it’s a major obstacle in the beginning, because they don’t follow what God asks. They followed a voice, and the voice came from this creature. We don’t know who the creature was. We know what happened to the creature when he lied to these people and said, “Look, what you really want, and it seems to be something that’s pretty good, you want to be like God, and certainly God is going to be pleased if you want to be like him. So go ahead and eat.” But it’s just a beautiful image to me that there is a part of human nature that would like to be like the God that created us, and that means to be able to accomplish things on our own.

So the rest of the story starts there, and then it evolves over 2,000 years or more with this story of salvation history where the story goes on, and we see human beings struggling with this autonomous part of them and a God who then has to work with them. And sense he can’t reach them, he has to work on them from sort of outside of their psyche, their soul, and so all he can do is control them. And so we have God in the Old Testament revealing himself as a jealous and sometimes angry and vengeful God who wants and has to, I guess, in terms of trying to help the people that he loves so much, he has to control them from being violent to each other and destructive to each other. So he controls them by laws and regulations, and that’s so much of the Old Testament, and it’s not successful. It’s resented on the part of the people who are told they have to do this or be punished. It’s frustrating for God, because he can’t seem to reach their hearts, where he really wants to change them. And so it just goes on that way until finally, even though there were prophets and priests and kings trying to lead them, it came to a point where something had to be done. Something had to be changed in human beings, and so the God then, who was somewhat distant and worked through rules and regulations and rituals, he realizes, “I’ve got to reach these people, and I can’t do it through an institution. I have to do it in a more personal way. I will come into the world so that I can be with them.”

With them — so God becomes a human being and enters into the life of a small gathering of people and starts revealing to them the fullness of God that was hidden in the Old Testament. And what do we find? A lover, not a taskmaster and not a judge but one who forgives, and the forgiveness and the non-judgment and the desire to enable them to feel the love that came from God’s heart to them was finally revealed in this person, Jesus, and it had a profound impact on these people. But the fact that they didn’t fully understand it implied that just being present to them wasn’t enough, because God’s presence had another reason for happening. It had to transform human beings. So you get this long salvation history of God working with human beings, trying to change them, in a sense, from the outside, explaining to them who he was, and even when that was all done, these disciples, who represent all of us, our human nature, were still saying, “Well, we really love that you are there for us, and we can’t wait till you give us the authority and the power to run the world with you. We want to be in charge.” It’s like we couldn’t shake that autonomy until something radically changed, and that’s called Pentecost.

This is the mind-boggling thing that I don’t think I, as a priest, have really faced much in my earlier years of ministry, but in these years of retirement and reflection, I see it clearer and clearer that the only way in which we can be the people that God calls us to be is we allow this mysterious thing to take place. And that is that God’s Spirit enters into us, and we live in God, not instructed by God, not working for God but working with God in us. And when we allow that image to take root in us, that truth that becomes incarnate in us, something has to happen first, and the thing that has to happen is the heart of the New Testament, is this crucifixion thing that Jesus went through, to surrender the way our life, his life was written, give in, surrender. So I don't know if you can feel this, but what I’m trying to say is we had a relationship with God where he was in charge and in control, and he managed us by rules and regulations, and it was a disaster. It never really worked very well. Then he sends his Son, and his Son comes and does his work, and they still didn’t grasp it fully. And the thing that really completely confused them was the death of Jesus, the way he died, what he surrendered to, and it made no sense to them at all, and they were really confused. And then comes the final piece, an example of what they must go through and then the empowering gift of grace that enables them to do it. That’s that fire image coming down into the human beings heart and purifying it of everything that’s self-centered, everything that’s half-true, every lie. It removes that. In its place, it brings enlightenment, and enlightenment is the ability for a human being to be conscious enough to realize what it means that God says, “I want to live in you, with you. That’s what I wanted when I made you in the garden. That’s what I always intended, but I had to tell a story. I had to do this long story, because the story is not simply about what happened in the past. But it’s the story of every single human being.”

We all go through this whole thing as we come into the world, one after another after another. You come into the world. You’re created. You become conscious as a child. You’re obviously engaged in a relationship from the very beginning. That’s what human beings are made for, relationships. That’s what God wanted with human beings. He wanted a relationship with them, so he made them relational. And the first relationships are with our parents, with our family of origin, with our culture and all of that, and that forms us. Along with that whole process, there is this God in your life and in mine who has been engaged in every single event that happened throughout your young years and your formative years that are much like those years in the Old Testament where you feel the obligation of responsibility as a burden, and you have to do these things, and you do them, because you have to. But if you can get away with not doing them, you won’t do them. It’s like that’s our story until maturity and evolution brings us to a point where we’re realizing, “I don’t know. There’s something in me that is made for so much more than just trying to fix my life and get it cleaner and more pure. It’s not satisfying enough.” And fixing yourself is never going to be that satisfying, because that’s not even our job. God is the one that transforms us. We don’t fix ourselves, but what happens when we are transformed, there, that’s the heart of who we are and what we’re here for, partnership with divinity in tending and shepherding the world. And the world is most especially considered human beings, the crown of creation of God, tending them.

So interesting that the world is the context in which we — a place where we live, but the real work is always between us and each other and God. That’s where it all takes place, and if you can imagine, the work is you and I participating in this phenomenal, wonderful task of awakening others to this reality and enabling them to live in it. There’s a satisfaction in that that is beyond anything that has to do with being in some kind of self-improvement work. To work on yourself, to get yourself into a really beautiful person, whether it’s physically or in the eyes of the culture and all that, there’s a longing to do that and a satisfaction in that, but nothing is as satisfying as being engaged in doing something that is actually going to create the kind of fulfillment that the world teaches us perfection and position and power offer us. Those things don’t satisfy, but co-creating a world in which there is peace and love and, I don't know, a sense of wonder versus a world that is filled with envy and jealousy and pain and suffering and abuse, that work of entering into this other world, is the key to being who God has called us to be in this world. And I don't know why it’s taken me so long to realize that it’s a partnership with divinity, is the only way that this can be accomplished, and that partnership can only be accomplished if I die to some egoistic part of me that thinks I’m in charge or focuses too much on me as the thing that I’m supposed to perfect for some kind of reward from God, from the people around me. It’s hard to make that shift, and the other keeps coming back, lingering. And even as close as I feel I’m getting to being, living in this world, where I am an instrument rather than the cause of every good thing that I am asked to be engaged in, even though that’s something I can feel and it works and it feels good, I will find myself slipping back to something so egocentric, and I have to just smile and say, “That’s just part of my human nature.” Because the one thing God doesn’t want us to think is that, when divinity enters into us, we become divinity. No, we are not ever going to become divinity. How do you live in this relationship with so much goodness when it flows through us but it’s not us? It takes amazing humility. It takes a death to our ego but most especially an infusion of truth and grace.

Father, you have created a world for us that is so much more than we ever could imagine on our own. How could we ever believe that we would be asked by you to share in the grace and the power that you are and bring that to the people that we are? Open our hearts, our minds, our imaginations to the beauty and the power of this gift of indwelling presence, and help us to be proclaiming it without words but just with the mysterious power that the Spirit has and how it can affect and change the people we care about. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Acts 1:15-17, 20a, 20c-26 | 1 John 4:11-16 | John 17:11b-19

Gladden us with holy joys, almighty God, and make us rejoice with devout thanksgiving for the ascension of Christ your Son is our exaltation, and where the head has gone before in glory, the body is called to follow in hope. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Today we’re celebrating the Feast of the Ascension. It’s the end, in a sense, of the physical presence of God in Jesus in this world, and the thing about it that I like so much is it focuses on that period of time after Jesus died. So often we think that’s the end of the story. Jesus died. The disciples went off and preached this great teaching of forgiveness and love. But it’s really a story about a group of human beings who lived in this world with Jesus for three years, and let’s focus primarily on the disciples, the apostles, rather, I guess. But they were men, just like you and me and like all women, and they really had a hard time grasping the fullness of this mysterious thing called the kingdom of God that Jesus came to establish. And the thing that’s so fascinating to me about the initial beginnings of this experience of this kingdom finding its beginnings, its seed form in the world came through the gospels and the story of Jesus making clear to us who God really is, the compassionate, loving, forgiving, healing God that we believe in.

Never have you seen God so clearly represented than in this person, Jesus, but the issue was they didn’t understand it. They didn’t get it. It’s so clear that, when he went through the final stage of his life before his resurrection, it left these men just completely bewildered, frightened, locked in a room, not understanding much, and in a way, they must have doubted that Jesus was who he said he was, the one who would restore Jerusalem, bring everything back to making it what it should be. And then he appears, and the thing about those post-resurrection appearances for 40 days, they were such a clear confirmation that Jesus was who he said he was. They believed he was the Son of God, the one who speaks the truth. Now, think about that. It’s interesting. In the first reading, we learn something about this whole issue. If you’re going to enter into the kingdom of God, as he invites us to come into it, he’s going to explain what it is. Unless you believe in Jesus being the one whose explanation is really the truth, unless you believe that, you’ll be condemned to a life that is not as full or rich. I love that image in the reading, because when I first read it in the first reading, it’s like, oh, it means if you’re not belonging to a Christian religion or something, you’re going to be condemned. No, it’s not that. It’s simply saying that, if you believe in Jesus and he is the one who reveals the truth of who you are and who God is and what we’re here to do together — if you don’t believe in that, you will be condemned to a life that is less joyous, less full, less wonderful and less effective in terms of why we’re here.

So we see this moment in the disciples’ life, the moment in the church where we have human beings absolutely certain that this is the truth that is coming through this God/man Jesus, and we’re going to listen to it, and we’re going to see what it is and understand it. And he presents it as a promise. “This is what I promise you. God, as he is in me —,” Jesus is saying this. “God, as he is in me — you are going to be able to be like I am, a human being fully human, also filled with divinity.” Now, I’m not saying we become gods as Jesus was God, but that union between divinity and humanity in Jesus was so intense, so complete that we’re not going to have that, but we have something so like it, as effective, in some ways, as it was. This promise of the kingdom is based on an event that was going to happen after Jesus returned to the Father after 40 days of making clear what the kingdom of God is. He’s saying, “You’re going to be filled in a moment. Call it baptism. Call it Pentecost. You’re going to be filled with this incredible gift called God’s presence.” That’s the promise, and that is given to every believer, every human being. So we’re in this world, challenged to be witnesses of the same thing that Jesus came to witness.

Now, what it seems to me that happened in my life and maybe in yours, I transferred all that responsibility over to the church. The church does that work. The church is commissioned by being the teacher, the preacher. So the teaching and preaching is where — you go to church to get it, and then you get it, and then you try to live it. And the shadow of that system also has another kind of side to it that’s a temptation of all religion where, if you’re in a position of great authority, you can start telling people what to do, and so control is always going to be the shadow of the institutional church. But she, the church, is not the sole presenter to the world of the in-dwelling presence of God. It is every single person who understands it and believes it, and we become the witnesses. We become the ones that make the work happen, the laity. That’s one thing interesting about Vatican II that happened, gosh, over 50 years ago, and it said so clearly the church is not the hierarchy. The hierarchy is there to teach, to serve, to awaken in laity the role that the church has, and the laity is going to carry it out. The laity is going to be living this truth in the midst of other people, and that’s how the kingdom is going to happen. That’s what’s going to change the world. And what is going to change? How’s it going to change?

Well, something really dawned on me when I was working on this feast this year. It’s like, okay, we’re here to establish the kingdom of God. It’s joyous. It’s wonderful. It’s filled with wonder and awe and fullness. And then I look at the world, and the world seems to not be so wonderful and not so full of goodness and corrupt and a mess. And so I’m thinking, “Wait a minute. If the kingdom of God is going, as a goal, to create a world that is perfect, then it’s not doing very well.” So if it’s not here to create a better world, what’s it here to create? What’s the kingdom for? What’s it doing? Well, the kingdom, it seems to me, is not about saving the world and making it a perfect place but saving human beings from the illusions that keep them from being who they’re intended to be. The world is not the concern of God, but the concern of God is the humans who live for a period of time in their existence in this world and how they deal with it and how it deals with them. That’s the context of this thing called the kingdom of God. That shifts a lot for me, especially when it talks about what it is when Jesus is describing it to his disciples. What’s it going to be like when you live in the kingdom of God? How will you act? How will you function? Well, it’s kind of scary and kind of weird. It says, “Well, this is what’s going to happen. You’re going to be strong, and you’re going to be able to drive out demons. And you’ll speak new languages, and you can pick up serpents with your hands. And if you drink anything deadly, it’s not going to harm you, and wherever you lay your hands, when you lay your hands on the sick, they will recover.” And so how do we interpret that? If that’s the job that you and I have as a believer, God living in you, you living in him, and he’s going to be able to make these things happen, how do we discover what that really means?

Well, let me start with the idea of driving out demons. If we’re here in the world to drive out demons, why are demons still here? What does it mean to drive out a demon? Does it mean to destroy it, get rid of demons? No. Demons are supposed to be here. It’s pretty clear. If God wanted no demons, there would be no demons. Demons have a role, but they’re dangerous. What’s their danger? Demons pose as non-demons. Demons become, in people’s minds, something that’s logical, practical and beneficial, and they use people and abuse people, and they think this is a good thing. So when you drive out demons, you’re not driving evil out of the world. What you’re doing is exposing demons for what they are. That’s different. Think about it. Being in the world as a witness to this truth that is God living in you, living in me and exercising this power and knowing that demons can destroy people, most especially when they pose as something else. What a great job or what a great occupation it is or privilege it is to be able to expose that, and you have the power to do that.

Y’all can speak new languages. What does that mean? There’s a way to speak to the mind, and it’s logical. And that’s the way most people speak, but there’s another way to speak. It’s speaking to the heart, and it’s speaking a world that is mystical and mysterious. And somehow we lose a sense of that. The world of angels, the world of the dead, the world of all these spiritual creatures floating around, we need to talk about that. We need to be able to express that with people, and so there’s something about being a witness to this incredible gift of a new kingdom that God has established for us, a kingdom that transforms us. Then we’re able to speak about it, talk about it.

And we’ll be able to pick up serpents. Well, serpents are evil, aren’t they? Well, not really. If you look at the image of serpents throughout history, and it’s even true in the Bible, you’ll see that the serpent is often a sign of healing. Remember when the serpent was held up by Moses on a stick to heal everybody of the poison that they had. So if you look at a serpent as the archetypal sign it carries throughout history of human beings, it’s an image of awakening, of new life. You’ll be able to deal with that. You’ll be able to be in the business of awakening people to something that was hidden. It’s another way of talking about the healing, but in the sense when you lay hands — whoever you touch and you lay hands on them and they’ll be healed, that’s a different kind of transfer of power from you, the divine power of you going into someone. One is a direct way of touching them, and the resonance moves from you to them. But the other one is more interesting. It’s more etheric. It’s somehow witnessing a reality by what you’re doing, the work you’re doing, that’s based on something that is way beyond our own human power. So to be able to be one who enlightens others, you are sharing the enlightenment that you’ve already accepted.

I don’t think you can share anything that God is creating you to share unless you are engaged in it, and the witnessing is not talking about it but being somebody that is doing it. When people see you doing the work of healing, awakening people, of speaking to the heart, of exposing demons, you’re the church. You’re everything religion needs to be, wants to be by just being that in the world, and the world is not going to be ever perfect. Sometimes isn’t it a shame? We think, “Oh, if our family is not just the healthiest family, then it’s valueless.” No, the unhealthy part of every family is there for the people in the family so that they can grow and change. The church is imperfect. It’s filled with corruption, all that stuff. Well, maybe it is at times. It’s there, but maybe that’s because dealing with that kind of imperfection in humanity, in all of its positions and places where authority is, to see it as not perfect is a real powerful image of what it means to be in this kingdom. Why is the kingdom based on this thing about healing, exposing demons, and bringing somehow light into darkness? That’s the work that we go through in order to be transformed. The earth, the world is always going to have that kind of evil in it, until the end of time, but what a shame. We worry about our own interior life. We’re not yet whole. We’re not full. No, we’re never going to be whole and full and perfect. We’re always going to be struggling against the inner demon, the inner problems, and if we expect that in ourselves, which we do, we’re going to end up with shame. If we expect it in the church, we’re going to end up with alienation and rejection of something it has within its great powers. We’re going to lose the kingdom, and that’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to witness it, engage in it, be it, and witness it by being someone who sees and understands the beauty of the ordinariness and even the imperfection of it all What a gift. What a promise. What a life.

Father, your power, your ability to transform us into the wholeness that you’ve intended us to have is beyond our imagining, and yet you share it with us. You tell us that we can participate in it, not being the cause of it but by being someone who brings it through our own intention, our own transformation work. We witness it to one another. Bless us in this work. Build in us confidence into being able to accomplish it and the joy that comes from knowing that we are bringing life to those we love, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48 | 1 John 4:7-10 | John 15:9-17

Grant, almighty God, that we may celebrate with heartfelt devotion these days of joy, which we keep in honor of the risen Lord and that what we believe in remembrance we may always hold to in what we do through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

Nothing is clearer in the scriptures than the focus on love. Love, what is it? It’s interesting that the Greeks had different words for love: eros, agape, philia. When I listen to those descriptions of love, it doesn’t sound like it describes love as much as it describes what love might be drawn to, what its function is. It’s there to give life to friends, to the world, love of God, and it has also that image of — there’s a love that is eros, which is drawn to physical connection and intimacy and celebration of that. What I’m saying is those don’t give me much of an insight into what love is, but I want to see if I can try to touch into this mystery, because I want you to think of love as the life force — the life force, that thing that we’re here to engage in, to be a part of, to allow it to flow from us to another, to allow another to be filling us with this life force. So it’s this dynamic thing that we call life, and it’s clear that, in this world that God has created, it’s intimately tied into relationships. In fact, it’s the one thing we take with us when we leave this world: relationships. And what are relationships? Those connections that we have with people in our life, and everyone has a certain circle of relationships. Some of them are with family, and some of them are with the people that we choose to be with. Some are created for us by where we work or where we live or who lives next to us. But whatever the context is, there is this sense there is something we are called to do in this world if we are believers in the God who created us, and we want to be who he’s calling us to be, like him. Then we have to enter into, seriously into this work of love, and it’s so much more than just liking something. I love it, because I like it. I enjoy it. No, it’s deeper. It’s more powerful. It’s more mysterious.

So let’s imagine it as the thing that God shares with us that is best described as his presence in the world, because God is love, and we have the option of choosing to be engaged in this gift called love or not. So that’s our responsibility whether we are lovers or not, and the lover we’re called to be is this figure that is engaged in this powerful thing that is called the life force, that’s called God. So it’s — the incarnation is at the heart of our whole understanding of what it means to be a follower of this God. So what we have to understand is that we have been empowered with this love force inside of us, and we call it God, God dwelling in us. And we have been focusing on that in the scriptures these last couple of weeks since Easter, God remaining in us, God living in us, God wanting to marry us, wanting to be a part of us. And that desire that he has to be a part of us is not just for us, but it’s for our role in the world, which is to give this gift that has been given us to others.

We receive it first inside of us, and then once it becomes a part of us, we’re able to give it to someone else. And it’s all wrapped around this mysterious thing as presence, God’s presence in you. So how do you receive God’s presence? Allow him to love you. What does that mean? It means to let go of all those things that we might create inside of us to think of what makes us lovable, what makes us pleasing to God. We should earn it, right? We should work for it. We’re told that indirectly by a lot of religious figures in our life. God doesn’t want to be a part of somebody who isn’t pure, isn’t perfect. What a misconception, as if love is something we earn, love is something we create a space within us by our own energy so that God will come into us. There’s nothing that’s further from the truth. God comes into us in our messiness. He wants to have an impact on us. And what does love do to someone who receives it? It changes them. How does it change them? Well, it changes them in the sense that there is a way in which we are made up of — as our humanity, we have this thing called our ego, our sense of self, and then we have this God that comes along and tells us, “Listen, I created this thing called you. It has a dimension to autonomy.” We find that in the story of Adam and Eve. Human beings like to be on their own. They have a sense of themselves, and then God created a way in which he said, “I want you to allow me to get into you by allowing me to enter into you by loving you.”

So how do we work with that? Well, it takes this, I guess you might call it, a disposition of neediness. When we’re in our egos, when we’re in that autonomous state and we’re doing well, nobody needs to be told that they need some support from something outside of themselves. They’re filled with themselves. That’s one of the great weaknesses of human beings. We tend to be too closely identified with our effectiveness by saying we are the ones that create this person that we present to someone else. We’re responsible for it. We’re responsible. If it’s received well, that means we deserve some kind of honor for that. That egocentric world is the hook that we’ve got to be careful of, because it blocks this one mysterious process, God loving us, entering into us, being the source of life in us that he’s asking us to share with other people. And you know what? When you’re in that role of being a lover because you’ve been loved by God, you are giving something to them that you’re not responsible for. You’re not the cause of it. You can’t take credit for it, and you can’t take blame if it doesn’t work.

Think of it. A life force is given to you and to me to dwell inside of us. How do we allow it in? We allow it in by allowing God to be a source of that which we know we need that we can’t create on our own, and if you have a desire to be effective in the world, which is a gift from God, we need a powerful source to be able to do it. And we tend to go to our ego. We tend to say, “I will make this person in my life a better person. I will decide for them what they need. I will make sure they do it. I will manipulate them.” That’s working out of the ego. You become the work. But the real work is this mysterious thing called love, and it comes into us by our allowing it to come in by simply saying to God, “I’m not enough. I can’t do this work. I need something to affirm me so that I can be more than my ego, more than this controlling factor that I have inside of me that, when I use it on people, they resent it. They feel used or abused.” But love never abuses. It has this deep powerful respect for the work, and what is the work? A lover works with a power that is not their ego but something that God gives them, and they know that, when they use it, it is effective. It changes people.

Look at Peter in the first reading. Look at what he was doing. Well, it doesn’t really talk about it in that reading, but if you look at the life of Peter — most people don’t realize that Peter raised a person from the dead. Peter would heal crippled people, just like Jesus. So you’re seeing in Peter a powerful force that changes people, radically changes them. Dorcas, a woman who was a follower and caretaker for the early church and, with Jesus, she was one of those women that always cared for him in a sense. And one of the things that happened when she died, they called Peter, and Peter uses a similar two-word statement. He says to her, “Get up.” And she rises from the dead. Just like Jesus said to Lazarus, “Come out.” Here’s a human being bringing people back to life. Well, wow, well done, Peter. How did you do that?” That’s why Cornelius falls at his feet and says, “You’re this divine, powerful force.” No, he said, “No, I’m just a human being,” Peter says. “Get up. I’m just a human being. Please don’t act as if I am the source of that tremendous power that is called love that gives life where there is no life.” Allow it to flow through you. That’s Peter’s major statement to those he was preaching to, and those disciples were so unique, because they had failed so miserably in what they thought they should be. They knew they were forgiven. At the same time, they knew they had this power in them that they could affect these radical changes, and they didn’t let their ego get in the way and imagine that they were the source.

So how do you work with love as a gift that comes into you that is not you? And if you use it as if it’s you, it becomes manipulative and demanding of someone else, and they don’t feel love. They feel like they have to perform whatever you want them to do. When real love, when it flows through you, it’s not you. It’s the power that only God knows that a person needs, the healing that they need, and as long as you stay detached from the work of what love does, you’ll be an instrument of it. You’ll be an instrument of it. You’ll do miracles, because you’re not the source of the miracle, but the work is. And what is the work? The work is this mysterious thing that God said, “If you allow me to be in your, loving you just for who you are, and you haven’t done a thing to perform to get it, then you’re in the beginning of the right stands of being able to be a vehicle for this great life force that God puts inside of you that you have to learn how to keep your ego out of it.”

Sometimes I want people to tell me that my work is effective. I love when people stop me and say, “Oh, last week, what you said on the homily really helped.” My ego gets instantly engaged in that and says, “Yeah, well, I’m pretty — I am amazing. I am really good. I’m better than the others that don’t do that.” What? Did I do it? When I sit here and preach to you in this context of a radio station, I have earphones on, and a microphone is picking up my words. If I’m sitting here thinking that I am the source of whatever is coming through to you, that I, Don Fischer, I’m responsible for it, which leads me to two deadly dead-ends — one is, if it’s not working, then there’s something wrong with me, and if it is working, then it’s all about me. How do you get out of that and stay in the reality of this work? This dwelling, in-dwelling power of God called love operates through us and not — it’s not us. That’s so hard for me. I get so caught up in my own performance, and it’s deadly. If I can give this gift away to people without feeling responsible, then I can be a vehicle, I think, of what love really means, because love is the life force that dwells in anyone who receives it, and it can flow out of them so perfectly and so beautifully, as long as they don’t get it confused with their own egocentricity, their need to be great, their need to be wonderful and need feedback.

So that’s why I think Peter could be a person who lifted people from the dead and healed cripples and still walk around and not feel that he was special. “I’m just like you. I’m just a human being.” What a gift. What a gift to be able to do that, and what does it bring? This mysterious thing called joy. Jesus said, “If you will allow me to love you and be in you and love others through you, let me use you as my conduit for my love of another person, you’re going to feel so exalted at your position. You’re going to be filled with joy, and nothing will rob you of this feeling that all is well and all will be well. And that my value is grounded in a work that’s not me means that you don’t have to go and work to make something to bring it to someone to say, “Here, this is what you need.” That’s a lot of work, and that’s a lot of responsibility, and then you’re well-being might depend on whether they like it or not. Think of it as being able to know exactly what someone needs, not because you’ve figured it out but because God knows it, and you’re offering it to people without any sense of responsibility for them to respond to it, because it’s not about their response to God’s power. It’s their allowing it to be there, allowing it. If you allow God’s love to pass through you to another person and that person allows that love there, it’s the life force that does the healing, that strengthens your crippled body, that brings you out of a place of death into life. What a joy to be able to do that when it’s nothing more than receiving a gift and giving it away. Other than working really hard to make it happen and you’re the source of it, and they’d better like it, because if they don’t, your value is at stake. That just ruins everything, and I know what it’s like to be ruined that way, and I don’t want to be anymore.

Father, your gift to us is you, you living in us, remaining in us, and you are love, this mysterious life force that, when it touches the hearts of those who are capable of receiving it, free enough to receive it, resistant to all of those things that keep it away, we become this life source. Thank you. What a gift it is and what a privilege it is to be an instrument of your work, not our work, your work, saving and healing and transforming the world, and we ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Acts 9:26-31 | 1 John 3:18-24 | John 15:1-8

Almighty, everliving God, constantly accomplish the Paschal mystery within us that those you are pleased to make new in holy baptism may, under your protective care, bear much fruit and come to the joys of life eternal. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

Nothing is clearer to me, after I’ve been doing this work of preaching and teaching from this one source, scripture, that the ultimate goal of this entire story of God working with human beings has the motive, has the intention of moving us to a place where we never would have imagined that god is calling us into, and that’s intimacy with him. This whole story of God revealing himself throughout history is more than just God showing us who he is in scripture, but we also learn a great deal about who we are. So imagine that this story that I’ve been working from for 53 years as a priest is so clearly destined for a purpose. It has a focus, and the focus is to bring into reality a relationship with God that he has planned from the very beginning but something that human beings have had a hard time accepting, surrendering to. How do you learn to move from simply somebody who is told what to do by an authority greater than them to an experience of a God who says, “I want to live inside of you. I want to be a part of you”? It’s not easy, but I want to see maybe if I can give you an image of this whole story.

It’s like we have this incredible gift of wisdom in this recorded story of salvation history, started 4,000-plus years ago. And let’s look at it from a kind of objective perspective, like we’ve never, ever heard it before, and here’s a story about this God. And so if you were going to write a review, say, of scripture, what might you say to somebody who has never read it, never heard of it? Well, one way you could do it is to start with focusing on how it began and how it ended. What’s fascinating about the beginning of the story, it’s a story of creation. God, this mystical figure that exists for all time, decided in some mysterious way to create a world. He existed before the world, and so when he created this, we have a story of seven days when he created all the elements of this universe that we live in. At the special moment that is so crucial to the whole story, he decided, “I am also going to create human beings.” So he created the universe, all the animals, all the insects, everything, and then finally the crown of his creation is human beings.

And you might say, “Well, why did he create human beings?” Well, it strikes me, and this is something I’ve played with for a long time, and it’s also rooted in St. Bonaventure, who is one of the great doctors of the church that lived in the 13th century. In his mind — Bonaventure was a mystic and a doctor of the church, but he had this sense that, in God, there was some longing for something more than just the creation that he made. He wanted something more like him, something he could connect with and be in love with and have a relationship with. So he created these beings that were actually part of the whole evolution of creation, and they evolved. Of course you could say, “Isn’t there a story in the scriptures where he just, puff, made them out of just — I don't know — breathing into some mud figure?” Yes, there’s that story, but the story is not so much about how it happened but what happened. And what happened is God created creatures that were different than everything else he created, and the most interesting thing about them that was different is that they had freedom to make choices, to choose. He gave them a gift he didn’t give to the rest of creation, freedom, freedom to choose. So it’s obvious that he’s going to have a different relationship with these creatures called humans than with the rest of creation. So the story begins with that relationship. God created human beings. He found them very, very good, and he created a garden for them. And he revealed to human beings for the first time who he was and who they were.

So imagine that, if you can follow this, let’s say, in the evolution of human beings, growing naturally through a process that I think is more complex and more amazing than just poof, if he made them in seven — just in one day. But no, his plan was everything evolves in a natural way. So human beings are the crown of his creation, and they are constantly in a state of evolution, changing, growing, becoming more conscious, becoming more of who God intended them to be. So imagine — the story of scripture is primarily both theological and anthropological. It’s a story where we learn who God is and how he reveals himself to us, and we also learn who we are and how we are here to develop and grow. So we learn about God; we learn about humans.

So in this first story — it’s very interesting. The first story reveals the nature of both. God is a lover. He created this beautiful world. He loves these human beings. He created a garden for them. It’s an almost idyllic life. It was an idyllic life. They didn’t have to work. They didn’t have to do anything. They could just sit back and enjoy the garden, as if that’s who human beings are. They’re not creatures that want to be simply cared for in a garden like children for the rest of eternity. The story of Adam and Eve reveals not only a God who creates these creatures and wants to please them. It’s also about human beings who have their own desires and their own longings, and the thing that’s so fascinating about this story is it’s often been, I think, somewhat limited in its interpretation by focusing on it as if this action of disobedience on the part of Adam and Eve determines the fact that the human beings that God created are somehow evil. And I don't know that that’s really the heart of the story. It seems to me the heart of the story is human beings reveal in this story who they are, and they aren’t people who want to just lay around and be served. Human beings like to do things, to make things, to be engaged in things. It’s almost like, if you can imagine the story of Adam and Eve being two children of the richest man in the world and they say, “You don’t have to work. You don’t have to do anything. Just enjoy the house. Here’s the gym. Here’s the pool. Invite your friends over.” And they’d say, “I want to do more than that. I want to be more than that. I want to create. I want to do something, make something.” That’s just a part of human nature. But the scary part of human nature is also what’s revealed in this story, and that is they do like to do things on their own. So I want you to imagine that the story of Adam and Eve in the garden is a story about human beings revealing to all of us that we have something in us that I would say is a longing for autonomy. We like to do things on our own. We like to achieve things. “I’ll do it. Let me make it.” It’s like the people in the world like me who want read instructions when they get something, or when they go to the store, they can’t find something. They’re not going to ask somebody. They’re going to find it on their own. There’s something in us that has that longing for autonomy, and there’s something in God that is a longing for unity. And that’s the way the story starts: a God who wants a relationship and human beings who want to prove to themselves, and maybe indirectly to God in their mind, that they can handle things on their own. And that’s the beginning of the relationship, human beings off on their own and God longing for a relationship with them.

Now, what’s interesting is, if you look at the story as it continues from that point on, we see in the story of Adam and Eve that they are wanting autonomy. And then the next story in scripture is about Cain and Abel, and there’s a story about this figure, Cain, the oldest son, wanting to be the best, so autonomy, wanting to be the best. Now, there’s the story of the Tower of Babel where these human beings decided they could do anything they wanted. They could build anything they want, and that hubris in human beings that we can accomplish anything — those three things set the stage for what God has an agenda to wean human beings off of that disposition and to get them into a position where they are ready to surrender and open themselves to an extraordinary mystery. That’s the mystery of the incarnation.

So go back to the story at the beginning. Adam and Eve reveal to us that part of human nature. When God sent them out of the garden, was he punishing them and kicking them out, or was he saying, “Okay, I understand. You want to make it on your own. Tell you what. You go down. It’s going to be hard. You’re going to have this difficulty. It’s going to be not an easy life, but if that’s what you want to do. Let’s go do it. You go do it, and I’ll make some clothes for you in the meantime and send you off.” So it’s hard for me to imagine in that story that God is condemning Adam and Eve for being human. No, he’s giving them an opportunity to experience humanity and to recognize that humanity was never made to be autonomous. It was made to be in union and communion with divinity, and that’s the way the story ends.

The story ends with this incredible revelation finally, after 4,000 years, of who God really is, a God who longs for intimacy with his people. And then we see the story of human beings evolving over this long period of time where they finally see something, and they’re converted to a new understanding, radically different than what was in Adam and Eve at the beginning. It’s in a way summarized in the story of Paul. In Paul’s experience, what he’s done is he’s moved from an image of religion, let’s say, that is based in law, performance, reward, punishment, the temple, and then the fullness of the revelation of who God is, is in Jesus, and Jesus is God fully revealed. And who he is, is the same God that was in the Garden of Eden, and basically he still wants and now can achieve the thing he wanted then. It was union and communion with humans, and so we see then, in Paul, an image of the conversion that is to happen to the human race. Instead of religion being something that’s an obligation to fulfill, it’s an experience to have, and what Paul experienced is the presence of God, in the form of Jesus, coming to him and saying, “Hey, I need you. I want you. I will enable you to be the best preacher in the world, and I don’t have any judgment against you for the fact that you were really trying to destroy my people. I love you as you are. I see gifts in you. They exist, and I want you to allow me to remain in you, and you remain in me, and together we’ll do this incredible work.” And that’s the end of the story.

From isolation and separation from God to complete intimacy and union with God, that’s the goal, and so what we see then in the life of Jesus is this incredible, full unfolding of the plan of God. And then you listen to Jesus talking to his disciples after his resurrection, and he’s saying so clearly the same thing. “Look, from the beginning — from the beginning, God has always had this intention that you would realize you were never made to operate on your own. You were always made to create and to do and to accomplish but never on your own. I have to be in you for you to achieve the goal that I’ve placed in your hearts, but you thought I was placing it there with you in control of it. And it’s not that.” Human beings in their core nature have this big issue of autonomy and wanting to use and abuse and be in control and all those things. Well, yes, in a way we’re in control but not fully, and what we need to recognize is this incredible image that Jesus is working with that we are branches of this incredible core vine that is God. The branch can’t exist without the vine. The vine can exist without the branch, but the vine that is God desires not just to be the vine but to be fruitful in the world. And the fruitfulness is to transform human beings, and so we connected finally to the core of who we are, knowing we have this longing and this deep connection with God that was won for us in some mysterious way by the new Adam and that what we’re experiencing is this new potential union that creates the most effective way in which human beings have been destined to live. And we can ask for anything, and we get it. That’s a weird, wonderful thing to think about, but what it means is, when you have God in you, living in you, your desire is to love, and you believe in love. And you believe in the power of that. So when you’re asking God, “Help me to be a more interesting and powerful of bringing life to the world,” he will do it, and that’s what I count on every time I walk into this station.

God, the plan that you’ve had from the very beginning has unfolded, and it’s important that we grasp the fullness of this revelation that is our gift from you. Bless us with readiness to receive the truth and to surrender to the things that we have to let go of so that we can enter into this incredible indwelling presence with you, you remaining in us, we remain in you. It’s hard for us to do this work without the grace that is our inheritance. So awaken us to the power that is within us that sometimes lays unawakened and awaken it and bring us to the peace and the joy of the kingdom where we know we are cared for and have the capacity to give life and care for each other. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Acts 4:8-12 | 1 John 3:1-2 | John 10:11-18

Almighty, everliving God, lead us to share in the joys of heaven so that the humble flock may reach where the brave shepherd has gone before, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

This Sunday focuses on the ministry that we all participate in, the ministry of caring for one another, shepherding one another, and one of the things that strikes me about this set of readings is in a way, the first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, describes what was happening to the people who were believers, that had never happened before, because of this mysterious thing called redemption, God coming into the world and revealing something that was beyond our imagining. He was revealing the fact that we, we, all of us, are called to be like Christ, to be other Christs. It means our destiny is to be doing the same work that Jesus came into the world to do, and there are two things that Jesus did so powerfully and so clearly.

One of the things he was doing was revealing the heart of who God is. The Old Testament, as we know, is a long history of God slowing revealing himself to be the God who is. He begins with an image of the gods that are, revengeful, angry, demanding, and slowly he becomes more and more into the God who he is, slowly revealing to us a God that’s beyond our imagining, a God who is there because of his desire to be there for us. And the being for us is to engage us in the same work that he has come into the world to accomplish, and the role of God in the world is to save, to save us, bring salvation. And the shocking thing in the way it unfolds is that not only is he revealing to us his role in this incredible work of drawing us, not into a place of shame or fear or anger, but a place of peace, knowing that we’re being saved, we’re being lifted up, we’re being given everything we need in order to grow into who we are intended to be. That’s a powerful way of imagining salvation. Salvation is entering into the life that God has called you to live with the energy and with the strength that he has given to you to accomplish it. What are we being saved from? All those difficult tasks of trying to be worthy of a God who is not in need of our performing for him so that we are then worthy of his love. No, he reveals himself as the lover, the one who created us with a destiny, and all he longs for us to do is to enable him to reveal to us the fullness of who we are, and we are other Christs. We are those that are called into the world, like Christ was called into the world, to heal the world because of the divinity that Christ was participating in. He was also fully human, and so he’s inviting us to move from simply being solely human to also adding divinity into our essence.

We are children, as the second reading says, of God, children of the Father. Why would it be important to be told that? In the Old Testament, you might say that the gods of the Old Testament, particularly the last thing that they were saying. Is that, “You are equal to me, or you are a part of me, or you will be like me”? No, no. They were always demanding something from them so that the god of the — the old, pagan gods could dole out some kind of favor. No, we have this amazing new image of divinity, and divinity is not something that is lording something over us, demanding something from us but a divinity that enters into us and empowers us. And the fact that we are children of God means that, as we evolve, as we develop, we become more like God, like the Christ. To be like God does not mean in our humanity we shed humanity and become divine. No, it means we have this incredibly complex and wonderful communion of two dimensions that have always been, in God’s plan, to be united, and that is divinity and humanity in one person. That’s what it means to be a child of God, to have this dignity in us that we are participants in this mysterious thing called incarnation, and when it’s in us, we do the most extraordinary things. And the extraordinary things we do are symbols of what it means to be saved.

So you look at this first reading when the disciples are being hauled into the authority figures of the temple and saying, “What are you doing? You can’t do this sort of stuff. Stop it.” And they’re looking at them and saying, “We’re sorry. What we’re doing is simply what we’ve been called to do.” If you don’t understand salvation, salvation is the promise in God for us that we will become who he intends us to be. So salvation has something to do with being holy ourselves, whole, healthy. Notice always the miracles of Jesus were healing people of blindness and deafness and being mute and not being able to walk and not being able to do something with their hands, not be able to make something. It’s so clear to me that this dynamic force in the world, divinity in us, is there because we’re called to be instruments of giving life, wholeness to another.

So then we get to the image that Jesus loves about his role as one who is mirroring who the Father truly is. Instead of having a revengeful master God, we have a servant God, but this servant God then is described in a way that people of the time would understand, because they knew crops. They knew how to raise animals. So they had this image easily that makes sense, that there are people who give their life, their time, their energy to caring for a flock of sheep, and there’s a wonderful relationship in that whole dynamic of sheep and shepherd where the sheep know, somehow, who their shepherd is, that intuition in an animal who knows who their master is. It’s a beautiful image of the potential in a human being to intuitively know who is the one we turn to for true care, for true protection, and so we have in this image of the Good Shepherd a beautiful image of the ministry that we are called to have as people empowered by grace, by presence of God.

So let’s look at that a little more in depth, because there’s something in this way that Jesus describes a Good Shepherd that we need to understand is a description of how we are to take on this role as we evolve and become more like the God who is revealed in Jesus. Jesus is the perfect representative of who God is. We are told that our destiny is to be like that God, to be like him, not by being him but by participating in him, by him being in us. And how do you, as a human being, deal with divinity inside of you without getting caught up and thinking, “I am that source that is in me”? One direction would be, I guess, egocentric and self-centered, and the other would be, I'm not worthy. What am I? I can’t do anything. I’m just a lowly human being with a zillion problems and all kinds of failures and sins. So there’s no hope for me to be able to be used by God.” That tension between divinity and humanity is something that, I believe, Jesus is trying to describe in this very well-known passage of the Good Shepherd, because he’s describing your work, my work as we participate in the role that God has given to us as partners with him in this incredibly fascinating story of bringing the world to its full potential. God has planned for us to be his partners in this work, and we have extraordinary dignity in that role, but at the same time, we have another role in that that is describe in the heart of the Good Shepherd. That is the idea that he will lay down his life for the sheep. What does that mean? It means, if it comes to someone destroying my sheep or destroying me, I would let them destroy me before I ever let them destroy my sheep. Now, that’s — how would you say? That would be a very, very clear understanding that, in a role that God has as our God, our Father helping us grow into who we are intended to be, like him, he is willing to do anything for this to make it happen.

So what is it that he did that made it happen? Well, he became incarnate and laid down his life and allowed himself to be destroyed in the eyes of the world and suffered death, and then he rose up again. He took his life. His life came back to him. So there’s something in that image that is connected to what I think is the heart of this set of readings, is how do we understand being engaged in this mysterious union of humanity and divinity? How do we understand the role of those two things? Because in one sense, we know that there is this divine power in us that gives us an enormous, enormous dignity and value and worth. It needs to be honored. There’s something about human nature that is sacred and beautiful, and we’re told that we should honor and respect everyone for who they are. They have dignity. They have value. They have worth. At the same time that we’re told that we have all this dignity and worth, we’re told that there’s something else about us that’s so important for us to develop and understand is the capacity we have to put all of that aside and not to claim any part of that dignity and value we have and to become absolutely in service to something bigger than ourselves in that moment but with a kind of diminishing of our value in the eyes of ourselves and others. To be the fool, to be the one who is seen as without value or dignity in all the ways of the world as we enter into another world, the world of the spirit, is so radically different than the world as we know that God says is not part of us. It’s that egocentric, power-centered world.

So how do you understand this mysterious thing that Jesus is trying to say, that if you are going to enter into the world that he’s inviting you into, you’ll be like him? What he has as his greatest capacity is the ability to lay down his life and also to pick it up again, to lay it down and pick it up again. How does he lay down his life? When he was on the cross, he gave up all of his power, in the sense of his divinity and even said out loud, “If I wanted to, I could call upon all these angels, and I would be the most powerful person in this situation. I would have everybody terrified. I could have them destroyed. I could call upon that power if I wanted to, that life that I am that’s divine, but I lay it down. I set it aside. Instead of that, I’m seen in the eyes of the world as a victim, as valueless, as a nobody.” And yet in that moment of surrender of his need to be exalted or honored, he takes that role of a servant, of a shepherd, and he is so powerful in terms of changing the world. And what changes the world? Hearts that understand this mystery of what love really is. To be a loving individual in the world, a life-giving individual in the world is to be held in high esteem in terms of the way we understand truth. Nothing is more valuable in the world than a loving, giving, serving human being that cares more about others than themselves. That’s the goal, and yet the world would want us to be in this position of authority and power over things. And the power that God wants us to see, that is most essential, is that power that a human being has to put themselves second and to put somebody else first. That’s real power. That’s the power of divinity in humanity. What a gift, to be in a position of wanting to serve someone else no matter what the cost is to us, because all we care about, with every ounce of energy and desire inside of us, is to give life to someone else. And when you do that and you understand you’ve done that, you’ve emptied yourself. You’ve laid down your life, but when you realize what you’ve done, you’re lifted up again, and you are awesome. What a mystery. What a beautiful image to work on when we work on becoming who God’s called us to be.

Father, your plan to live within us and to empower us to be like you and to heal and to bring life, at the same time to embrace our humanity, our weaknesses, our sinfulness, this is a gift that can only be understood by your wisdom, not our understanding, not our minds. So bless us with the wisdom of understanding our dignity, our worth, our role and how it is that you call us, through this work of service, to be served and to be filled and to be all that you intend us to be. So bless us with this wisdom, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Acts 3:13-15, 17-19 | 1 John 2:1-5a | Luke 24:35-48

May your people exalt forever, oh God, in renewed youthfulness of spirit so that rejoicing now in the restored glory of our adoption we may look forward in confident hope to the rejoicing of the day of resurrection. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

We continue to reflect upon the experience of the early church, the experience that must have been so incredulous, where this figure, this wisdom teacher that they spent time with, who surrendered himself to evil, was destroyed seemingly by that evil, his life taken away, comes back and is so full of life and full of wisdom and longing to open people’s eyes to what they had not seen before. And so we see story after story in this time in the church year, where we see this Christ coming back, and I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have a teacher that you saw seemingly destroyed by evil, and you thought the whole thing was now over, and you were distraught and frightened and confused, and all of a sudden, there he is, looking at you, talking to you. And what is it that he’s there for? Why did Jesus rise from the dead? Well, multiple reasons perhaps, to prove that he was who he says he was, but the thing that’s more interesting to me is what happened to the people that were living at that time when they encountered a risen Christ, and what was his response to them, at least the disciples in particular?

They had failed him, and they were filled with fear and shame and confusion. And all he does is he comes back, and he said, “Look, I understand. I understand your condition. I understand that you made this decision. You were frightened, and you fled. And I understand, because you were caught in confusion and sin and ignorance, but I want you to know who I am. I want you to believe in everything that has been said about me. And what’s so interesting to me about these post-resurrection experiences as we have in these stories of today’s liturgy of the word, it’s like he comes, and he said, “Look, I know what you did. I know your weaknesses, and you acted out of ignorance when you weren’t there for me. And I want you to know me, and the thing about me is, if you could just understand that everything that happened to me,” Jesus is saying to his disciples, “It was all planned that way. There was nothing about this that was a mistake.” And he keeps going back to them, as he did in the scriptures today, and he said, “Go look and listen again to everything that was spoken about me in the Old Testament. It’s all there. You can see exactly that I was living out the way God intended me to live. It was intended that I be seemingly, in the eyes of the world, cut short — my life would be cut short because of sin, because of evil, like evil destroyed me. No, no. Evil has no power over me. What I’m trying to do for you is expose evil for what it is. I want you to see how this world that God has created for you really works.”

And what Jesus is saying to people over and over again, and the church continues to say it to us today, and every religious person, every spiritual person hopefully is saying something like this to us, the challenge of being a believer in God is to believe in the world that he created, the world as it is. And sin is that weakness we all have to create a world of our own, the world that we want to be there, the world that we think is there, the world that we were taught is there, and if it’s not the world that is, we’re somehow at an enormous disadvantage. And so I want you to just imagine with me that a spiritual person, a person who believes in God, who is open therefore to the truth is open primarily to the way the world works. A spiritual human being is the most realistic person in the room. They’re the ones that embrace the world as it is and surrender to it, and the thing that’s so fascinating about the world that is, is the ingredient called sin, evil. Why is it there?

I don't know if you’re like me, but you sometimes pick up the paper, and now you listen to the news, and it seems like one thing after another, you’re hearing story after story about people who are either abusing each other, murdering each other, institutions that are found over and over again completely filled with corruption. And we constantly see evil and sin and destruction all around us. I don't know if you get the feeling sometimes. You’re saying, “Well, things are just getting worse.” Things are getting worse? What if this is the way the world is? What if a world of sin and goodness is the world God created, and what if we stop trying to destroy evil? Because the one thing you can say about evil is it has an intention. Its intention is primarily to separate things, to isolate things, to break them up into parts and to call some good and to call some evil and to set up this binary world and to somehow convince us that there’s a way to deal with everything in the world that we don’t want to be there, and that is to do exactly what evil does, to try to destroy it. Evil seeks destruction. Grace seeks healing.

So the unconscious thing that we get caught up in is that we end up trying to destroy evil by using evil, and that’s the great illusion. That’s the great lie that we get caught up in, and religion sometimes has a way of increasing that by giving us this false notion that the world that God wants us to have, the world that he created for us is a world of union, communion, perfection. If you look at the world at times and say, “This is so frustrating. It’s still so corrupt,” well, that’s the nature of the world. It will always be corrupt. And why would God allow corruption unless it had a purpose, a reason for being here? I know this might sound strange, but what I’m trying to say to you is evil is a part of the way the world is, and unless you embrace it and understand it and refuse to get caught up in its ways, you can’t really live and grow in this world as God intended you to grow and live. We’re here not to stop sinning so much as to stop being caught in lies and illusions. We’re here to grow, to evolve into full, conscious human beings aware of reality, the way God created the world to be, and the world that God created will always have — while we’re in this state of human beings living on this planet, there will always be evil. And to try to destroy it is to get caught up in the very thing that it wants us to get caught up in.

Think about it. When you listen to a story, the story about somebody doing something wrong, what’s your reaction? When you do something wrong? What’s your reaction? Forgiveness is what God teaches us to have, but what’s the opposite of that? Judgment, condemnation, a desire to punish, but even more deadly, to destroy. Even if you’re looking at the world today and reading the paper and listening to the news and saying, “I want this all to stop. I want to destroy all these people that are destroying other people. I want to destroy all those elements out there that are negative. Let’s get rid of them.” Think of the illusion that people get caught up in when they try to create a loving, Christian community separate from the evil of the world. You end up with a cult. Now, evil has got to be embraced for what it is for it has a purpose, and what is that purpose? The purpose is it’s part of the way in which God is inviting us to go through a process in this world where we are becoming more and more conscious of what is, what is true, what is real.

Can you imagine growing in your wisdom as to what is right and wrong without making mistakes? Can you imagine what it’s like to simply be told what you’re supposed to do and then blindly say, “Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll do exactly what you tell me to do.” That’s not what God wants. He doesn’t want us to be people who are blindly obedient to a higher power. He doesn’t want us to follow him because he tells us to follow him. He wants us to discovery why, what he’s calling us into, the life that he wants us to live. He wants us to know why it is so important and why we should be motivated to do it. It’s not because we’re told to. It’s because something inside of us knows. We know what it’s like to be the person that God created us to be. It’s called wholeness, holiness, consciousness. Can you become fully aware and conscious of what evil is and what your choices are unless you experience them? And could it be that the reason evil is in the world is because it’s there so that we can experience what it is that it really does, what it really does to us, our human nature? It flies in the face of everything that we are.

I sometimes hate myself for being the person that I am when I see myself not being who I think I should be. Now think about that. I hate myself for being who I think I am. God knows who I am. He knows my goodness. He created it. So when I hate that which he creates, I’m caught in what? Evil. I’m doing the very thing that evil longs to do. It longs to enter into us and to make us into people that are like evil, and again, evil separates, isolates, wants to destroy. You can’t destroy evil using the tactics of evil. You can only destroy evil by taking away its power, and what is its power? Its desire to destroy, to punish. That’s why, from the beginning, it’s so clear what Jesus came into the world to do is to radically change our response to evil. So he does it in a way that seems absolutely incredulous to everyone watching it. He gives in and allows evil to do all of its negative stuff to him, to isolate him, just separate him, to make him into something evil, to incite people to want to destroy goodness. And then when he’s in the middle of all that, he just drops this explosive bomb, which is forgiveness. He said, “Look, I’m not going to be what you are to me in this moment, this destructive force. I will not turn around and seek to destroy you. I will allow you to be who you are, because I believe that, if you are a human being and you can experience the impact, if you can experience consciously what sin actually is, what it feels like to want to destroy, to want to kill, to want to remove, isolate someone, if you experience that and you feel it in your gut that it’s somehow wrong, then you’ve grown up. Then you’ve become more conscious.” It’s essential that you taste evil in order to get past it, because the taste is bitter. It’s awful, but somehow we live in a mild form of it, my prejudice, my way of denying people rights and — All the stuff we do that is negative toward ourselves and others is somehow participating in evil, yet we do it with the sense that this is what God calls us to. We need to hate sinners and get rid of them, hate sin and get rid of it. I guess we can say, “Well, Jesus said don’t hate the sinner, but he does say hate the sin.” And you’ve got to be careful of that, because do you hate the fact that we’re given a world in which our experiences are the best teachers? Are we supposed to hate the fact that the world is imperfect? Are we supposed to deal with it as an imperfect world that is trying to awaken us to something that’s so wonderfully freeing and mysterious, surrendering to evil, not buying into it, not becoming it but becoming something radically different? Evil’s role is always to be hidden and to pose as something else, but to taste it, to know it, to experience it through sin is sometimes the best teacher, because to be told what to do is one thing. To know in your heart what is the only real thing you really want to do, that’s transformation. That’s holiness. That’s the goal of spirituality.

Father, you tell us that we need to know you in Jesus. We need to pay attention to all that he is and all that he longs to open our minds to and give us the freedom to let go of misconceptions, lies, illusions and enter into the world of truth. The truth is that you have come in the world to save us all from the kind of world that we tend to create that is never going to fulfill our longings and our desires. Make us open to your wisdom, your truth, your life, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Acts 4:32-35 | 1 John 5:1-6 | John 20:19-31

God of everlasting mercy, who in the very recurrence of the Paschal feast kindle the faith of the people you have made your own, increase, we pray, the grace you have bestowed that all may grasp and rightly understand in what fount they have been washed, by whose spirit they have been reborn, by whose blood they have been redeemed. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

It’s fascinating to me that, after the great feast of Easter, the celebration of a new way of understanding God and understanding who we are and why we’re here, focuses on this one key element that Christ won for us and changed the relationship we have with him. When he died for our sins, he offered us redemption, the blood that removes completely the separation that sin was causing always with our relationship with God.

So this shift from the Old Testament to New Testament is so dramatic and so powerful that it’s often missed, and the reason it’s so different is because human beings became different from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Let’s just say the Old Testament lasted for close to — over 2,000 years of God working with people, trying to get them to understand who he is and what he wants from them, and he was desperate to help them realize that they were caught in a way of life that was so self-centered and that they were often at-odds with their brothers and sisters, and when they were, they were filled with anger and resentment and destructive behavior. It was their nature, lower nature. It’s all focused on self. You harm me; I’ll harm you even worse. You do something negative to me; I will make sure you’re punished, because you have damaged me. You have hurt me. The evolution of human beings is a constant, slow movement from a self-centered life to an other-centered life, and when we’re focused on self, the one thing that can be used against us or with us is the idea that, if you don’t do what you are asked to do, you will be punished. So if you don’t want to see yourself in pain, then you’d better pay attention to what I’m telling you. So the whole Old Testament is based on the fear of punishment, which is all focused on self. I don’t want to be punished. I don’t want to be in pain. I don’t want to go to hell, so all right, I’ll do what you say. But I really don’t like doing what you say, because I don’t want to do it. I want to do what serves me. And what God is slowly revealing to human beings is, “Look, the reason I created you, the reason you’re here is I want you to connect with one another and allow me to be the source of a life flow that comes from one person to another. If you allow me to dwell inside of you,” which is the promise of the New Testament, “I will come and dwell in your hearts. If you let me in there, I will do the most extraordinary things through you. I can reach other people. You can join me in serving people. No longer focus on being served yourself. There really isn’t much joy in being self-serving, but what you’re made for, what excites you, what gives you joy is to be there for another person. And you are slowly, slowly evolving into that kind of a person that I intended you to be, and so you’re now, in the New Testament, you are ready.” Two thousand years ago, you were ready to hear something that was shocking, and that is that God no longer feels separated from us, nor should we feel separated from God when we sin.

Listen to the way Jesus first appears to his disciples after they had failed so miserably in being there with him and for him, except for John. They were scared. They were locked in a room out of fear. So when we sin, we’re afraid. We’re afraid of God’s punishment, afraid of disappointing God, afraid of his anger. Sin always separates us. That’s the nature of sin. So when we sin and God looks at us as a sinner, then we have the sense from the Old Testament that he is now angry, and he will punish us, and we no longer have his favor. And so in the New Testament, Jesus does this mysterious thing called redemption, and in that moment, what he did is he took away any sense of anybody who feels that, “I owe God something, because I sinned. I must make up for it. I must repair the relationship.” He’s saying, “No, it’s been repaired. Your sins no longer separate me from you. I am there for you.” That’s what it means he forgives sin, all sin, and yet many people hear that, and they say, “Well, it can’t be true, because if he forgives all sins, then sin doesn’t matter. If he’s not going to send you to hell because you do something wrong, why do something right?” Taking away the fear of God and replacing it with love is the core of this whole Judeo-Christian tradition. Until we understand how loved we are by God, we cannot become who we’re called to be, and if facing our sinfulness, looking at the times in which we failed to be who we’re called to be, if that is the task of being a more mature, more conscious human being, then we’re going to always be confronting our sinfulness. Sins are there for a purpose, for helping us grow, and when we see sin for what it is and we see the emptiness that it creates and the separation and isolation that it creates, we want to turn away from it, because that’s not who we are, and that’s not what we want.

And so it’s essential that we understand that, during this period of time that we’re struggling with our self-centeredness and longing to be more service-oriented, we have to feel that we are loved. Love is the power of the New Testament, and if you’re told that nothing that you do will ever separate you from the love of God, you’re understanding something that is very hard for the mind to grasp, because the mind works in justice. And justice says, “If you do something wrong, you’re going to pay for it.” Well, don’t worry. You will pay for it. Sin always creates separation and isolation from yourself. It creates shame, a sense there’s something wrong with me, a sense of uncomfortableness with who we are. Sin separates us from self, and then the sins that we commit against another or that are committed against us by another separate us from them, and we get caught up in things like anger and revenge and paying them back.

All of that has to be destroyed, removed, and how is it done? First of all, it seems that, if we’re ever going to enter into the place where God intends us to be, the person that God has always had in mind that we will become, we have to believe in that promise that God is there to help us grow into who we ultimately truly are, leaving lies and half-truths behind and living in truth. How do you believe that God will do that for you, since it’s a gift that he and only he can give to you, if he hates you and if he’s angry at you? The most devastating thing, a misunderstanding that we have of our relationship with God, is that sins separate us from him. And that was needed in the Old Testament, but now it isn’t. We need to believe that he loves us, because he has the sense that, within each one of us, there is this kernel, this beautiful thing called our essence, and if it’s loved, if you believe that it’s there, if you can be touching that, that’s — the image of doubting Thomas in this gospel is so interesting, because these men are locked in a room because of fear that they’ve failed and that God is angry with them, and he comes, and he offers them nothing but peace. And he said, “I want you to understand. Your actions did not separate me from you. I’m there for you in your brokenness.” Can you feel that? Can you touch it? Isn’t it interesting that the thing that Thomas had to touch were the wounds? The wounds are the image of God shedding blood for us. I don’t have any way of explaining how it all works, how God’s act of self-sacrificing his Son — how did that work? Don’t get caught in that. Just get caught in the impact of it. The impact is nothing can separate us from God’s attention, his desire that we grow, his desire that we learn, that he will show us things, make us more conscious of the choices that we make and give us a better insight into what those choices produce. I guarantee you, if your choices are based in a life or in a half-truth, they will never produce what you hope they will produce for you, and you’re going to end up empty. And so he said, “If you can believe in me, my love for you in that state, then you have a chance to be connected to me while you’re in this world sinning, causing pain and separation from self and others. I’m in there with you. I’m fighting this fight with you. I’m empowering you to see, most especially, the impact you’re having on people and its result.”

Isn’t it funny how we would — we want so much for the peace of the kingdom, and we’re using all kinds of means to find that fullness when the truth is right here, kind of in our hearts. Believe that God can dwell inside of you and affirm you every second of every day and give you insight into who you are and why you’re here. And if you know that the reason you’re here is to offer a connection with other human beings through longing for them to not be caught in their sin and to not be caught in the isolation it’s creating — think about that. God has a plan where he can live inside of you, and if you see the plan and see the value of it, you will resonate the same thing that he’s resonating to you. The same love that you feel from God in your brokenness, you can give that to someone else, and then they become more conscious of this God event in the world that is the healing power of love. We think so much about our actions, how we treat each other. Yeah, that’s important, and sins can be a way of seeing that negativity that we’re laying on self and others. But it’s more subtle than that. The core reason that we’re here is to be an instrument of giving a power to other human beings just as God has given it to all of us who open our hearts to it. We can share that to give it to another person. That’s what you’re called to be, instruments of this kind of grace, and that would mean that you are a person filled with forgiveness, with mercy. Mercy is another word for favor. Favor is a kind of love that’s given to people that isn’t merited. Do you know how good that feels, when you can have that sense inside of you of self-acceptance in your brokenness and want another person to feel the same kind of self-acceptance for the brokenness that is just our destiny? That brokenness is the essential tool that we use to grow up and to change and to evolve.

If sin — if the goal of the church, if the goal of religion is to get rid of sin, well then, baby, it has failed miserably. In fact, the more conscious one becomes of their sins, the more aware they are of them, and that’s the process of growing in the direction that brings you freedom from sin, to see it for what it is. So if you’re always trying to avoid it, if you never want to think of yourself as sinning, what you’re going to do is repress so many emotions and feelings that come up that are like shame and guilt and fear and anger and revenge. We just repress them. “I’m not supposed to have those feelings.” No, those feelings reveal to you who you are in your conscious state, and if you’re filled with those feelings, you know that there’s something missing, something that you’re needing and longing for. And it comes first from your understanding of the way God looks at you as a sinner, and then you can look at yourself that way and look at another person that way. And then sin no longer has any power. It will not separate you. It will not create enmity between you.

Look at the opening reading, from the Acts one. What was the impact on the community of people who understood who Jesus is and what he was offering? All of a sudden, they all are of one mind and one heart, and they don’t see anything that one of them has as a possession of theirs, but it belongs to everyone. That is the most amazing consciousness state that you could be in. We’re all in this together. We all have something we can offer to each other. Nobody owns holiness. Nobody is a slave to sin. All of it we share, and when we share in the work, in the very essence of what it means to be alive and to be full of this gift called love and we feel it flowing all over the place between everybody, there’s no jealousy, no envy, no competition. That’s the kingdom. The world runs on fear, shame, anger, and the kingdom runs on forgiveness, love, patience, unity, communion. It’s a choice. We have a choice to imagine the world as it is or to imagine it as something it’s not, and the world you imagine is the world you live in.

Father, your Son revealed fully who you are. You are the Son incarnate. He was God and made man, and we see, in this new image of who you are, the lover, the servant, you always have intended yourself to be seen as. For that we give you thanks and praise, but open our hearts to it. We resist it. We’re more used to a system of fear and punishment. Instead you’re inviting us into the mystical world of your life living in us, flowing between us and the people around us, and it’s a world that we’re not familiar with, a world that seems strange to us at first. So please bless us with patience, openness, and surrendering to the truth that you reveal in your very person. Bless us with mercy, and we ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Acts 10:34a, 37-43 | Colossians 3:1-4 | John 20:1-9

Oh God, who on this day, through your Only Begotten Son, have conquered death and unlocked for us the path to eternity, grant, we pray, that we who keep the solemnity of the Lord’s resurrection may, through the renewal brought by your Spirit, rise up in the light of life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

The way the church celebrates this great feast of Easter is more than just Easter Sunday morning. After Vatican Council, we renewed so many of the traditions that had somehow gotten lost over centuries, and one of the things that we recovered after Vatican II was the fullness of the celebration of Easter, where we focused primarily on the three days, not just Easter Sunday but Thursday night, when Christ instituted the Eucharist and revealed the heart of his ministry to his disciples and then his death on Friday and then his resurrection on Sunday. And this is a strange year still. Like last year, we haven’t been able to gather in churches as much as we used to because of the pandemic, and so it struck me that maybe what I should talk about today is not so much Easter Sunday but Thursday, what happened at that Last Supper with Jesus. A lot of us haven’t been able to experience the fullness of the Triduum on these, Thursday, Friday and Sunday, but it’s so important, because it’s one story. It’s a beautiful full revelation of what we believe in as Christians, as believers of this mysterious creature that came into the world, this God/man who is just like us but also God and that he did this thing for us out of his humanity. It just revealed his divinity that was hidden inside of him.

And I love that phrase from the opening prayer when it said that Easter is this celebration that brings us into the light of life, and to me, light of life sounds so much like entering into enlightenment, full consciousness. So my intention then in this homily this morning, on Easter, is to give you a perspective on who this figure is and what he was really leaving us with and what he’s inviting us into now, a life in him, he in us, we in him, this oneness, this commingling of two spirits, divinity, humanity. Jesus lived that life, and he is the example of how we’re to live the same kind of life, even though we’re not — in terms of intensity, we’re not divine, but we are infused with the light, the enlightenment of what it means to be in touch with the divine. We can use all kinds of images for what the divine is, but the one I love the most is when we think of divinity and who God is, he’s also, as John says in his opening gospel, that this Jesus that came into the world is the incarnation of truth, reality.

I’ve spent so much of my life looking and struggling for perfection, no mistakes, no sins. And that may not be necessarily a bad goal, but it’s incomplete when you realize that we’re not here to stop sinning as much as we are to be shown by God, by divinity inside of us the illusion that sins carry and the lack of their ability to give us what they promise. And it’s like the gift of divinity is to expose all that isn’t real, isn’t true. And isn’t it interesting? When you look at the world today, it seems like almost every institution, whether it’s politics or medicine or the church or religion, whatever, it’s all — we’re aware so much of what is in those institutions and those kind of ministries that is impure, that is not what it should be. And that can be a depressing time, in one sense, but in truth, it’s the way people enter into the light of life to see the darkness and to name it and to not be afraid of it and to not be ashamed of how we participated in it, because the greatest goal of this God/man Jesus was to come into the world to convince us of a couple of things that are very simple and very direct. One is that God is living with us and guiding us. He’s our mentor, our teacher, our friend, our advocate, and also he forgives us of everything we’ve ever done.

So I want to take you back then to Thursday night, because I believe that night is so essential to understand the person of Jesus. He’s with his disciples. He wants to spend the last meal with them, and during that meal, he did two things that seemed completely confusing to his disciples, which means they hadn’t grown enough in consciousness and awareness of who Jesus is. If you see Jesus, as we do now, and we know who he is, the things that he did make total sense. But to them, it must have been strange, because when they went through the Passover celebration that was a part of their tradition and Jesus did the ritual, as it was always done, and there was a cup of blessing, and there was bread that was always there, and these were blessed. But Jesus said the most bizarre thing, in a way, to them. He said, “This blood — this wine, it’s not just wine. It’s not just blessed wine. I want you to realize this is my blood — my blood. This is part of me. It’s the life force in me, and what it does for you, if you let it course through your veins, if you let this life-giving red liquid that brings oxygen and cleans all our cells constantly, 24/7, if you let it into you, my blood, it is going to do something for you. And the blood of the chalice is for forgiveness.” So Jesus makes a profound statement by asking them to drink of the cup, when he said, “If you don’t drink this cup, you have nothing, none of my inheritance. You have to believe you’re forgiven. You have to believe that.” And I don’t know why forgiveness is a very difficult thing for us. Because of our minds and the way our brains work, we can understand justice. It makes sense. You do a good thing; you get rewarded. You do a bad thing; you get punished. That’s clear, but it’s only the heart that can understand what it means — this God/man wants us to believe that, no matter what we do, no matter how far we drift from him and from the truth and from reality, no matter how much damage we do, it never, ever changes the intention in his heart that he wants to be there for us and lift us into the light of life. That’s hard for us to understand, but that’s what Jesus was establishing that night. And then the bread, the bread is his body, he said. Take it and eat of it, and what he’s saying is that this bread, which is a nurturing element in our life — it’s food, and it’s for our strength. So it’s so interesting. He’s saying, “If you’ll eat this break and drink this cup in memory of me, you will have the inheritance I promise you.” And that has become the ritual of so many Christian churches and especially Catholicism and major sacramental religions. Without that, I can’t imagine us being who we are without the Eucharist daily, every Sunday. It’s the most amazing promise, and that’s what Jesus was establishing that night. “I want you to know something about me. I’m going to leave you.” And he knew he was going to die, and he knew they’d be scattered. He knew they would doubt him, and so he had to say these things, and even though they didn’t comprehend it, they went back, and they did comprehend it. And when they were infused with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, they saw the light. They saw the truth. They saw who he is. They saw what he’s doing for them. They saw what they have to do for others. It was a powerful night, that night that he spent having dinner with his disciples.

But then there was the other thing, the most interesting one. It’s funny that John’s gospel, which is the most spiritual, I think, basically when he recalls that dinner, he never mentions the Eucharist, but he does mention the next thing, the strange thing, that after Jesus dined with his disciples, he stood up, took off his cloak and put a towel around him and said, “I want to wash your feet.” That seemed very strange to all of them, because that’s the role of a servant, and probably the least attractive for the servants themselves, which job they were going to get when someone held the banquet, was the guy who had to — the couple of men who had to sit at the doorway and wash dirty feet that had come in. If it was a rainy night, they were muddy feet. Otherwise it was dusty feet, but they had to clean the feet, because people reclined at table, and they didn’t wear shoes and socks obviously. So it was the kind of thing like washing your hands before you sit down if you’d been working in the fields or something. Why would he do that? Why would he say, “I want you to let me wash your feet”? It becomes clear in the conversation because — particularly between Peter and Jesus, because Peter just said, “Absolutely not. You’re not going to wash my feet.” And the interesting thing about that is Jesus’ response. He said, “Look, unless you let me wash your feet, you will have no inheritance from me. You won’t receive what I’m leaving you as a legacy, as a gift when I die.” It’s like the person who leaves their wealth to their firstborn son. Well, he’s leaving the thing that made him so powerful, so effective, so life-giving. He’s going to give that to human beings if they allow him to do what — to be a servant to them. What? A servant? You notice, when Jesus is talking to Peter, he said, “Yes, I’m your master. You call me a master. You call me a teacher. Yeah, I am all that. You’re right, but I’m also a servant. And you, who are attached to me and who are looking forward to the kingdom,” and looking forward to a political kingdom, as they did, thinking they were going to be in positions of authority and power in the world because they followed the Messiah, and they would be the ones in the temple, running the whole operation — they thought all that. And what he’s saying to them is, “That’s not it. You’re not being empowered with my life and my blood and my body inside of you, my nourishment to be a master. Here’s the secret: you have to understand that you are empowered for one reason only, and that’s the minister to the needs and the wants and the desires of other people, not any of their whims but what they really need, what their heart longs for, what their souls are meant to be. You need to help them be that. You’re not their master, but you’re their servant.” And Jesus himself said to Peter, “Look, you call me master and teacher. That’s right, but I want you to be a servant.”

But the interesting thing about that image to me is that, when you look at what Jesus was doing and saying to Peter, it’s almost like he’s saying, “Look, I know you have an ego,” like everyone has an ego. “You’re looking forward to being a master over others, and that’s normal. But what I’m calling you to is to be a servant to others. Okay?” But then the interesting thing is it seems that, when someone refuses to allow another to serve them, then there’s often — you see that resistance reveals something. And what it means in the relationship with God is, if you don’t let God serve you, if you don’t accept his service humbly, then you can’t be in his kingdom either. That means, unless you allow God to be the source of life in you for the work that you have, you’ll never be able to do that work, and the thing about being effective in this world — and everybody, I think, that’s honest, knows that human nature loves to be effective and loves to be held up as somebody who is effective and powerful and helpful. It goes right to our head and not to our heart. Our head just says, “Well, I’m special. I’m special. I’m special.” Well, everything we do that’s powerful and transformative and brings people into the light is not us. It’s us with God, and so the idea of being a servant means you have to receive the gift that comes from the master to the servant, who gives the servant the ability to do the work that they do. So there’s something very much hidden, in a way, but not hard to see, that this whole idea of service is essential to this relationship we have with God. Let him serve you. Let him be the source of the healing power in you. Always acknowledge it’s him in you doing the work, and then do it in a way that is generous and wanting only the goodness that the other needs to be there, not to make you good or not to look good. So to move from master to servant, to move from somebody who is on their own to somebody who realizes that everything I am is because of God’s nourishing love and his life-giving forgiveness. When we have that rooted in us, we are then capable of becoming the servants that God intends us to be. That’s the mystery of Easter, this transformative union between God and man. Without it, we end up being people that control and people that tend to use and people that tend to be self-focused.

Father, the fullness of your revelation, the God that you are was shown to us in this mysterious creature, this God/man Jesus. There’s so much about it that’s hard for us to grasp and hard for us to comprehend, in terms of the reason you do this is so that we can become ministers just like you were, and it’s so easy for us to create a God that is more like a master than a servant. Help us always to be servants, servants to each other but most especially allowing you to serve us. So we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Mark 11:1-10 | Philippians 2:6-11 | Mark 14:1—15:47

Almighty, everliving God, who is an example of humility to the human race to follow, caused our Savior to take flesh and submit to the cross, graciously grant that we may heed his lesson of patient suffering and so merit a share in his resurrection who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

Before I read the gospel, I would like to tell you that this is going to be a different kind of program. I’m not going to be giving a homily, and I am using music, but the music is music taken from the actual liturgy of this most sacred time. But instead, I’d like you to focus on the story, the story of Jesus’ Passion and death. We all know how powerful stories are. They can have an incredibly powerful impact on us, and one of the ways in which that influence happens is that we’re watching. And in any good story, a pattern, maybe multiple patterns of how people live, how we react to things like evil, goodness, forgiveness, resentment. So I’m expecting you, or I’m inviting you, rather — so I’m inviting you to a meditation on this classic story, the story on the death and resurrection of Jesus, but this is going to focus on his death, on his surrendering to what he had to surrender to in order to save us. Watching for, listening for the pattern is what I’m inviting you to do. So I’m suggesting a kind of meditative listening to this story when you’re alone, simply quiet, and let it speak to you, because stories have power to change us.

So there are two readings before we get to the gospel. So each one is there to enhance and to set the tone for how we should listen. The first one is from Isaiah, 50th chapter, fourth through the seventh verse. “Lord God has given me a well-trained tongue that I might know how to speak to the weary word that will rouse them. Morning after morning he opens my ears that I may hear, and I have not rebelled, have not turned back. I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard. My face I did not shield from buffets and spitting. The Lord God is my help. Therefore I am not disgraced. I have set my face like flint, knowing I shall not be put to shame.” The word of the Lord. Responsorial Psalm, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

A reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, second chapter, sixth through eleventh verse. “Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name. At the name of Jesus, every knee should bend, of those in heaven, on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.” The word of the Lord. The verse before the gospel, “Christ became obedient to the point of death even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed upon him the name which is above every name.”

Now we turn to the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ from St. Matthew [sic], 14th chapter, first verse to 15th chapter, 47th verse. “The Passover and the feast of unleavened bread were to take place in two day’s time. So the chief priest and the scribes were seeking a way to arrest him by treachery and put him to death. They said, ‘Not during the festival,’ for fear there may be a riot among the people. When he was in Bethany, reclining at table in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of perfumed oil, costly, genuine spikenard. She broke the alabaster jar and poured it on his head. There were some who were indignant. ‘Why has there been this waste of perfumed oil? It could have been sold for more than 100 days wages and the money given to the poor.’ They were infuriated with her. Jesus said, ‘Let her alone. Why do you make trouble for her? She’s done a good thing for me. The poor you always have with you, and whenever you wish, you can do good to them, but you will not always have me. She has done what she could. She has anticipated anointing my body for burial. Amen, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed to the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.’

“Then Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, went off to the chief priest to hand him over to them. When they heard him, they were pleased and promised to pay him money. And he looked for an opportunity to hand him over. On the first day of the feast of unleavened bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb, his disciples said to him, ‘Where do you want us to go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?’ He sent two of his disciples and said to them, ‘Go into the city, and a man you will meet there carrying a jar of water, follow him. Wherever he enters, say to the master of the house, the teacher says where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples. Then he will show you a large, upper room, furnished and ready. Make the preparations for us there.’ The disciples then went off, entered the city and found it just as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover.

“When it was evening, he came with the twelve, and as they reclined at table and were eating, Jesus said, ‘Amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.’ They began to be distressed and say to him one by one, ‘Surely it is not I.’ He said to them, ‘One of the twelve, the one who dips with me into the dish, for the Son of Man indeed goes as is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would be better for that man if he had never been born.’ While they were eating, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, gave it to them and said, ‘Take it. This is my body.’ Then he took a cup, gave thanks and gave it to them, and they drank from it. And he said, ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which shall be shed for many. Amen, I say to you, I shall not drink again the fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.’ And after singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

“Then Jesus said to them, ‘All of you will have your faith shaken, for it is written, I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be dispersed. But after I’ve been raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.’ Peter said to him, ‘Even though all should have their faith shaken, mine will not be.’ Then Jesus said to him, ‘Amen, I say to you, this very night before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.’ But he vehemently replied, ‘Even though I should have to die with you, I will not deny you.’ And they all spoke similarly.

“Then they came to a place named Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, ‘Sit here while I pray.’ He took with him Peter, James and John and began to be troubled and distressed. Then he said to them, ‘My soul is sorrowful even to death. Remain here and keep watch.’ He advanced a little farther and fell to the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass by him. He said, ‘Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will.’ When he returned, he found them asleep. He said to Peter, ‘Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep watch one hour? Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ Withdrawing again, he prayed, saying the same thing. Then he returned once more and found them asleep. They could not keep their eyes open and did not know what to answer him. He returned a third time and said to them, ‘Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? It’s enough. The hour has come. Behold, the Son of Man is to be handed over to sinners. Get up. Let us go. See, my betrayer is at hand.’

“And while he was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, arrived, accompanied by a crowd with swords and clubs, who had come from the chief priests, the scribes and the elders. His betrayer had arranged a signal with them, saying, ‘The man I shall kiss is the one. Arrest him and lead him away securely.’ He came and immediately went over to him and said, ‘Rabbi,’ and he kissed him. At this, they laid hands on him and arrested him. One of the bystanders drew his sword, struck the high priest’s servant and cut off his ear.

“Jesus said to them in reply, even so their testimony did not agree. The high priest rose before the assembly and questioned Jesus, saying, ‘Have you no answer? What are these men testifying against you?’ But he was silent and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him and said to him, ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the blessed one?’ Then Jesus answered, ‘I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the power and coming with clouds of heaven.’ At that the high priest tore his garments and said, ‘What further need we have of witnesses? We have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?’ They all condemned him as deserving to die. Some began to spit on him. They blindfolded him, struck him and said to him, ‘Prophesy.’ And the guards greeted him with blows.

“While Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the high priest’s maids came up, seeing Peter warming himself, she looked intently at him and said, ‘You too were with the Nazarene, Jesus.’ But he denied it again. ‘I neither know nor understand what you’re talking about.’ So he went out into the outer court. Then the cock crowed. The maid saw him and began again to say to the bystanders, ‘This man is one of them.’ Once again he denied it. A little later, the bystanders said to Peter once more, ‘Surely you’re one of them for you too are a Galilean.’ He began to curse and to swear. ‘I do not know this man about whom you are talking,’ and immediately a cock crowed a second time. Then Peter remember the words that Jesus had said to him. ‘Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.’ He broke down and wept.

“As soon as morning came, the chief priest, with the elders and the scribes, that is the whole Sanhedrin, held a council. They bound Jesus, led him away and handed him over to Pilate. Pilate questioned him. ‘Are you the kind of the Jews?’ He said in reply, ‘You say so.’ The chief priest accused him of many things. Again Pilate questioned him. ‘Have you no answer? See how many things they accuse you of?’ Jesus gave no further answer, so Pilate was amazed.

“Now on the occasion of the feast, he used to release to them one prisoner whom they requested. A man called Barabbas was then in prison, along with the rebels who had committed murder in rebellion. The crowd came forward and began to ask him to do for them as he was accustomed. Pilate answered, ‘Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?’ For he knew that it was out of envy that the chief priest had handed him over, but the chief priest stirred up the crowed to have him release Barabbas for them instead. Pilate again said to them in reply, ‘Then what do you want me to do with the man you call the King of the Jews?’ They shouted again, ‘Crucify him.’ Pilate said to them, ‘Why? What evil has he done?’ They only shouted louder. ‘Crucify him.’ So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas to them, and after he had Jesus scourged and handed him over to be crucified.

“The soldiers led him away inside the palace, that is the Praetorium, and assembled the whole cohort. They clothed him in purple, and weaving a crown of thorns, placed it upon him. They began to salute him, ‘Hail, King of the Jews,’ and kept striking his head with a reed and spitting upon him. They knelt before him in homage, and when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak, dressed him in his own clothes and led him out to crucify him. They pressed into service a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross. They brought him to the place of Golgotha, which is translated Place of the Skull. They gave him wine drugged with myrrh, but he did not take it. Then they crucified him, divided his garments by casting lots for them to see what each would take. It was 9:00 in the morning when they crucified him. The inscription of the charge against him read ‘The King of the Jews.’ With him, they crucified two revolutionaries, one on his right and one on his left. Those passing by reviled him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘Aha, you who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself by coming down from the cross.’ Alike the chief priest with the scribes mocked him among themselves and said, ‘He saves others. He cannot save himself. Let the Christ, the King of Israel come down from the cross that we may see and believe.’ Those who were crucified with him also kept abusing him.

“At noon, darkness came over the whole land until 3:00 in the afternoon, and at 3:00, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani,’ which is translated, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me. Some of the bystanders who heard it said, ‘Look, he is calling Elijah.’ One of them ran, soaked a sponge with wine, put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, ‘Wait. Let us see if Elijah comes to take him down.’ Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.

“The veil of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom. When the centurion who stood facing him saw how he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was the Son of God.’ There were also women looking on from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of the younger James and Joses, and Salome. These women had followed him when he was in Galilee and ministered to him. There were also many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem.

“When it was already evening, since it was the day of Praetorium, the day before the Sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea, a distinguished member of the council, who was himself awaiting the kingdom of God, came and courageously went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Pilate was amazed that he was already dead. He summoned the centurion and asked him if Jesus had already died, and when he learned of it from the centurion, he gave the body to Joseph. Having brought a linen cloth, he took him down, wrapped him in the linen cloth and laid him in a tomb that had been hewn out of a rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb. Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Joses, watched where he was laid.” The word of the Lord.

My prayer for this experience we’ve had together this morning is that you will grow in your understanding in the patterns that we find in these incredible, powerful stories of the Passion of Jesus. We have four versions. This one was from St. Mark, and each one opens us up to a way of understanding, not just getting information but really understanding and feeling the emotion in this story that is our story — our story. So let me close with a prayer.

Heavenly Father, the fullness of revelation is found in this person Jesus. He’s the one who reveals completely who you really are and who we are and what we are together. Your presence living inside of us, your awareness you place within us of your indwelling presence is something that we need to grow into and accept and be blessed by. So thank you for this opportunity for us to grow in our awareness of who you are and who we are and why we’re here. Amen.

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Jeremiah 31:31-34 | Hebrews 5:7-9 | John 12:20-33

By your help, we beseech you, Lord our God, may we walk eagerly in the same charity with which, out of love for the world, your Son handed himself over to death. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

This Sunday marks the end of the five Sundays of Lent, and we begin next week, the holiest of the year, with the Feast of Palm Sunday, ending with Easter Sunday. Then there is the Triduum, the holy Thursday, the institution of Eucharist, and then Friday, the death of Christ and then his resurrection on Sunday. This season is the culmination, in a sense, of everything that we need to learn and know about what it is that we are to engage in as we surrender to the will of a God who is all powerful, at the same time all merciful. If I go back to the first Sunday of this season, one of the things that was always brought up, usually, in terms of the reading, is the temptations of Jesus, and I just want to start with that one image, because it’s so clear that this last set of readings for this fifth Sunday, in a way, point to what it is that Jesus made clear when he was tempted. What was his intention in terms of his life here? What did he want to accomplish?

The incarnation is core to our teaching. It means that we believe that Jesus was fully human and fully divine, and when we see this creature that’s fully human and fully divine unfolding throughout its life on this earth, we realize that what we’re looking at is the fullest representation of who human beings are and who God is. The fullness of revelation is found in this human being who is also God. We see who human beings really are and who God really is. From the beginning it was clear what’s the relationship between humanity and divinity in this person of God and Jesus, and it’s this: the reason Jesus came into the world, he said, is to open himself as fully as possible as a human being, to learn as much as he could of what the Father is teaching. “I live on every word that comes from my Father’s mouth.” And when asked whether or not his words were worth trusting, the devil tempted him and said, “Well, make sure he’s going to do what he says or if his words really work. Test him.” And Jesus said, “I’ll never test him. I trust in him implicitly. Whatever he says, whatever he teaches, I believe in. I don’t need to have it proven to me.” And once Jesus made those two decisions, once humanity makes those decisions, then the next part is rather just like — it just turns out to be that way, and that is, when the devil shows him what it’s like to live in this world that runs on power and control, Jesus looks at it and says, “I’m not even interested in this. This is not the kingdom of my Father. It’s the kingdom of evil. It’s the kingdom of the devil.” That’s strong words for what is considered to be the world, but don’t confuse the image of the world as the world that God created but the world that we live in that is created out of an ego and a mindset that says the way to deal with this world is to be in a position of power and to use that position of power to achieve and get whatever you want. That’s living in the world. The other option is to live in God, which is what Jesus is teaching the world, what it’s like to live in God.

So we start with this first reading in this set of readings with an image of a change that came with time, in terms of how God was dealing with his people. He began, definitely, as his master, as the human beings’ master. He was the one with power, like all gods had power, and if you did what he said, and that was one of the ways to help them keep themselves from self-destruction, by following rules and regulations — there were first ten rules and regulations that were given that had everything to do with our relationship with God and with each other, the Ten Commandments. But it’s clear that human beings were so prone to wanting a power to tell them what to do, and if they could follow that, they wouldn’t have to do any of their own work, just obey the ruler. And if they gave themselves over to the rule and followed it, they knew they would be safe. They would not be destroyed. So you can see that that was the system in the beginning, and then we see, as God is revealing himself slowly over time, we realize that God is not a God of power over people but a God that longs to empower people. And so in this beautiful reading from Jeremiah, we have a kind of foretaste of what redemption is going to be, what’s going to happen to human beings, and what it is, it’s a change from looking outside of ourselves to a power greater than ourselves to tell us how to act so we can act that way and, our of fear, do it over and over again so that we won’t be destroyed. And that’s going to be replaced by something much more mysterious. “I will place my law within them, write it on their hearts. They will know the truth. They will know who they are. They will know who I am. Nobody’s going to have to teach them. It’s inside of them. It’s buried in their unconscious, and it’s going to become more and more conscious.” So no longer will people have to be controlled with rules and laws. They will know what to do. That’s the promise.

And that’s what we call redemption, and that’s what Jesus accomplished. We have to understand exactly how he did it. What did he do? Because what Jesus learned while he was here on this earth is what we all need to learn while we’re here on this earth. The first thing that we see in the next reading about Jesus, who was in the flesh, who was God in the flesh, is that he had to learn. He had to learn to obey, and he learned obedience from what he suffered. Now, what that means is obedience means to listen. So he had to learn how to listen to everything the Father was showing him, everything the Father was teaching him, and when he saw that what he was doing was not in sync with what he knew that God longed for him to do — in other words, when he was caught as a human being into being the powerful one, the one that could control people, he had to feel at times that that’s what he wanted to do as a human being. He was fully human, and if I want to change somebody, if I had the power over them to change them, I’d say, “You must change. Stop doing what you’re doing. Do this, or I will leave you, or I will destroy you. I’ll never have anything to do with you.” That’s the way the mind and the will work, but Jesus had to learn to listen to something new. And when he learned it, he had to surrender to it, which means to suffer, to allow it to take the place of where he was, what he thought. So he was made whole, more in tune with the truth, because every time he saw something he decided would work and it was revealed to him it wouldn’t work, he had to suffer it. He had to surrender to it and change, and what the change really was, was a change from being a figure that was a master over us becoming a servant. When Jesus said, in the first reading, “I had to show myself as master,” that’s the way he first revealed himself, as a master. “Follow my rules or die.” And yet he knew that that was not truly who he was, and he wanted not to be that, but he wanted Jesus to reveal who he really is. Who he really is, is a lover who wants to serve his people. He doesn’t want to have power over them, making them do what they’re supposed to do out of fear of losing his love or being condemned by him. No, he wanted so much for them to see that he was one that looked at their sins and didn’t want to destroy them because of them, because of those sins but wanted to offer forgiveness. And when he knew that we would understand that we were forgiven, human beings would begin to understand what it means to live in this thing, live in the world in God and not in the world as a place where the thing that works, the only thing that works is power over people, controlling them. How do you stop controlling people? Instead of that, empower them. Empower them to see who they are and to live as they’re called to live.

So we have, in this set of readings then, an image in the gospel, which is perfect, because the Greeks are coming to this great feast. Now, understand this feast is a celebration of the power of Jesus in the world. He had just healed a man that was born blind. Then he raised someone from the dead. This is power, and he came into Jerusalem as a rock star, as a celebrity, as the greatest of all kings. And it was a kingdom that was not the kingdom of God but the kingdom of the world. He was powerful, and so he had to have been, in a certain sense, intoxicated by that a little bit if he was human. And maybe he could look and realize, when he saw that he was being held up as some great powerful figure that had power over evil, he became worried that maybe he had made a mistake. And where would the mistake have been? Well, if you look at Jesus, he was really good about offering forgiveness, and as a human, remember, he was a human being learning how to become more like God. And at the beginning of his even ministry, he had a way of dealing with the scribes and Pharisees where he showed hate for them. He was judgmental and condemning and thought they should be destroyed, and yet he was soft as a human being over sinners who recognized their need. Well, doesn’t that feel human? It does make sense. If somebody who is absolutely bent on doing destruction to you — you want to destroy them. If somebody comes to you and says, “Forgive me. I’m going to change.” You can relate to that person. So is it true then that Jesus revealing in this story of the end of his life the final thing he had to learn — you cannot change the world by hating it or trying to destroy it. So you’ll notice that this statement, when the Greeks came and said, “We want to see where Jesus is right now.” This is the end of his life. “Where is he? What’s he dealing with?” That’s kind of what they were asking, and Jesus said, “Look, I realize something. Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat, but something has to die in us as human beings, and it’s power over people.” If you really are in that world of power, you know how effective it is, and if your motive is good, you feel empowered.

If I had the power to change everyone by forcing them to be who they should be, I would think I was doing a great thing, but the only trouble with every institution that gets that power inside of them is it may start out by saying, “I want to give it to people, empower them.” But then normally the source of power becomes intoxicated by their power, and they start to use and abuse instead of empower. So Jesus is saying, “Something in me still has to die at this last moment of my life, and I want God to glorify me and glorify God.” What it means, the glory of God is human beings intoxicated with the love of God dwelling within them, becoming everything that God longed for them to be. That’s what God wants. That’s his glory. So what it is that Jesus is trying to say to the world, “I’m finally seeing fullness of who I have to be.” Yes, to forgive the sinner is a very, very difficult thing for a lot of us to do, but how about to forgive evil, raw, demanding, destructive, ugly evil? What do you have to do with that? Can’t you will to destroy it? Isn’t that what God would want? No, he wants you to forgive it, and so the glory of God in Jesus and the glory of Jesus in God is that moment on the cross when the pinnacle, the high point of his humanity and divinity coming together manifests itself in a humanity that is surrendering to something that’s so hard for the will and the mind to understand. And that is power over people is always destructive, and empowering people is the only way to save the world. And what is clear in this moment of Jesus’ death, right before he realizes that he has seen all of this, and he wants to manifest it to someone, he says the most incredible thing. He said, “Father, I am a victim of the institution that I’ve come to save, and the people in that have become empowered with the way of the world, not your way. And I’ve hated them for that. I’ve tried to destroy them for it. It’s the wrong thing to do, and so now I’m hanging here and saying to you, look, I’ve learned it. I see it. I want to tell everybody that — look what I am doing. I am forgiving the very people who have set their mind on destroying me, and I wanted to destroy them first, but I couldn’t.” And the more you try to destroy the enemy, the more you empower them. And the more you empower them, the more you lose. And so there he is, saying the most amazing, powerful statement. “Unless you forgive everything, every evil, every wrong thing, unless you forgive it with your heart and want it to be changed by it, being forgiven, only then can you enter into the kingdom of God. Only then do you understand my kingdom.” Living in God is living as a figure that empowers every seed of goodness in everyone by loving it. To live in the world is to destroy every person who’s filled with evil, and while you destroy that, you destroy the seed of goodness in them. Hatred, destruction is the devil’s work. Forgiveness, understanding, compassion is God’s work, and it’s conceivable that the human heart can override the human mind and will that can work always toward destruction of evil. And the heart can win. Instead of destruction, there’s life and beauty and goodness and redemption.

Father, your gift to us is the life of the God/man Jesus. Without it, we would never fully understand who you are and who we are and why we’re here. Bless us with insight, understanding, openness to who he is and who you are in him, and let us grow in our understanding of what his life teaches us so that we can do it, imitate him, become like him. It is going through the same process he goes through. It’s not being told what to do. It’s becoming who we really are. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23 | Ephesians 2:4-10 | John 3:14-21

Oh God, who through your word reconcile the human race to yourself in a wonderful way, grant, we pray, that with prompt devotion and eager faith the Christian people may hasten toward the solemn celebrations to come. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

The scriptures are a treasure of information, of wisdom and knowledge, and many say that the scriptures are both anthropological and theological, meaning they reveal to us the nature and the evolution of human beings and the nature of God as he slowly reveals himself to his people. So through scripture we learn about who we are, we learn about who God is, and we learn about why we are here in this world.

So let’s look for a moment at this notion that we have of this God who reveals himself slowly to us, and it’s so interesting in this reading from Chronicles. We see the evolution of God from a God who, when he saw his people not being who they were supposed to be, who we long for them to be, he made them in his image, and they were not initially in that image. In the time of Noah, he saw what he created. Even though, when he created it he said it was so very, very good, he looked at it all and said, “I made a mistake. I’m so sorry. I don’t like these people. Their hearts are filled with darkness, and I’m going to destroy everything I created,” a very strange story in a sense. But it underscores the fact that we have a destiny that is so much higher than what he saw in his people, and in a way that we see in God a kind of connection to our humanness, it made sense. He created something he hoped for that would be so much more than it was, and he was so disappointed that he said, “I want to scrap it all.” So he reveals himself as someone like us, but in this story, it’s different. In this story, we see an evolution of God, because we see the same situation. These people are filled with all kinds of iniquity and all kinds of sinfulness, and they are just turning from God completely. And so instead of wanting to destroy them, his first reaction now is compassion. “I have compassion for them.” And so early and often — I love that set of words, early and often. He kept saying, “Listen, you’re in the wrong direction. You’re going toward something that will destroy you. Please, listen to my word that I give you through my prophets, and change. Change. Turn away from what you’re doing.” And they didn’t, and then you’ll notice, instead of God punishing them, he allows the enemies to punish his people. It’s a way of saying, “All right, you’re going to choose a way of life that is destructive. Well, I’m going to allow you to have that way of life, and it will destroy you. And what happens? You lose everything that you have, and you become a slave.” It’s a perfect image of a kind of — how would I say — addicted qualities of human nature that can turn away from light and truth and continue to go to darkness over and over again, and they are slaves of it. They can’t — they’re not free to do anything else. It’s a beautiful description of human nature. And so we see in that particular passage then something that God is doing, because at the end of a very difficult period, 70 years that these people had to live with the results of their choices, they were ready to change. And then God infuses in a man, Cyrus, who is able to create the world that God wants them to live in again for them. He allows Cyrus to build this wonderful temple, and they go back, and hopefully all those experiences change them. So you get a different image. God is not wanting to destroy that which is not what it should be. He wants it to grow and to change, but the only way he can do that in the Old Testament was to put them through a period of great suffering — great suffering. So there is always that image of God working with people, taking people on a journey, bringing them into something new, and they have to go through something that’s difficult and painful. So there’s something about, in a way, in that system, we earn, in a way, God’s favor, because we learn from our mistakes. We changed, and now we’re pleasing to him.

Something is coming. Something is coming, and the thing that is coming is so different from that that we don’t always understand how much we have received from God’s mysterious gift of revealing himself in the person of Jesus to be the one who is really the fullness of who God is. And he is mercy. He is absolute love and forgiveness for the sinner in his or her sinfulness. I don't know why that’s so hard for us to understand, the shift that Jesus reveals in the world of who God the Father truly is. He is not anyone who is interested in turning away from anyone who is failing. He wants to turn toward them, transform them, awaken them, and it’s done through this mysterious thing that is talked about in Paul’s letter. He says, “There is this thing called grace.” Grace, what is grace? It is an unbelievable understanding of who God is in his love for sinners. It is love incarnate, and when we think about the things that we have failed at, we think about the things that we’ve not done. We feel the shame. We feel unworthy of being loved, and we get caught in that, and that’s the antithesis of grace, because grace is never earned. Grace is graciously given. It’s not out of obligation that God loves us. It is a free gift. It is his favor, and it’s so hard for us to understand that God has such favor for us in our most unattractive states, when we are absolutely destroying one another, hurting one another, harming ourselves and others, and yet his response is not to destroy us, not to give us over to our enemies but in the fullness of revelation to do something radically different, to tell us over and over again that we are loved and that it is his and that it is his grace that enables us to realize that, even in our greatest imperfection, we have this God who loves us because he sees and understands and is aware of the seed of goodness within us. And he knows us. He created us, and he knows the thing that will work best is when that seed is loved for what it is. We put so much emphasis on our actions as that’s who we are, but there is a core of all of us that knows — that knows who we really are. It’s like everything — I think education is trying to awaken us to the things we already know, so it seems clear that human beings had to go through a process of evolution before they could fully understand the mystery of grace, redemption, forgiveness for sinners as we’re sinning, not when we change, not when we’re sorry, not when we ask for pardon. The love is given consistently. If we accept that love, that’s a way of realizing what we’ve done, and we go through a thing called repentance. And repentance means we regret what we did, and it doesn’t mean that we have to have the repentance before we have God’s love. That’s what I think is a mistake. I think I’ve been always told unless you choose freely to not ever sin again, promise you’ll never sin again, you can’t be forgiven. Well, that doesn’t make sense in human nature. We don’t sin because we want to necessarily. We sin, because we are drawn to it in a way that is somehow overpowering our own free choice.

So this image of grace is at the heart of this set of readings. So I want to see if I can awaken you to this gift a little more by showing you what Jesus did when he was talking to Nicodemus. You know this story of Nicodemus and Jesus. Nicodemus was one of the Pharisees or maybe a scribe. I forget, but he was a high official in the temple. And he, unlike many others, but maybe there was more than we know, were really intrigued by the message of Jesus. They had something in their hearts that made them realize what he’s saying would be incredible awesome if it were true, that we are truly forgiven, not because we’ve changed but because forgiveness is the stuff we need to change. It’s being loved in our sinfulness that awakens us to our goodness. So Nicodemus comes and wants to know about this thing that Jesus is teaching, and he uses a phrase. He says, “Just as the serpent was lifted up by Moses in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” And what is lifted up? What does it mean to be lifted up?

You know the story about the snake. The Israelites were on their journey with Moses, and they were uncomfortable, and the food was lousy, and the accommodations were terrible. They even said, “I wish we could go back to where we were in slavery, because at least we had good meals and things like that.” All that was just so typical human nature. God is taking you on a journey to change you, to bring you to something so much more than you ever could imagine being, and we want to go back to something more comfortable, easier, less stressful. And so what we see in that story with Moses and the serpent is all of a sudden, serpents started to appear. Serpents are kind of hidden. They come in through the grass, and you can’t see them, and they bite these people, and they die. And so it’s like some hidden thing is attacking them, and so Moses was asked to put the snake on a pole. It was basically, “Look at what’s going on. Look at the sin that you’re caught up in. Look at the effects of that sin. Look at how it eats away at you. It destroys you.” When you lose faith in God, you lose a source of life, and you die. And so it was like — it seems to me that the lifting up of the serpent was a way of saying, “Look at evil for what it is and what it does.” And the most evil, dangerous thing we can do is turn away from the truth of who God is and reject his absolute total, incredible, faithful love for us in our brokenness, in our awfulness if that’s a word.

So what is Jesus then saying about lifting up this cross of his crucifixion? He is saying, “I want you to be aware of what I did when I died on the cross for you. I made up for every sin you will ever commit. They are no longer anything that keeps you from the presence, the love, the attention of God. Do you believe this?” And of course he didn’t. Nicodemus didn’t understand redemption yet, because it hadn’t happened. And so Jesus is talking about something that he can only wonder about rather than understand, but he’s saying, “If you really think about it, what I’m going to do for you is going to be —,” dumb way to put it — a game changer. We’re going to move from simple justice to justice and mercy, and the mercy is the part that’s so essential for all of us to understand, because it means that there is nothing that we can do, no attitude we take, no decision we make that is opposed to our very nature that limits God’s love for us. It’s hard for people to understand that, but that’s grace. Grace saves us. If Jesus is telling us that grace is the thing that saves us, grace is best described as the presence in our very heart of the love that God has for us proved to us in the crucifixion of Christ. It changes everything, and it’s just something that is at the heart of these mysteries that we prayed for at the very beginning of this liturgy when we said, “Let us understand fully what it is we’re celebrating so we can celebrate these mysteries that are coming that are so incredibly life-giving: Jesus’ passion, his suffering, his acceptance of the cross, his dying on the cross and his statement. As he felt the evil of the world rejecting him, he said, “Father, don’t punish them. Forgive them. Love them as I love them,” an amazing revelation of the nature of God, who in the Old Testament is not seen as this great lover, but he fully reveals himself in Jesus. That’s the great mystery of Easter.

Father, we are so easily trapped in our misconceptions, our illusions, our lies. They lead to destruction, both to those we love and to ourselves. So bless us with an understanding of the love that you have for us in that state of sinfulness so that we can believe with you in our own goodness that, if we turn to you and trust in you and allow you to open our eyes to see all that is, we will find life. Bless us with this great gift. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Exodus 17:3-7 | Romans 5:1-2, 5-8 | John 4:5-42

Oh, God, author of every mercy and of all goodness, who in fasting, prayer and alms-giving has shown us a remedy for sin, look graciously upon this confession of our lowliness that we, who are bowed down by our conscience, may always be lifted up by your mercy. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

GOD longs for our hearts to receive the message that has been poured out for thousands of years. There always have been those who understood it, who have taken it in, and it has changed their lives. They carry the message in a powerful and beautiful way, but the number, I think, always has been small. My personal opinion is that it’s growing at an unprecedented rate in this time we’re living now, and the key to this wonderful, core message that God has shared with us is that we keep blocking it in some way, not staying with it, not seeing it for what it really is. It gets cloudy. It gets confused with other things, and it strikes me that, in that second reading, Paul is saying that at the heart of this message that God has given to us, there is this way — he calls himself the way — to life. It has something to do with crucifixion.

When you look at the readings of Lent, in this period of time in Lent, what we’re asked to ponder is that very thing that brought about the fulfillment of the teaching of God. From the call of Abraham until Jesus, it is finally fully revealed that the crucifix is key. So what is the crucifix saying to us? What is Christ crucified saying? Well, the first thing we hear from Paul is that the image of a Savior who is saving the world through giving in to evil and dying this horrible death, that the core ingredient in the message is so quickly dismissed by those who hear it. He uses these phrases. He says the Jews — it is a stumbling block to them, and the stumbling block was that they had an idea of who the Messiah was going to be. They knew he was going to be a great leader. He was going to free the people from everything that had put them down, so he had a political career, and he was going to change everything and make it easier and better for the Israelites. Instead he ended up being executed as a common criminal. Well, that didn’t make any sense. You look at the Gentiles when they’re shown — let’s say they’re the ones who haven’t had any understanding of this mystery, and they just all of a sudden hear this idea that, if you die, if you suffer, if you give yourself over to evil, then you’re going to be much better off. So you take a person who’s fairly underdeveloped and not very sophisticated and certainly on a low level of consciousness, and it makes absolutely no sense. It’s foolishness to the Gentiles. What do you mean give in to evil? What do you mean to be a servant instead of a master? And the Greeks, they were the learned and the clever, and they were trying to figure out what this message meant and trying to analyze it too much. Somehow they were seeking wisdom, and by seeking it in a way that was too complex, they couldn’t see it. It reminds you so much of Jesus saying, “This message I have is hidden from the learned and the clever, and it’s revealed to the merest children.”

So all of that says there is something in this crucifix that is such a basic concept, so simple, so easy to understand if you can simply open your heart to understand what it says. So let’s see if the first readings of the gospel work with that image or don’t help us. Let’s see if they — I really believe they do help us understand this message of the crucifix. First of all, I want to say a few words about the word "crucifix" — crucial, crucifixion. The word crucial means that there are two opposite opinions about something, and it is absolutely essential that one of them be chosen over the other if there is going to be any success. We call it a crucial decision, absolutely essential if you want to go forward to decide which of these conflicting ideas is the one to choose. A crucible is an interesting thing. It’s a clay pot that holds metal that’s being mixed with another metal so that it becomes stronger. It’s also important to look at the word to suffer. This is the one thing we talk about, that Jesus had to suffer the crucifixion. There was a time in our history of spirituality in the Catholic church that, during the Middle Ages, everyone thought, if they were in a painful situation, if they were suffering, they were pleasing God, because it proved that they loved him, that pain was what suffering was about. Pain is not necessarily the core of suffering, although it includes that, but to suffer means to allow, to endure, to put up with patiently, without anger and without resistance. So there’s a conflict in us that we have constantly, I believe, as human beings; the conflict between truth and what is not true, lies, between being self-oriented and wanting everything for me versus being a person who wants the best for everyone else. There’s a whole sense of the way life is supposed to serve me versus whether I want to serve it. These are crucial questions about which you want to pick, and it seems that, when one selects the correct choice, there is an experience of loss or of something being taken from us that is our right, the right to have what I want when I want it. And that’s where we get into the real issue of the crucifix and crucifixion.

So hold those thoughts, and let me go back to the first reading and talk about the image of the temple, because the temple was the place where — you know they felt that the temple was the sacred place where you connect with God, and there was a place in the middle of the temple, in the smallest part of it where only certain priests could enter. It was the holiest place, and what was in that tabernacle was the first reading, the Ten Commandments. So here are human beings, in a way, worshipping a God who has done something for them, and what he’s done has been so incredible in their minds is that he’s revealed to them their nature. And that’s what the Ten Commandments are. They are a description of who we are, who we’re meant to be. We’re meant to be a people who trust in a power beyond ourselves. Our core essence is that we are people who respect those things that give us life, and when we’re in love and we have these most powerful of human emotions when we want to care for and love someone, we don’t want to lie to them, or we don’t want to steal from them or destroy them or even demand to have what they have. It’s hard for us to imagine that people didn’t really know what human nature was at one point, and this is the way God begins his work with people so they can see. “This is who I’m intended to be. This is my essence. It can be distorted by my mind and by my will, and I can become something that is the opposite of who I am.” And when that happens, then death enters and destruction and intense pain versus the pain and the suffering that is demanded when we understand the kingdom.

Then we go to the gospel, and what we realize is that Jesus is explaining to everyone that this image of the temple as a sacred place that carries within it the truth of who we are is about to be replaced. It has to be replaced, and Jesus is the one who replaces it. So when he looks at the temple as it is and he experiences it, he realizes that the whole notion, even of sacrifice, the notion of suffering, of offering something that you created, that God helped you make and you bring it to God and says, “God, you are the reason I have this gift. You are the one who enabled me to do this.” That was the heart of those sacrifices. It was a way of honoring God for being a part of your life and producing good through you for yourself and for others. And what happens? They turned into some kind of convenience store, meaning, if you had to travel to Jerusalem to offer your sacrifice, the problem was you had to bring whatever you created, whether it was the best of the fruits you raised or vegetables or wheat or maybe the animals became preferable, and you would bring some small animal that you nurtured, the ones who gave birth to this, and then you were identified with this creature you brought to God and thanking him for letting you be a part of him and creating life in this figure you are offering. All that was gone when they came and just had to buy the cheapest item they could to get through the ritual. It was about purification, and purification is about opening your mind to what’s real and true. And it was lost. It was all kind of a farce, and it must have been incredibly difficult. There were all these people from different countries, and they all had different kinds of coins. You had to have moneychangers. They made some money off it. I’m sure they had to give a cut to the temple if they got that job, and yeah, it was a marketplace. It was something that just had no similarity to what it was intended to be, which is what happens to people who take things like religion and twist it and turn it into something radically different.

So what is Jesus saying? “I am the new temple.” Well, what was in the center of the temple was wisdom as to who human beings are. Now the center of the temple is the person of Jesus. The person of Jesus has within him the person of God. So the new temple is not a building, but it’s us, and inside of us is God. God dwells inside us. Now, think of the difference. One is insight into who I am. The other is insight into the part that I am, the most mysterious part, and that is what I can’t do, what I’m called to do, be who I’m called to be, on my own. I have to do it in partnership with divinity. That means I have to believe in those incredibly mysterious moments of God dwelling inside me and being a source of wisdom and strength. And I call upon it consciously, and I know it’s there. And the three things that it’s trying to do so clearly is it’s trying to make sure that, on a daily basis, you hear the voice of this God inside of you, and he’s saying three basic things: “You are loved as you are. You are loved exactly as you are, and I want you to know that, basically, you are also the person who I need to be in the world. And I’m going to engage you in work that ultimately will change the world, if you surrender to my truth and you listen to me and you become who I want you to be. You’re valuable. You’re loved, and you are forgiven for everything you’ve done. And what you have to understand is that the world that I created for you is precisely what you need, and your struggles against the evil that’s around you, those are all things that I planned so that, if you’re working with me and I can help you go through this, you’ll find an amazing — amazing transformation happening to you.”

What a gift, divinity inside me versus a model of who I’m supposed to be, yet I feel at times, religion simply falls back on talking about what you should be. It’s almost like in homilies, we get the Ten Commandments, in a particular way, but in truth, it’s not about those rules and laws. It’s about a transformation, becoming those things that can only be done in partnership with divinity who is the only one who has the power to use all things and somehow use them for the good so that every evil and every setback and every problem we have continues to move us in the direction of insight, and awareness and consciousness. It’s so mysterious and so simple at the same time. To figure out how it works — you’ll never, never be able to do that. To know it works, to believe it works, to want it to work, that’s what a child does. That’s what we need to do, and when you trust in that, then life, the life that God has promised us, the Promised Land, the peaceful, inner place appears.

Father, we long for the gifts that you promise, and yet we still resist the process that you’ve opened for us. Bless us with the kind of understanding and the simple trust we need to have in you and the promise, and let us go into it without trying to figure it out, without having nice, neat clear lines that we can stay within, but give us the freedom of children who simply are so excited about a gift. And when they know that this gift has been promised, they know it will be given. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Genesis 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18 | Romans 8:31b-34 | Mark 9:2-10

Oh God, who have commanded us to listen to your Beloved Son, be pleased, we pray, to nourish us inwardly by your word that, with spiritual sight made pure, we may rejoice to behold your glory. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

The theme of this set of readings is captured in the word listen. The opening prayer asked us to really listen, to listen to something that will change us, to open our eyes to see, to feel, to know something, and it’s a spiritual insight, according to that opening prayer. Open our eyes that we might see something, something radically new. It’s fascinating to me that we have two sets, in a way, of readings to work with in terms of scripture revealing to us the truth of who God is, who we are and why we’re here. And it seems to me, when you look at the first set of teachings in the Old Testament, what we’re hearing very clearly is the story of a God who reveals himself like other gods, and one of the things that he requires from us is the absolute capacity to surrender to whatever he asks us to do, to trust in him. And the way we express our trust is to do whatever he asks, no matter how difficult or how hard or how demanding.

So the ultimate thing with testing Abraham, who is the first person that God called into this intimacy with him, he was asked to basically give up the one thing that had been given to him as a gift from God, and that’s the first way that God reveals himself to Abraham. “I’m a God who can give you what you’ve never ever had that you’ve always longed for, a son. I’ll give you that.” And that gift was everything — everything to Abraham, and then for God to turn around and to ask him to sacrifice his son is so — really bizarre, in a sense. It’s like the son that you created, that I helped you create, that is something that God is willing to destroy just to show God that you are trusting him. There’s a phrase somewhere in the scripture there that implies somehow that Abraham thought, “Well, if I do sacrifice my son, something will come from that that will be maybe more than what I’m giving up,” because that’s got to be somehow — in human nature, you can’t give up everything, thinking that it’s going to leave you with absolutely nothing. But what I think this image is — and it comes up over and over in the Old Testament, people sacrificing their will to God’s will — it is a way of understanding your relationship with the divine power when human beings are in need of their help, and they need to know that we really trust in them. God needs to know that we are there with them, and so it’s one way of imagining your relationship with divinity. He gives us wisdom, gave us the Ten Commandments, and the relationship he wants with us is, “You follow these Ten Commandments, and if you don’t, you will be punished. If you do, you’ll be rewarded.” So it was a very binary world. It was a world of good and evil, a world of reward and punishment, and it makes total sense to the mind.

That’s very logical and very easy to understand, and that’s where God first began to reveal himself to our minds. But there is potential beyond that, and then we have a New Testament, a whole new vision. And you’ve got to look and understand the very radical difference. Imagine in the Old Testament, the ideal was to listen to the law and to follow it, and in place of the law and in place of all those prophets that demanded that people follow God or be destroyed, all of that was going to go away in the New Testament. That’s the hardest thing, to realize the Old Testament is old, and the New Testament is new. It doesn’t mean the Old Testament isn’t loaded with wisdom. In fact, the most interesting thing about the Old Testament is there are over 300 references to exactly what the New Testament is going to be, describing almost perfectly the life of Jesus. And so the first testament was never the full message. It was never intended to be the full message. It was reaching human beings where they were in terms of consciousness. That’s the best you could do, is get hold of their minds and give them some kind of sense of what’s right and wrong and justice and injustice, fairness, and God always demanded a lot from those who he was going to take care of. They earned his care, and that was what saved them from a life of destruction. It was motivation. They needed the motivation of punishment. It’s like maybe a child doesn’t understand fully the depth of why they shouldn’t play in the street, and so they’re spanked, or they’re punished for playing in the street. It’s about a more primitive — primitive understanding of life, and life on this planet has always been a case of human beings evolving more and more and becoming exactly who God created them to be, which is a reflection of God.

So time was a very important element in this revelation, story. So it began by listening to the law and trying to follow it. So we see that image, in the first reading, of that whole process, but there’s a part of God in that first reading that reminds us that every time that God was acting in the way that most gods acted, because the gods were always demanding sacrifice, there is this thing that this God of the Old Testament, Yahweh, does. Every now and then, he will take the stand that all the gods did, and then at the end, he goes, “Well, I’m not really going to do that. I just really wanted to see if you trusted me.” So then in the New Testament or in the gospel — let’s go there. The gospel is about what’s new in the New Testament. In the Old Testament, you had to listen to the word of God. Now, in the New Testament, the word of God is not a written word. It’s not a spoken word. It’s an incarnate word. It’s a word made flesh. It is a word that is living and active. It is something that can only be read with the eyes, not just the ears but the eyes. So Jesus comes into the world, and he’s going to be the one that opens the eyes of everyone to who God really is and what the relationship that God wants with us really is. And it’s something that could have never been fathomed by people with a much lower conscious level. It had to be — people had to grow into some potential to understand this, but he’s saying, “I want to come and dwell inside of you, and when I dwell inside of you, I bring you something. It’s called the truth, and the image of the truth is light, enlightenment. I will come into the world, open your heart, your mind to what is real, to what is true, and when you see the truth, when you are aware of it, it changes you. It makes a shift inside of you. It is a spiritual event. It is not something you can do for yourselves. It’s a mystery.”

So when you see this beautiful image of the transfiguration in the gospel, you see all these images that are loaded with meaning. Jesus calls just a few to give them a hint of what’s coming — Peter, James and John, and basically what he shows them is who he is. What they see with their eyes is they see this Jesus figure, who is conversing with the Old Testament images, the law and those who demanded the law be followed, the prophets. It’s as if they’re getting together and saying, “Well, thanks for your work.” This is Jesus saying, “Well, thank you for the law, and thank you guys for all this. But basically I’m telling you that there’s a new thing coming.” And then the disciples see the new thing, and when they see enlightenment flowing out of this figure, Jesus, they’re completely mystified. They entered the mystical world, the world of mystics, and they encountered divinity. They encountered divinity in their life, and that didn’t happen in the Old Testament. If anybody thought that God would enter into them, they would be disintegrated in a second. There was such a division between the goodness of divinity and the ugliness in the sin of humans they could not ever come together, and this new vision that is placed before them is just the opposite. No, no, there is no division between a sinner and God. There’s nothing but unity and communion. How could that possibly be? Because human beings are not anywhere near who God is. Well, the whole notion of the incarnation, when Jesus was revealing himself as the revealer and telling the disciples, in a sense, though they couldn’t understand it, that this is their destiny. They’re going to be like Jesus. They’re going to be something that Jesus later would say, “You are the light of the world.” Anyone that believes in the indwelling presence of God’s spirit inside them is a light to the world, and that interior life of God within us that Jesus manifests is also a manifestation of a God who is more a servant than a master. And Paul was so aware of this. He was so conscious of the fact that that’s who God is that he talks about it in this way. “If God has died for us, if God sacrificed his Son for us,” using Old Testament images, “then how could we not trust him?” We can trust him because he gave up everything for us, and what he gave up was this thing that is so crucial for us. He gave up any sense of demanding from human beings justification for their sins. In the Old Testament, you were always required to make some kind of action that would make up for your sin, and Jesus said, “This is blinding you to the real work that I’m here to ask you to help me with. You’re not in charge of getting — making up for your sins. I’ll do that. I’ll do that for you. Don’t worry at all about the justice issue about your sinning. That’s taken care of. Don’t wallow in shame and guilt and fear that you’re going to be punished. That’s just not going to help, because what I need you to do is not to be focused on your sins and the past but to be focused on the power that is now within you.” And the most powerful way that power is manifested is when you begin to have that same disposition that Jesus revealed to these disciples, the enlightened position that you are like the Christ, bringing into the world an image of a God relationship that is so radically new and different that it’s still hard for people to grasp it. God is so in love with you, with me that every one of our sins, because he knows that’s an obstacle for us to be close to him, they’re written off. He said, “I paid for all of that. Don’t even think about the fact of how you’re not worthy. Just think about the fact of how much God wants to give you an insight into who you are, the dignity, the value of the core that he created in you, and he wants you to find that, connect with that and share that with other people.

Good religion, truth is contagious as our lives, and when the truth is lived in a person, it awakens the truth in another person. When a person is lying constantly, the other people begin to think that lies work. They don’t. The only thing that works is truth. The only person that’s really valuable in the world is a person who’s living in the truth. They have all the authority. They have all the power, even though it seems that those who lie and cheat and steal, that they get all the power. Well, they don’t. They have power in a world of materialism and using and taking and killing, but we enter into a world of light, enlightenment, awakening people to the depth and beauty of who God is, who we are and why we’re here. It’s a great blessing.

Father, we have such a hard time believing you truly abide, live, dwell within a heart that is open to your mercy, to your credible gift of forgiveness. Our minds are so strong and justice is such a part of that. And we have a hard time moving to the heart that understands completely what this is about. It’s about love being the core of who we are, who you are, and what we’re supposed to bring to the world. No judgment, no division, simply a longing for all things to come to the fulfillment that you created them for. Bless us with this kind of faith, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Genesis 9:8-15 | 1 Peter 3:18-22 | Mark 1:12-15

Grant, almighty God, through the yearly observance of Holy Lent, that we may grow in understanding of the riches hidden in Christ and, by worthy contact, pursue their effects. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

Probably nothing is more reflected upon than the temptations of Jesus in the desert, and in this particular passage, we’re reminded that it happened. There’s an image there that he was in this place of conflict, I suppose. There were wild beasts there, and there were angels there. There was good; there was evil. And what is interesting to me about this moment in Jesus’ life is that it teaches us something about who he was when he began his ministry and perhaps not who he was when he was born and how he grew up exactly, but the most fascinating thing about Jesus is the years that he spent, 30 years, getting ready to understand enough, to know enough, to believe enough in what it is that God wanted him to do. And you say, “Well, wait a minute. He was God. He knew everything.” Well, yes and no. It seems clear that what we see in Jesus, and it’s the most important thing to understand the teaching of Jesus, when he came and lived on this earth, is he was like us in everything. He sort of didn’t use the divine card very much. He used it mostly because he was such a compassionate man that, when somebody was broken and needed healing, he knew he could heal, and so he would do it, even though it was a real detriment to his ministry, because he couldn’t then preach in towns. He couldn’t be in a public place without being mobbed with people who wanted nothing more than a fix and not necessarily what Jesus came to offer.

So we learn in these temptations the first and foremost thing about this God/man Jesus is he had one primary focus. I would say he had it from the time he was old enough to think, “I would like to know. I want to know the truth.” If you understand him as a human being struggling to understand that, he had to study the scriptures. He had to wonder, ask questions, pray, all those things that we do, and it brought him to a point where he realized, if there’s anything in life worth anything, it is to find what is true. That was his passion. That was his longing, and when you think about that, you say, “Well, what is it about this very core issue? Why is it so important?” Well, because there is this plan of God. There is this thing called life. We’re not in charge of it. We don’t have much to do at all about how we’re born and how we grow up and the process we go through. It’s all, in a sense, outside of our control. So if there is this life that has meaning and purpose, and that’s the second temptation that Jesus endured, which is, “How do I even know this is true? How do I even believe? What do I base this on?” Trust in the one who created him, trust in God. Two of the biggest things that we learn from the temptations of Jesus is to believe that there is a truth, that when we find it, when we understand it, when we surrender to it, it brings life to us and to the world. And we have this conviction there is someone who knows that truth who is communicating to us that the essence of it and the work of life is to be engaged in this work of pursuing, over and over again, “What does this mean? What is this for?” And what those two things empower us to do is the third temptation. He was shown the world in all of its magnificence, all of its power, all of its glory and genius and all that, and he just looked at that when he realized that that isn’t necessarily in any way, shape or form, the world that God has created for you and for me, and it’s not even attractive. And he knows that if you do it, you’re worshiping, you’re giving your life over to a lie. That’s one of the best ways to describe the devil. He lies over and over and over and over again to you and to me about what is, who we are, who God is. So nothing seems more important than these things.

So if we want to look then at this journey each of us is on and how it unfolds, I think it’s interesting that scripture is the one core thing we go to, but it’s also a story that happened in history, and it’s a way of understanding what’s happened up until this point, how God worked, how he evolved, how he changed, how he grew, how we have grown and changed. But there’s something more that is more than scripture, and that is the indwelling presence of God. He answers our prayers. He doesn’t just say, “If you want an answer, go to scripture.” Scripture will give you answers, but more — the thing about scripture to me is it’s the truth. It has truth all through it, but it has to be read as it was intended to be read, and it’s a story of a God who grew and changed and evolved and developed and about human beings who are going through the same process. Isn’t it interesting that God reveals himself as a God who changes? In a way, well, that doesn’t make any sense, does it? God is everything. Well, the God in scripture is not necessarily the God who is in that moment, because what you’re looking at is a story of a relationship, God relating to human beings. And when you think about that, all right, how would you do that? He could do a miracle thing and just make everybody understand and puff. That’s just not the plan. He wants us to discover him. He wants us to understand him. He wants us to surrender to what it is that he’s calling us into, because it’s so rich and full if we can see it for what it is. So there’s a problem, I think, with going to scripture to understand who especially God the Father is, because the fullness of God the Father is in Jesus the Son. That’s the fullness of God the Father. What we had before that is God, but it’s a God who is trying to convince a group of people that he is one of the gods, and if he’s going to convince people that he’s a God they’ve never heard of — Yahweh, who’s that — then he has to sort of explain himself and say, “This is what I do.” So he has to do the same things that the other gods do. So he’s powerful. That’s the biggest thing about gods. They were always the ones who could do anything, and they had a kind of temperament that they get easily angered, and if they didn’t like what human beings were doing, they would destroy them, or they would punish them. And God reveals himself as that kind of God in the Old Testament, and probably the strangest thing, in a way, when you think about the God who we now know, that was revealed in Jesus, for that God to look at human beings and say, “They are just a bunch of nobody’s. I so regret making the world, this beautiful world.” He said, “I just hate it. I’m just going to destroy everybody.” Well, that’s a typical god statement to people that gets their attention, that says, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to do what he’s saying. I’ve got to please this God. I’ve got to please him by my performance. Otherwise I’ll be destroyed.” That image comes up over and over and over again in scripture.

Look at the time when — the story that’s in the first reading, of Noah. He looked at everybody that he created, animals, beautiful — even the earth. He said, “I’m going to destroy everything I’ve made. I just regret doing it. I feel awful.” Does that make any logical sense that the God who created this world, and it’s all very good, that would look at it and say, “It’s all very bad, and I’m going to destroy it”? So what’s the story about? It’s about a tiny seed in people’s imaginations, that this God, who is like all the other gods, has a weakness, a kind of Achilles’ heel. He can’t stand, in a way, to be a destructive God. He is that, but then at the same time, he kind of melts when somebody presents to him some other alternative, like, “Maybe you should trust in what you created more. Maybe you should be a nicer God.” The other story that’s so powerful and so effective is when Moses had gone up to Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments, the core of what is in the Old Testament. That’s the heart of the Old Testament, these laws that reveal God’s nature and our nature and what we have to do in order to live in harmony with God and one another. We have to acknowledge God, who he is, and use him for what he wants us to use him for, not for pain, not for punishment but for goodness. He wants us to not have any other God but him. He wants us to be compassionate and caring for one another. So three commandments about how we relate to God, seven commandments how we relate to one another: that’s the wisdom. And he gives this great gift, and the Israelites have been irritating him anyway all along, which is interesting. He called them stiff-necked, but basically, when he came down, he was so furious that he decided — he told Moses, “Well, I’m going to destroy all the Israelites. They’re disgusting. I hate it when they don’t do what I tell them to do, and my hate turns to vengeance, and my vengeance turns to destruction, and I’m going to kill them.” That’s the God that reveals himself in the Old Testament, and it lingers as a bad smell in people’s imaginations of God. They really fear that that is who he is. And you can take any natural tragedy, anything, and people will say, “I think God is punishing us for doing something that we shouldn’t have done. He’s upset. He’s angry. We’d better shape up.” That’s the antithesis of the relationship God ultimately has planned for you and me and God, God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, the creator, the revealer and the empowerer. But that wasn’t there in the Old Testament. It couldn’t be there, because people weren’t ready.

I think it’s so important to understand something about human nature. When I used to think about people like Abraham and Adam and Eve, whatever, you think about these creatures. You think they’re kind of like us. They would be pretty intelligent, and so therefore, everybody back then must have been pretty intelligent and evolved. Five thousand years ago? What do you think the basic understanding of human beings was toward things like love and forgiveness and patience and forgiveness and all? They were more primitive, and primitive man may seem like then man is evil. But primitive human beings were just primitive. That’s what they are. They were just growing out of chimpanzees, and a lot of people don’t like that idea that we came, naturally evolved from nature. It doesn’t mean that God didn’t do it. God created us. Everything that is, is created by God, but the fact that he did it in a way that implies that there’s a need for time and effort and work in order to grow and evolve into who we ultimately were meant to be — we were made good. God says that in Genesis, but the goodness in human beings is like a seed, like a tiny seed, and it can be overshadowed by anything that is more primitive. You look at some of the things that human beings have done in the past, genocide or even racism, anything, people that murder, sociopaths. What is that? It’s a constant reminder that human beings without understanding who they are and surrendering to a power greater than then are not going to be able to evolve into who they were intended to be. We were never meant to be without God in us. That was never the plan, but it took 3,000 years before the call of — well, before, let’s say, the story of Adam and Eve, the call of Abraham 2,000 years before Christ. It took thousands of years to get people ready for the fullness of who God is, and the God who is, is irresistible when you see him, believe in him, know who he is. He is so much on your side and my side and wants so much for us to be freed of that lower nature within us, and we are all engaged in this work. In fact, to me it seems like that is the work of human beings, to grow and evolve and help each other to grow and evolve into the creatures that God intended us to be. And if we want to know what that creature looks like, look at Christ. Look at the man filled with patience and the capacity to suffer what is necessary in order to do the work that we’re called to do. It’s our choice to surrender to that.

We talk about understanding and knowing the truth. Well, I don't know that we’ll ever know the truth in the sense of understanding exactly why it’s this way and exactly what’s going on all the time. That’s not — to know the truth is more to surrender to the way things are. The truth is reality, the reality of your life right now, what’s going on. That’s real, and 90 percent of that is there for — all of it, in a sense, is there for you. And so do you understand why or how it’s going to end up and all that? No, it’s just a knowing deep inside that — there is truth in reality and what’s unfolding. And what’s unfolding is for us, always for us, and it brings us into a place of greater awareness and consciousness. That’s the reason we exist, and when one person grows in consciousness, everyone else around them is lifted up. There’s always been a small group of people who have got the message. It’ll probably always be that way. They’ll be the ones that are far, far above everybody else. They’re called mystics and the saints and great philosophers and physicists and all that. They’re gifted with insight into the way things are, and those are the unique people that God uses like avatars. They’re there, and they lift the whole human race up. And none was more powerful than Jesus. He was the one that lifted up people more than anyone else as he described God who is in us as we are and the world as it’s intended to be. Without him, we would still be living under a frightening, judgmental and angry God, but God slowly, not all of a sudden in Jesus, but slowly revealed himself in story after story after story. And there was always this hope in Isaiah that was so unbelievably important. The God who is, is not a tyrant. The God who is, is a servant God, and that’s what we find in Jesus, God the servant.

Father, you have a longing in your heart for union, communion with each of us. So many things are hard for us to understand. So many things are hard for us to surrender to, and yet you ask us to do this for you and for us, for one another. So bless us with that grace that is there that we will long for it. It’s our wanting it that is so crucial and so important; our believing that it’s there to be found. Bless us with this kind of faith and trust and the ability to decide and to live a life that is not in any way, shape, or form a lie. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Leviticus 13:1-2, 44-46 | 1 Corinthians 10:31—11:1 | Mark 1:40-45

Oh God, who teach us that you abide in hearts that are just and true, grant that we may be so fashioned by your grace as to become a dwelling pleasing to you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

One of the big themes in Mark’s gospel is Jesus as the healer. He can heal our diseases, can heal us from the power of demons, and what’s interesting about that notion of these two elements that Jesus came to free us from, there’s something about them that we need to understand. They both have a very powerful impact on the human spirit, and that’s simply this: that there can be a feeling inside of us that something is working against us, some power that’s evil, something that’s causing us to be sick and not being able to function as we should. And there are voices in our head that keep giving us all this misinformation that either we’re no good or that life is unfair or that somehow we’re going to be destroyed. So I want you to help me enter into this experience of what it is to live in the life as God has called us to live with two forces that are working on us, one evil and one powerfully good, and let’s look at their motives, what they want.

The whole tradition of evil comes from an image of those who oppose the plan of God where he would become intimately engaged in the life of human beings. They felt it was beneath God that he would enter into them, dwell with them, empower them, and so they decided that they would reject his plan and work against it. And so if you understand the role of evil in the world, and it is a power in the world, you have to understand what it’s trying to do. And what it wants to do more than anything else is summed up by one word: separation. Evil wants to separate you from your authentic self, separate you from God, and separate you from your neighbor, your brothers and sisters. When you look at the impact of evil and what it does, particularly the evil that is engaged in, let’s say, the demon’s voice — I don't know if you have the sense that I do, but at times you can feel that there’s a voice in your head that’s just saying things to you that are destructive to your unity with yourself and others. It’ll tell you you’re no good. It’ll tell you you’re better than everybody else. It’ll tell you that your disease is going to kill you; it’s going to destroy you. There’s this voice that is absolutely not us, and I think it’s so important to believe that. There’s a voice out there that is determined to separate us from the love of God and the presence — the power of the presence of God in our life.

Then you look at what is goodness. What is God looking for, for us? What is his intention? Well, if evil is for separation, then we can easily see that God’s gift of grace and his presence in our life, what he wants us to enter into fully is a life of union, communion, first with him. Notice the opening prayer that said, “Please make us a worthy dwelling for you, God.” God dwelling in us is so essential. We have him inside of us, just as Jesus did but not in exactly the same way. Jesus was God, and he could use the power of God in any way he wanted, but he didn’t use it other than he was so drawn to healing people and forgiving them of their sin and wanting them to be whole that he found himself doing more and more for people, almost to the detriment — well, not almost, but to the detriment of his ministry. To heal the leper in the gospel today was to put him in a position of being the wonder worker, and he didn’t want people to look to him to be the one who took away all their diseases and silenced all their demon voices. He can do that. He has power over that, but that isn’t the plan. The plan of God is not that you and I live without that demon voice and without the struggle in life to live and to have that which works against it, mostly disease. When you look at the nature of the healing power of God manifest in Jesus, what is it that he did most especially? He would drive out demons, silence that voice inside of them, or at least free them from following the advice of that voice, and also, most of his healings were about physical ability to be who you’re called to be. He would fix your eyes if they were blind, open your ears if they were deaf, let your legs work if they couldn’t get you to where you needed to be. Your hands that were withered would be strong, and you could do your work. It wasn’t a long list of diseases, though he did heal diseases like leprosy. But the real healing — you could always see the intention in his healing is to make us whole, to make us capable of being the people we need to be in this world, and that is people who serve one another who are connected to one another, who feel responsible to one another, who have compassion and empathy. That’s the work of divinity inside of you, and it’s interesting. When you watch Jesus in this tension between using divinity to fix everything around him so that there was no pain versus what he really was trying to do is something different than that. He didn’t want to become just the miracle worker, because he obviously said, “I’m not here just to do that. What I’m really here to do is to preach, to teach.” And what does he want to preach and teach? That you and I are called into this life with two forces working with us, one divinity, one demons, and he’s not saying, “If you believe in me and if you allow me to dwell in you, you will absolutely have total power over this other power, and you will get rid of it. You will get rid of all disease. You’ll get rid of all negative thoughts.” But that’s not the goal. The goal is not to get rid of evil but to somehow learn that there’s a reason for it being here, and what that reason is, is essential to your being able to deal with it in a healthy way.

So we don’t ask God to use the power of his presence in us to alleviate all the suffering that we ever encounter. What’s the best way to describe that suffering? Well, my sense is, if you’re listening too much to the voice of the demon and if you are responding to the human condition of disease, which is part of being a human, because sometimes disease is nothing other than human beings having to cope with the natural evolution of a human body where, toward the end of your life, like me in my 80s, it’s not a disease, but you find your body not being able to function as well as it did before. Are we supposed to say, “Okay, God. You’re living in me. Fix me so that I feel like a 20 year old”? That kind of resistance to reality is not what God intends us to use his power for but rather to do something else more mysterious: how to work with divinity and the weakness of human nature and the demon voice. How do we work with those together? It goes something like this: You have to believe that God has the power to stop something that would destroy you. And so when you see Jesus working miracles, it means that God is working miracles for you, in a sense, by his presence inside of you so that anything that would happen to you that would overcome you, that would destroy you, that would you put you into a depression that was impossible to get out of, all those things, you have power over that. He’s not going to let anything destroy you. So if he allows evil, if he allows you to struggle, it has to be because there’s some value in that struggle.

It’s so interesting that the way that Jesus ultimately saved the world. Yes, he was a miracle worker, but he didn’t rely upon miracles to get him out of the place he was. He learned that there was a reason for the suffering that he had to endure, and it was to teach us that, if we give in to the demon, to evil, meaning if we do not try to destroy it and don’t allow it to destroy our well-being and our peace, we have to integrate it somehow into a process where it’s there for us. Could it be that disease is there for us? Could it be that suffering is there for us? Absolutely, otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. God promises a kingdom where we’ll be filled with a kind of sense of self-worth and self-love, and we’ll be able to share that kind of presence of a whole human being with the people around us. We’re here to serve one another, but the demon voice, if we give in to it, if we just take it as it shouldn’t be there, if we take it as not an exercise that helps us to develop the skill to overcome it, then we’ve missed out on the whole process. The work of life here is not to be comfortable and to have everything the way we would like it to be. No, it’s to learn how to evolve and develop, and you can’t develop without pain and suffering or struggling with the other voice. You have to embrace that, suffer that, actually forgive God for it.

I thought about that once, and it just seemed so strange to me. Can you forgive God for the way he created the world that he put us in? But in a sense, people could be angry, saying, “All this pain and suffering, where are you, God? You’ve given me all this. It does nothing but destroy me,” when God is looking at us and saying, “No, no. I’ve given you just the right amount right now in this moment, what you’re dealing with, so you can develop the skill that I want you to have, because I don’t want to be the God that comes into you and takes care of everything for you, and then you remain this sort of weak human being.” No, he wants us to be strong, wise, powerful against this voice, not because God does it for us but because God empowers us to do it with him. We’re doing it. We have the capacity to stand up to these negative forces and laugh at them. That drives them crazy. So when you look at it, you can tell if you’re giving in to evil too much, because some of the ways in which it shows up, there’s kind of side effects to listening too much to the negative voice or reading all the suffering in the world as if it’s punishment from God. You can see and feel in that sense that these — you have these feelings inside, and they’re excessive fear and excessive anger and excessive shame. What is fear based in? It’s that you really believe that there’s something out there that could happen that’s going to destroy you, and so you live in anxiety all the time. And shame is that terrible way in which we constantly hear this voice that tells us we’re no good or that we’re the best and just throws us off and gives us this kind of, I don't know, inability to find the balance of who we really are. Shame keeps us from accepting our humanity as a gift. We look at it as some kind of broken mess that can’t be fixed, and anger is just that thing that says that nothing’s right. “This is not the way it’s supposed to be. I shouldn’t have to suffer. I get angry. I want somebody to pay for it.” All those things, those are all signs that we’re getting into a disposition where the work that needs to be done is going to be given to us by God so that we start developing a skill to overcome those. That’s what we’re here for.

There’s so many paradoxes. We’re here to enjoy and to embrace this world that God has given us. We’re supposed to be filled with joy and some kind of inner peace, and we sometimes equate that with a life without suffering and without disease and without any voice trying to convince us we’re so much less than we really are. But those voices stay there, because that’s exactly what we have to deal with in order to grow and to mature to become the compassionate servant people we are. The most amazing thing about Jesus as a reflection of God, different than God the Father — notice that God the Father is God the Son, but God the Son came at a time when we could realize that this God of ours is not as distant as we thought, not as demanding as we thought, but he’s a partner that wants to develop us into whole, strong, loving human beings.

And back to that image of separate, the image of being separated from your true self, then separated from each other, then separated from God, all of that is so clearly the way in which evil works, and if you can look at this first reading in the gospel, it’s all about leprosy. The thing that’s so fascinating about that image, especially now today, lepers were quarantined. They had to cry out, “Unclean.” They had to wear masks. We know what that feels like, to be isolated and separated. That’s the goal of evil. Leprosy reveals the power of evil overpowering someone, and Jesus comes into that world of the leper and just said, “I can heal this. I can take this away for you.” And I love the question the leper poses to Jesus. “Is this what you want? Do you really want to free me from the effect of this disease?” And Jesus said, “Yes, of course I do.” The thing that’s in that image of leprosy is, when one is dealing with imperfection and brokenness, that they either are told they don’t belong or they feel they don’t belong, and they’re isolated and separated. That’s evil at its best, and here’s Jesus saying, “Yes, I can take that away. I can do that, but don’t tell everyone that I did this, because I just want you to not get in the way of my preaching.” You think about it, and you say, “Well, Jesus, you took a chance. Why did you heal them that way?” Well, I love this idea that Jesus had to deal with his demon. He had to deal with whether he was going to play God or be God all the time and not really present what he came to present. He came to present a human being with all the weakness and frailty of a human being filled with divinity. And if he turned out to be just the miracle worker, he would imply that’s who we’re supposed to be if we have God dwelling is us, and we’re not miracle workers in that sense. The miracle work that we do is to overcome all the negative, destructive power of evil and to use it for our own goal of development and evolution of consciousness. That drives evil crazy, because that’s why God allowed him to be here, her to be here, whatever. It’s to make us whole.

Father, on the cross you manifested something that’s easily beyond our understanding when you gave into evil and didn’t try to destroy it but seemingly allowed it to destroy you. But it couldn’t destroy you, and when you dealt with that incredible disappointment of a ministry that ended too soon, when you gave into the plan of God, when you realized it was something that you had to do because that was what you were called to do, you did it. And then there was this explosion of your presence in the world. You became so powerful, so effective in what you were teaching, because you experienced it. So bless us with that experience that you had in giving into evil so we can understand it, so we can grow because of it. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Job 7:1-4, 6-7 | 1 Corinthians 9:16-19, 22-23 | Mark 1:29-39

Keep your family safe, O Lord, with unfailing care that relying solely on the hope of heavenly grace they may be defended always through your protection. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

One of the fascinating things about the Gospel of Mark that we are focusing on during this liturgical cycle is the way in which he reveals a part of Jesus that’s fascinating. The fascinating part was his relationship with demons. The fact that Jesus knew them and they knew him, what does that teach us? What does that say? I will put this whole idea of Jesus dealing with demons in the context of one of the core teachings that Jesus came to reveal, and it’s the incarnation. God of the Old Testament was the God of the Father. He was the strongest, most powerful figure who ever could exist, and he had a side to him that was demanding in a sense. God the Father was the one who said, “This is what I ask of you. This is what I expect of you.” He got disappointed at times at his whole creation. He at one time wanted to destroy all humanity and then found one family, Noah’s family, and said, “Okay, I’ll work with them.” But there’s a hardness, in a way, to God the Father when he’s demanding that we become what we’re intended to be, and we’re having such a hard time with that throughout Old Testament times. So there was always this conflict between the God who says, “Do this,” and you don’t, and so he says, “Okay, I’m going to destroy you.” So think of that as not the fullness of God but the beginning of human beings, who have strong egos, coming against something that is greater than they are, and it’s asking that they do certain things in order to receive God’s favor, God’s protection. But then there’s something more that God had planned to reveal. He isn’t just that God. He’s also a God that is human, and there we get to the heart of the mystery of who Jesus is, this image that he is the one that comes to reveal the fullness of who God is, and God is both human and divine. How can that be, God being human and divine? But that’s who the Son of God is.

So we have God the Father who worked with us and then God the Son who is part human. So what’s the difference? Well, the image is that this fullness of God is so much more sympathetic and empathetic about what it’s like to be human. His whole notion of who he is, is, “I want to be a part of your life, and when I see your faults and your weaknesses, I’ll take care of those for you. I’ll get rid of those. Those are the things that kept you from my Father, but I am going to take care of that so that you don’t have to think about that. Just trust me to be a part of you. Let me come and be in you.” The ego has a really hard time with that, that this God is the God who wants to come and be a part of us, because the thing about humanity is — and you can learn this from the book of the Old Testament, the Genesis book where it says, “This is what human beings did when God said, ‘I’d like to join you and be a part of you and take care of you,” and they said, “Well, we like that idea.” But basically the story of Adam and Eve is human nature, when it’s told, does it want to do things on its own or does it want someone to help them, they say — the ego just knows to say, “I can take care of this.” So the great sin of our original parents, in a sense, is the sin of saying, “I as a human being can deal with all that God requires and all that God asks, and I myself, I will be able to accomplish it.” But that’s not God’s plan. God made human beings, in a sense, incapable of becoming who he intends them to be without his indwelling presence, a great mystery. God had to reveal himself as one who has the potential to live inside of you and me, and in that indwelling presence, he offers the ego a balancing agent. It’s called God’s favor — God’s favor. What does that mean? Imagine that there is someone that meets you in your life, or you meet someone, and you fall in love with them, and you want to be there for them. You want to be with them. You want to know everything about them. You want to be a part of them. That’s God’s favor. That’s a good description of God has the same intense desire to be in an intimate relationship with every single one he created, and he does that, not because he decided that would be a good idea, but because human beings are made in such a way that, without that, they become like Job in the first reading.

The story of Job is fascinating, because it’s a deal with the devil and Job where the devil comes and says, “You love God, and God is such a good God because he gives you everything he wants, and he gives you everything you need. So the reason you love him is because he gives you everything you want. Is that really love? Would you love God if he didn’t show his favor to you and give you such a beautiful family and such success in the world?” And Job says, “Yeah, I think I can.” But the interesting thing about the story of Job is, when you see him without God’s favor, even though it was a very materialistic way of favor-showing in that story, he’s depressed. He’s anxious. He’s sleepless. He’s in bad shape. He doesn’t do well without favor, and that’s a beautiful image of human beings who are made for this gift of God’s indwelling favor. When we’re left with just the ego, the ego has two directions it goes in. It knows how to achieve and be the best. At the same time, it looks at our humanity and accuses us of being the worst possible creatures we could ever be. The ego either is building us up into these incredibly powerful, perfect people, or we’re trash. And when you think about it, human beings are not made to live in that kind of tension. They’re made for a partnership with love, with favor, with some Spirit that’s inside of him taking care of him. So that means to me that the essence of the revelation of God in Jesus is that human beings are destined to be in a relationship like Jesus where they have God in them, and they also have their humanity in them. And the two of them remain separate, but they have to be one. They have to be in union. They have to be in communication.

So let’s go back then to the work of the devil, the evil one. The evil one is so opposed to the work and plan of God, and if the plan of God is that he lives within us and is the source of the balance that we need to be able to achieve the role that we have in the world — and that role is both for us and for others — he wants us to be in this world and enjoy it. He wants peace and joy to be part of who we are in this world. He’s not interesting in us being in pain, yet pain is part of it, because pain does this mysterious thing of deepening us and changing us. But no, he wants us happy. He wants us full of the joy of this beautiful thing God has given us, even though it’s flawed and broken and has all kinds of evil in it. Fundamentally the world that God has created is beautiful and good, and we are destined to participate in that and be reflections of that, to be good, because we have this incredible gift of God’s favor that overcomes our ego’s, what I call it, duality that either throws us into perfection, and we become egomaniacs, or we’re wallowing in the same thing that Job, in the first reading, is wallowing in. So for balance, we need to integrate divinity. So the devil’s plan would be to keep those two things separate. So Jesus comes into the world, and when he starts driving demons out, they have this interesting way of saying, “Wait a minute. I know who you are. You’re the Son of God.” And Jesus said, “Shut up. Don’t say that.” Why didn’t Jesus want people to know that he was the Son of God? Because he was the Son of God, but what he did, it says in scripture, he pocketed his divinity. He didn’t play the divine card. He played the human card. He wanted to show people what it’s like to live with God in you, God’s favor as a human being, and so it was essential for him to say, “When you see me, you see who you are meant to be. You see who you’re supposed to become.” Now, we’re never going to become God like Jesus was God, but we participate in divinity. So he didn’t want to come onto the scene and act like a God, meaning he could have changed every — he could have destroyed everybody who was in his way. He could have done spectacular things. He could have done miracle after miracle and got everybody to believe in him, and they would have believed in a miracle worker, that they were supposed to be like God. And we’re not destined to be like, in that sense, God. We’re destined to be in a connection, in a deep, intimate union with divinity that balances our humanity and makes us these incredibly valuable, in a way, joyous, at the same time, struggling human beings. So when the devil is screaming out, “Hey, claim your divinity,” Jesus says, “No. No, I won’t. I can’t do that, because I will not be able to effect the change in people if I act like God, because they’re not going to be gods, but they’re going to be filled with my favor. And I’m acting as if a human being — that I’m a human being filled with God’s favor. So I’m going to be able to deal with all the struggles, all the disappointments, all the pain of life. I’m going to take it on and show you there’s a way to deal with all that pain. If you have God’s favor in you, you can do it. So then there’s a — look then at the devil saying, “Okay well, if I can’t get divinity to be the obstacle to you connecting with Jesus, then maybe I’ll work on you.” So what he does — and the devil’s voice is constantly pounding us with the same kind of thing. Instead of saying, like the devil said to Jesus, “You’re God. You’re God,” you know what he says to us? “You’re human. You’re just nothing but a human. You’re a broken, stupid, ugly human. That’s all you are.” It’s called shame. If he can get us to think only about our humanity, then he’s doing the same thing with Jesus, who is a man. He’s saying, “Play on your divinity. Do the divinity thing.” No, it’s got to be divinity and humanity. Jesus was, as a man, tempted to use his divinity to be spectacular, but he didn’t. It was one of the first temptations in the desert. “Do spectacular things. Turn stones into bread. Everybody will believe in you.” He said, “No, I’m not here to do that. I’m here to feed people the truth, to be fed on the truth. The truth is I’m divine and human. I want human beings to be that, both.” So the devil attacks our union with divinity by telling us we’re not worthy. He tempts God to say he’s more than human.

How do we deal with this mysterious thing of integrating humanity and divinity inside of us? You do it by simply acknowledging two very simple things. What’s God’s plan? God’s plan is that we live a full, wonderful life here, but in our humanity, we can’t accomplish that on our own. So his plan is that he will enter into us and give us a sense of what it’s like to live in our brokenness, experiencing it, being depressed at times but knowing, believing that, in all of that, there is this power, this mysterious power that can lift us from the depth of depression and shame and anger and bitterness, and it’s called favor. It’s called love, believing that there’s this divine power inside of you, inside of me that’s saying over and over again, in the midst of our experiencing nothing but our failures, he’s saying, “You’re loved. You’re forgiven. You’re redeemed. You’re my beloved.” It’s amazing what we can do with our broken humanity and that divine, incredible affirmation. It balances. It brings life and peace.

Father, it’s amazing. You’ve given us something to do that’s beyond our capacity, to integrate two things that are very different, separate in our mind, to imagine that they’re one. Our mind understands separation. Our heart understands unity. Move us to our heart so we can embrace a mystery as profound as your divinity living inside of our broken humanity, and help us to be consoled by this mysterious presence of your affirmation, your love, your favor. Without it, we’re dangerous. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Deuteronomy 18:15-20 | 1 Corinthians 7:32-35 | Mark 1:21-28

Grant us, Lord our God, that we may honor you with all our mind and love everyone in truth of heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

This is the year of Mark, and we have the beginning of the ministry of Jesus described in the experience of Mark. And what he’s opening us up to and what he wants us to understand is how different, how different this time is when Jesus entered the world and became the prophet that was promised, that we had a whole new way of hearing who God is and what God longs for us. There’s an Old Testament and a New Testament. They’re both essential for us to understand, but there must be a transition from the old to the new, which is not always easy. I see in the opening prayer a reflection of both testaments. In the Old Testament, we honor God with all our mind. We listen to him. We recognize who he is. He created us, and he teaches us about justice. And the mind understands justice. It’s an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It makes sense to the mind. It works, and what we see so much in the Old Testament is that God reveals himself as one who is there to teach us about who we are and how we should treat one another. And it begins with the most basic level of evolution of human beings from self-centered human beings to other-centered where in the middle of that place is a place of justice. We understand that we have an obligation to be fair, and the mind understands fairness. That’s why it is — it is sort of made for justice, but also, in a way, the mind is made for revenge, because that’s a way of imagining justice. Someone does something bad to you; you can do something bad back to them. And in a way, that’s what God describes himself as in the Old Testament.

Listen to this first reading. The first reading is about God, who is saying, “All right, you people are asking for something more. You don’t really want to hear my voice directly.” I love that image, because one of the things that is interesting about God’s voice, in the minds of the early followers of Jesus, is it’s a harsh voice. It’s a scary voice. It has fire in it. And so they’re saying, “We’d rather have somebody reach us that understands a little bit more about who we are and isn’t so harsh on us.” And so God said, “Okay, I will do that for you.” But listen to the way he describes giving them a prophet who is like them, who would be more compassionate and understanding of what it means to be human, but you’ll still hear something in that Old Testament passage that’s so perfect for you to realize what the Old Testament is really trying to do for people: give them a sense of obligation to a power greater than them, that if they displease this power, that power gets angry and punishes. So listen to what he said. “You want this prophet? Okay, I’ll send you one, but if you don’t listen to the prophet I’m sending, I’ll take care of you. I will hold it against you.” That’s what’s implied, but then he’s still harsher on the prophet. He said, “If you’re a prophet and you prophesy in my name but you’re not really teaching what I told you to teach, I’ll kill you. I’ll get rid of you. I’ll destroy you.” Now, I know I’m saying that rather dramatically, but still, I’m trying to give you a sense of how people would have listened to this, how they heard it. You’d say what God is really saying is that, “A prophet that isn’t able to do what I’ve given him to do will no longer be a prophet.” That’s a death, but I think you really have to look at the Old Testament and see how it impacts people to know that there’s a God in the Old Testament that is someone that needs to be feared, and if you don’t do what he says, he is going to crush you, send you to hell forever. And that isn’t who God is. It’s a part of God, because the God of the Old Testament that speaks to the mind is speaking to things like logic and justice. And that’s where we began, and that’s how we evolved slowly from that. So in a way, the Old Testament had to be what it was in order to reach the people that it was destined to reach. It worked. It needed to be what it was. But I think, back to that opening prayer, it also said, along with honoring God with our minds, we have to love everyone in truth of heart. Notice, the Old Testament is about honoring God, worshiping him, doing things for him. The New Testament is more about how we treat one another.

So we are called in the New Testament to a new way of seeing. Our eyes are opened to a truth, and the truth resides in our heart. And what the heart is made for, it goes beyond justice. It’s called mercy, understanding, compassion, forgiveness. The two really do work together. One is the foundation. The other is the perfection of that foundation, and so as much as we’re called to being people who do what they’re told and obey the truth, we’re also called to be instruments of something that goes way beyond truth — well, maybe say way beyond justice but enters into the depth of truth. And the truth is we are human beings made in God’s image, and the fullness of the image of God is revealed in Jesus. And Jesus is the one who comes into the world without an intention of judging and condemning those who are not who they are but loving those who are not who they are so that they can be transformed. Justice frees the innocent and can only punish the guilty. Mercy can free the innocent but also free the guilty by not punishing them but transforming them.

Listen to the second reading with this image of Old Testament/New Testament. It’ll help you, because Paul is caught — he was a Pharisee, and he was caught in a lot of the Old Testament. I mean — caught in it, he was trained in it. You just don’t all of a sudden become somebody radically different because God enters your life. You still have a part of you that lives in the past, and we still have that ourselves, a part that’s more selfish, more self-centered. We live with it. It doesn’t go away, but we learn how to be different than that. We’re empowered to be different than that. But listen to the way Paul is imagining Jesus coming back again. He’s coming back next week maybe or the week after, and so he’s saying, “We should be paying attention to that.” But what I find interesting is he’s saying, “What God would really like is for you to give him your full attention. Just make him the only concern you have and ignore the people around you. Don’t pay attention to your relationships. Pay attention to God.” Now, that is just so interesting when you think about it, because that would be the antithesis of the New Testament. A mystic, St. Catherine of Siena, once asked, “How can I love you, God? How can I love you? I want to love you more and more and more.” And he said, “I don’t need that kind of love from you, but the way you would please me, the way you would be who I want you to be is love each other. Then you’re showing me that you’ve become who I’ve called you to be through my love for you and my acceptance of you as you are. And do that for each other, because I want you to pay more attention to your love of your neighbor than for me,” not in the sense of saying the two don’t go together, but a lot of people go around saying, “I love God, but I hate my neighbor,” and Jesus calls them liars. You can’t do that. If you love God, you are — no. If you are loved by God, understand his mercy and his acceptance, you will have that thing for your brothers and sisters. it’s just natural. It just flows that way.

So let’s go to the heart of the gospel. Jesus comes into the world, and he is the prophet that was promised. He’s the one that’s going to change the world, and when he comes in, he astounds the people that are listening to him, because he has something different than the scribes and Pharisees. What do we know about the scribes and Pharisees? They were hypocrites. They were saying what was right, but they weren’t living what was called for, and you know what that’s like. Those crazy-making people in your life that act and speak the truth, but in reality, they’re anything but the truth. They’re liars, and they’re users, but they speak the right language. Jesus has something that is essential for anyone who is going to be in the world affecting change for the good, and that is authenticity, another word, authority. He’s living the truth, not a lie. Truth has one major impact on the people that are engaged in it. It unifies, makes one. The opposite of truth is lies, and lies are always going to have a profound effect on those that are engaged in it, and it will be separation and isolation. When you find out somebody’s been lying to you, it immediately separates you from them. It’s a very, very frightening experience to have someone in your life that you’ve trusted and find out that they’re not telling you the truth, and the relationship then becomes deeply, deeply damaged and, in a sense, divided. And the only thing that can unify it again is forgiveness and understanding, but the forgiveness and understanding is offered only because it can be effective in changing someone. If the person doesn’t change, the relationship can’t exist.

So here is Jesus coming into the world and revealing himself as different, and the difference is authority, authenticity. And what does that mean? His intention. Intention is felt from someone. Your intention is something that we underestimate, because if you have an intention to be with someone and to give them life versus you’re with someone and you want to impress them or use them or demand from them something that you need, the difference of that is the difference between authenticity and being a fake. So what are we looking at here? We’re saying Jesus comes into the world with an authentic heart who has an intention that all he wants to do is bring people to life. And how is he going to do that? How is he going to bring people then to life? Speak the truth. Okay, when he speaks the truth for the first time, in the Gospel of Mark, what does Mark say that is the first sign for the disciples to watch? Because the disciples were told by Jesus, “Follow me. Watch me. See what I do.” The first experience in Mark’s gospel is they’re watching him walk into a synagogue, into a holy place, and in that place, there is a liar, someone possessed, someone with an unclean spirit. And the fascinating thing about this passage is that that unclean spirit knows instantly that Jesus has power over him, and he said, “I know who you are, and you’re here to destroy us, right?” I think that’s so fascinating. When you think about it, here’s a human being speaking in the name of evil. That means evil has a way of becoming a part of us where we’re not even aware that it is the source of things, but whenever something comes out of the core of our being that is designed to destroy, to use, to abuse, it’s evil. Not that I’m saying we are evil, but the evil is in us. That’s something I want to try to get to in this homily if I can, that we are this strange combination of good and evil, selfishness and self-centeredness. We’ve got to embrace it all. It is part of the work of being an integrated human being. We’re not good or bad. We’re both. So here it is, this unclean spirit recognizing that a person who has the intention of nothing but love is so intolerant to evil that their very presence shakes them and destroys them. So when the disciples see a man who comes into the world, who they believe is the Messiah, and they see that he is filled with something called truth, called love, called mercy, the minute he comes into contact with evil, evil knows it is busted. It is destroyed. Imagine the power we have when we stay in the truth, in love and in mercy, to overcome the influence of evil. Evil can’t stand to be around love and mercy. It lives in hearts and minds that are bent on revenge and anger and fear. So we have this new teaching with authority.

So his fame begins to spread everywhere, and if you continue in the Gospel of Mark, and we probably will as the next couple of readings, but what is interesting is not only does he show that he has power over evil, but he is able to heal people of distress and disease. So from this experience he goes and heals Peter’s mother-in-law. Then all the neighbors come, and they line up outside, saying, “Here’s a man who can heal us.” It’s just like the lines for vaccines. It’s like they were here. “I want this man. I want him to give me whatever he has so that I can be immune from the infection of evil and revenge and hatred.” I love the fact — it’s so human for Jesus when I think about it. So he’s there, and he’s exhausted by the end of the night, and so the next morning, all these people are lined up. And he slipped away at night and goes away to pray, like he’s saying, “All right, I have this power, but I’m here to give it to you to do it to each other. I’m not going to be the source always with you to do it. “ It’s not going to reside in one or two persons who have a role in religion that is going to save the world. No, it’s religious people being truly prophetic and awakening people to the power that’s in them, called love and mercy, that transforms the world. The world is never going to be changed from the top down. It’s going to be changed from the bottom up. That’s the way it works. Each individual representing this awesome new power that God is giving to human beings by creating the prophet Jesus, who is nothing more than the example of what you and I are to become. We are the incarnation of Jesus in the sense that we are like him, meaning divinity lives in us doing its work, and we still remain human, broken, filled with all kinds of negativity. But that’s the way it’s supposed to be, and that’s the way it works.

Father, your invitation for us to be instruments of your love, your mercy, your forgiveness to our brothers and sisters is often something that seems too difficult, but when we accept our humanity and its weaknesses and still know that you can work through us with your love, then we are safe and sure and confident in this work. It is you through us that brings life to others, not ourselves. As we grow in that knowledge, we will grow in the joy of watching those around us be touched by your mercy and your love. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Jonah 3:1-5, 10 | 1 Corinthians 7:29-31 | Mark 1:14-20

Almighty and everliving God, direct our actions according to your good pleasure that, in the name of your Beloved Son, we may abound in good works. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

As we begin this ordinary time of the year, we’re going to be reflecting, as we always do, year after year, on the ministry of this God/man Jesus, and probably one of the most tragic things that happens is we take the Old Testament, with its focus on justice, focus on punishing the evil and rewarding the good — we take that way of God working with people in the Old Testament, and we continue to carry it over in the New Testament. And we don’t listen to the heart of the message of Jesus, and we end up living in a world of justice. A world of justice basically looks at evil and hates what it does and condemns it and punishes for it, and it’s so hard for the church and for all of us to believe that that is not the way that God is fully revealing who he is. It’s not the thing that we should be living in any longer, and I love that one phrase from the Old Testament reading that’s just so strong.

We all know the story of Jonah, the reluctant prophet who didn’t really want to see the Ninevites change. He’s a perfect example of the thinking of the Old Testament: bad people need to be punished; good people need to be rewarded. And so when basically Jonah was so anxious to see the Ninevites pay for their evil that, when God said, “Ask them to change, but tell them, if they don’t change, that I will destroy them, and use that as a motive of fear and see if they change.” And Jonah was hoping that they wouldn’t, but they did. But then the most interesting thing that God says about that action that he did, that he convinced people to no longer do what they were doing, because he threatened them with destruction, he calls that evil. This is the line. “When God saw, by their actions, they turned from their evil ways, he repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them.” He repented of the evil he had threatened to do to them. Does that mean God sinned, and now he’s sorry? No. What he’s revealing in that statement is the God who is, the God who fully reveals himself in Jesus is a lover, a forgiver, not a judge, not a condemner, and he will always, always find a way to accept the shadow that we’re in and long to change it. But he no longer requires that we be the ones that change it. Fear is the great motive for self-change, but what God is trying to initiate in all of us, through the coming into a human being and speaking the way he spoke to us, he’s saying, “I don’t expect you to change yourself. I will change you.” Redemption is the change. The Holy Spirit descending into you, illuminating your eyes to see the reality of a life that you’re called to live and to know that there’s a purpose for evil. There’s a reason for sin, and it’s not to be punished or to be controlled or to be crushed. It’s to be surrendered to and embraced. Wow. Does that make sense? Not if you’re living in the Old Testament.

Look at the reading from the gospel, and what it’s really saying is that, when Jesus came into the world, what he did, he was calling his followers, and he was calling them by saying, “Look, I want you to come and stay with me. Dwell with me. Hang out with me.” That was the interesting thing that Jesus was doing. The Old Testament, God was someone who needed to be listened to and then followed, obeyed. Now it’s not so much a God to listen to but a God to see, to watch, to be in his presence. Jesus is God incarnate. So in the New Testament, we have an experience not of a message from God that we have to listen to and obey but the presence of God that enters into us and that changes us. The disciples spent three years, three long years, with Jesus, and at the end, they were still confused, doubted him, expected him to do something that he didn’t really do. They thought he’d be a great political leader. They thought he’d put them in a special position. They were caught in the Old Testament image of life and power and control, and they had no idea what they were being invited into. And when did it change? When did they finally see? Two things happened. One, Jesus came and told them what it was. Imagine, he dies, and he comes back. And the first thing he says to his followers is, “Don’t be afraid of what’s just happened. You’ve doubted me. You’ve done the worst thing you could possibly do to me. You ran. You hid. You weren’t there for me, except for John was.” So he’s saying, “Look, that isn’t the issue. The issue that you failed me is not the issue. The issue is that just look at what you did. Accept what you did. It’s normal to do what you did. It’s human nature to do what you did, but what I’m telling you is that I’m going to enter into you, and my Spirit coming into you is going to forgive you in the way that forgiveness really works. It isn’t just that your sin is written off. No, forgiveness is that your eyes are opened to see the reason why we struggle with evil.”

Why do we struggle with it? Why didn’t God just erase it? Well, he didn’t, because there’s a teaching that’s so clear if you look at the life of Jesus. What did he really do? We mentioned it last week. He went through a process of surrendering to a plan that looked very much like evil was destroying this human being’s God figure, and so we see that evil was there to destroy the message of Jesus. But what it really did — they tried to destroy him, but you can’t destroy God, nor can you destroy the truth, nor can you destroy the Spirit of God that’s in you and in me. And so when someone attacks that truth and wisdom inside of you, what it is, it’s the opportunity for you to realize, “Wait a minute. If something is attacking this essence of the message of Jesus, then something is out of balance. There’s a division inside of me. There’s a part of me that believes that I’m forgiven, and I will be changed. There’s a part of me that believes that I’m responsible for all my actions, and if I do something wrong, I deserve to be punished, and I find myself hating myself, hating other people that don’t do what they do.” That’s the hangover from the Old Testament.

So how can I convince you in this short homily of the importance of knowing what it is that God has done by dying on the cross and forgiving, making up for all our sins? He is forgiveness, and forgiveness means that he has this really unique way of looking at you and looking at me and seeing you as both a combination of goodness and evil. And I’ll tell you one thing really clearly that you need to remember is grace, God’s Spirit, is always about unification. When you live in the world of evil and the world of justice, let’s say — not that justice is evil, but it’s incomplete. But you live in that world, then basically what you’re going to do is you’re going to see evil as the enemy that needs to be cut out of you, not surrendered to, not accepted, but cut out of you, hated. And what do you do if you’re given a challenge to do something that only God can do? What’s going to happen? Well, you pretend it’s happening. You pretend you can do it. What do I mean? Let’s take this as a principle. Every human being has a light and a darkness in them. It’s just human nature. The darkness comes maybe because it’s inherited from our ancestors. A lot of times it’s because we’ve been wounded by the people who raised us and the world that we live in, not that it’s done intentionally, but we get caught up in all kinds of lies and illusions. All right? So we are a human being who has both positive and negative qualities. Now, what Jesus is saying is, “I look at you and see you that way, and I forgive automatically everything in you that’s not what it should be. I don’t let your sins separate me from you. I’m here for union and communion. My forgiveness is I accept you totally as you are. That means I’m constantly pouring affirmation and love into you.” And guess what happens? In that process, there comes about a way, a wisdom that I can’t describe how it works exactly, but when you decide the evil in you is not something that makes you feel unworthy of being in the presence of others, when you stop letting evil rob you of the peace of what it means to be loved by God, when you stop that, you enter into this place of light and wholeness, unity. The fact that you have a dark side and light side does not mean that you are schizophrenic or that there’s something wrong with you. It’s means you’re human, and if you can accept that part of your humanity and take the part that’s not what it should be and say, “I can’t change this. I can see it. You can show it to me, and I can recognize it as evil, and I can own it,” then you can change it. Then you can change it, because the only person that can change our nature like that is the divine nature of God, and the only way he can do it is if you allow him to do it. And you can’t allow him to do it unless you accept it as part of yourself and know that you’re loved in spite of it.

So this idea of repentance is very, very important to understand. Repentance is a change of heart that’s based on an opening of our consciousness and our awareness of what is real, and when we see things as they are and we accept them without self-judgment and condemnation, then we are in a new place — a new place. And we regret — that’s the word. Repent means to regret. We regret the disunity that we allowed to happen within us by looking at one part of us and hating it, looking at the other part of us and saying, “Oh, I’m wonderful.” We’re both. Forgiveness gives us the opportunity to be one with our shortcomings and our failings, not to say they’re okay but to say, “They’re part of me. They’re not me. They’re a part of me. They’re a part of my human nature, and what I need to do is to know that I can’t change that.” The only way I can really change myself is to say, “I will destroy that part of myself.” And then you can’t really destroy part of yourself, because the shadow is part of the gift. So if you try to destroy your shadow, you’re going to destroy part of your virtuous life. And how do you pretend to destroy it? How do you do it? Denial. “I don’t have that part in me. There’s nothing dark in me.” Notice people when you try to point out a weakness that they have, and if they say, “Yeah, I know. I’m just really a mess. I’ve done that all my life, and I’m really — I don't know — trying to get out of it, but I can’t,” versus somebody that says, “What are you talking about? There’s nothing in me that’s like that. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Denial. If you’re denying part of yourself, you’re dividing yourself, and then sin has done its wicked work. You’re living in a world of duality where you accept the part of you that’s wonderful, and you reject the part of you that’s not. You live in this tension. You live in self-hatred, refusal to forgive, and you can’t find peace, because when you don’t accept evil, it controls you, and you will be divided. And the interesting thing — it’s one thing to say, “Well, I hate myself for evil, but I accept everybody else.” No, you don’t. Nobody is going to treat themselves differently than they treat others. If you look at your weaknesses and your sins as if they are the things that should not be there and you hate them and you want to destroy them and you do it by denying them, you are in the classic state that we all get caught up in. And that is living in a time of freedom and love and acceptance and blocking it and not allowing it to enter into us. What a tragedy not to believe that I’m loved in my imperfection, not to believe that I’m forgiven before I even do anything wrong, not to believe that the love of God and the acceptance of God is the transformation stuff. It’s the energy of transformation. It will change you permanently. The other is fear and hatred of a part of me, and I try to crush it and destroy it. And if I do that, I live in a dual world, and I never find peace. That’s the scary part.

So repentance is God’s work. Our work, open your eyes. Accept your human nature. God created it that way. He wanted it to be that way. He wants you to be indebted, in a sense, to him because of his love and how it changed you, and then you will start doing that to other people. And once you love people in their imperfection, watch them change. It’s phenomenal. Condemn them and judge them, try to get them to face it. It doesn’t work. So there’s a great, great lesson as we begin this time of reflecting on the work of Jesus. Keep in mind what he did when he died on that cross. He took away the sting of sin. It no longer is an obstacle to our being with him. In fact, it’s the key to experiencing his love.

Father, we pray that we might have the same experiences as the disciples as we go through the journey that you had with them this liturgical year.We want you to open our eyes so that we can really see how close you are to us but most especially the enormous gift of your love in spite of our weaknesses, in spite of our sins so that we can feel this affirming, transforming love that changes us and brings us not only a change of heart but a capacity to change the way we treat one another, the way we respond to evil in one another.May we respond to evil in the world.Your very gift is peace, oneness, unity.Open our heart to the way in which you’ve given us so that we might find it, experience it and share it with one another, and we ask this through Christ, our Lord, Amen.

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1 Samuel 3:3b-10, 19 | 1 Corinthians 6:13c-15a, 17-20 | John 1:35-42

Almighty everliving God who govern all things, both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

It’s hard for me to believe that it was 60 years ago that I felt that I would like to be a priest. I don’t think I understood at all what it would be like to be a priest, but I knew somehow it had something to do with doing something that seemed valuable but, most especially, I felt would be helpful. I think if I look at the way I came into the world, I think it was that I came in and looked around and said, “Is there somebody here I can help?” It’s just the way I am, the way I’m hardwired, and what was happening at that time, which I had no idea was happening — no one really did, but in 1959, John XXIII said he was going to call a council to breathe new air into the church, to open the windows and let the Holy Spirit enter. So it was like he realized that the church had been, in a sense, closed to so many things that they needed to open their hearts to, and that’s a pretty good description of what is true for all of us and for all institutions. We get a certain understanding of the way things are, and then we don’t change. We just defend the position we’re in, and we fight those who think differently, and we protect it by trying to not let anybody else take away what we believe to be true. We’re not as open as we should be.

So one of the things that was so powerful about the things that were opened in the hearts of believers through the Vatican Council, which is what he called it, is that we were called, all of us, to be holy, and that was not something that was just for a few, not just for monks and for people that go off into the desert or into a monastery. But holiness is everybody’s right. It is what God died on the cross to give to us. He longs to be the source for you and for me to become the people we are called to be, and what we have to do in order to do that is enter into the world of holiness. Another word for that that I like to use is mysticism. Mysticism, we’re all called to be mystics, not just a few of us, all of us, and what’s a mystic? Well, the best description I can give you of mystic is in the first reading, Samuel. If you look at the context of this reading, it’s really interesting, because it says a lot about what maybe was in the heart without maybe realizing what was in the heart of the leaders of the church, particularly John XXIII, who realized, “Something is missing in this institution. We’ve got to get it back. And it was there in the beginning, but we’ve lost it. We’ve become too rigid, too legalistic, too closed to new ideas.” The thing about a mystic is that they’re the ones who have the capacity to know that God is in them, with them, for them, and they listen to him. They listen to God.

I remember once having a priest share a story with me where he said, “Somebody in the parish came to me and asked me to do something, because, they said, God told them to do that.” And he kind of laughed, like, “God doesn’t speak to people like that.” Oh yeah, he does. He does. I’m not saying that a parishioner can come and say, “You’ve got to do this, because God told me.” No, but for a person to believe that they have received a personal revelation from God is absolutely, rock bottom, Christian spirituality.

So let’s look at the story of Samuel. Samuel had a special birth. His mother was barren for a long time. She went and prayed in the temple. Eli was the priest of the temple. He was also a judge, one of the judges of the Israelite community, which is — the judges were basically kind of military leaders. They protected Israelites from all their enemies outside of them. He was also a priest, but anyway, Eli sees Hannah and thinks she’s drunk, because she’s mumbling these prayers. And basically she said, “I’ve been begging, begging God to give me a child.” And Eli says, “I believe he will.” Eli must have felt that God had spoken to him to tell her, “Yes, you’ll have a child.” She calls him Samuel, brings him back to Eli, and he’s now growing up in the temple. And he’s asleep in this story. He is in the temple asleep. I think that’s so interesting. My image of the church before Vatican II was pretty much asleep in many areas. And so he hears a voice, and he thinks it’s Eli. So he gets up each time and goes and asks Eli what he wants, and Eli is wise enough, old enough to realize, “Well, God is speaking to you.” And so this is what’s so beautiful about it. This man, who is listening and having God call him, he hears this voice, and what he’s realizing is that, “This God has an interest in me listening to what he has to tell me personally.” And that response that he had was so perfect. “You’re speaking. I’m listening. I’m listening.” That’s a mystic. To believe that God speaks is one thing, but to listen to him and then to add, “I’m your servant.” So a true mystic is one who believes that God speaks through situations all around them, that you are open to listen to what he’s saying, to interpret it and then to do whatever it is that you’re invited to do. That’s, to me, the hidden mystery of Christianity. That’s everybody’s right, to have this happen to them. It’s what we should all be aware of, sensitive to, open to, and we need to give, then, God the time to speak to us. We need to be still. We need to have a reflective life. We need to be reading things, not just on the surface, but looking for symbolic meaning behind things, not to an extreme where we’re following every little whim that comes along. No, we’re saying, “You, God, long to say something to me, and I want to hear it.”

And so what I think we hear next, in the gospel, is something very profound. We’re seeing Jesus revealing to the world and to particularly his disciples the way this whole inner voice works. The inner voice comes from God’s presence. Now, the most exciting and wonderful thing about this figure Jesus is he is God’s presence incarnate. So he’s the model of who we are to become, and you would think that this teacher, Jesus, who spent 30 years reflecting and working on it, and he wanted to work with some people the way, I think, the church would have at that time and maybe even today, said, “Well, how do we teach this to people?” Well, we’ll set up a classroom, and Jesus can live in the temple, and then the disciples can sign up and get 12 in a class. Then Jesus sits there and teaches them what they have to believe and how they should act, their moral theology, dogmatic theology. No, no. No, he does the most amazing thing. When they’re interested in him — and they asked the right question. “Where do you dwell? Who are you? Tell us something about you.” His response is, “I’m not going to talk about me. I’m going to show you. I want you to see me.” Now, compare that to what was told centuries earlier to the man in the temple. He’s sitting there, and he’s told, “Listen to me.” Now Jesus says to the disciples, “See me. Watch me. Pay attention to me, because I want you to understand something. I want you to see something that I am going to manifest for you, because that is exactly what you are going to be asked to manifest. And what is it? What did Jesus do? How did he do the work that he was doing? How did he convince anyone? Well, first of all, he didn’t convince them thoroughly. After John got it, the disciple John — but most of the disciples didn’t, couldn’t fully grasp what Jesus was trying to teach them. And what was he teaching them? “I am the model of who you are to become. You all are to be people who are filled with my spirit. My spirit is God in me, divinity in me.” So our challenge is how do you believe that God is truly in me and is manifesting himself through me, not necessarily by teaching me what to say or even what to do but empowering me to be someone. We are the presence of God. If we believe that God is in us, then his presence is in us. If his presence is in us, then it’s going to be like the presence of God in Jesus, and what was that like? Everywhere he went, he healed people. Wherever he seemed to do anything, it was so effective and powerful. He just willed to do something, and it happened. Even when he didn’t want to do it, it happened. So here’s Jesus saying, “The power of God is in you as it is in me, and it has the ability to do things beyond anything you could do with words or your will or whatever. Just trust that you are God’s presence.”

And that’s what Paul is then talking about when he talks about the body is made for something beautiful, something wonderful, something moral. What is morality? Morality goes beyond the law. Morality is a kind of ethic, a wisdom, an ethic that knows in this situation, this is what should be done, and that’s what the presence of God does through you. And I’m not trying to make this into something too weird, but that presence of God in you is so effective that you are not necessarily going to know exactly how it’s working or when it’s working. And that’s wonderful, because Jesus obviously, as a man, could have gotten caught up in his miracles and seeing himself as the great savior of the world. And maybe he did get caught up in that a little bit. He certainly was a celebrity when he entered into Jerusalem at the end of his career, but he was able to not buy into that. But it was his celebrityhood that cost him his life, because when he became so famous, that’s when the scribes and Pharisees had to get rid of him, because he was too popular, and he was too effective. And when he raised Lazarus from the dead, that was the killer. They had to kill him then, but think of it. What was he manifesting that whole time when he was with his disciples? He was manifesting the presence of his Father through his body. So it’s his presence, his presence, not his performance, his presence that changed people.

It’s the same for us. That’s exactly the mystery that I’m talking about that a mystic understands. You are — your body resonates whatever integrity is inside of you, or lack of integrity that’s inside of you comes through your body, and in a way that is almost like simply a frequency. But at the same time, it’s when people are aware of your intentions and your decisions and your actions, and they’re reading them. And when you’re reflecting divinity in those actions, because you believe it is in you and believe that he can use you in ways that you don’t even have to understand how and when, you are like the prophet who says, “I am here. I am listening. I will do whatever you ask. I will be used by you in whatever way you want.” The prophet said, “I listen.” In the New Testament, the disciples who encountered the incarnate Jesus said, “We will watch you, watch you and see what you’re doing.”

So that’s what I think Paul is really talking about when he says, “The body is not made for immorality.” Immorality would be a way of acting that goes against our very nature, our very essence. The moral choice is the right — as I said, a wise, ethical choice, and when we are making those choices and we witness that kind of choosing in front of people, we are so effective, very effective in achieving the goal for which we came. We’re here to help. We’re here to heal one another, and if you work solely on performance and that’s a shadow of any official religious person or in any person that claims to be Christian — “I’m performing moral acts all the time for the reason, maybe, that I want to seem pretty wonderful in the eyes of others.” That’s like a prostitute, and in that reading, Paul talks about, “Don’t be a prostitute,” when you might think he’s saying, “Just don’t ever get involved in sexuality outside of marriage.” Well, it’s much more complicated than that. It’s really saying, “No, look, the intention of you — your intention in sync with God’s intention is that I am in the world to reflect something that is bigger than myself, and I want to give it to the world. And if I can take time to reflect and be still and listen and allow God to transform my body, then my presence does the work, so much more important than words or actions that are not grounded in truth. And the mysticism is the great gift, and our hearts, our minds, our whole body needs to be open to receive this gift so we can be that gift in the world.

Father, the life that you’ve called us to is in such intimate closeness with you. It’s beyond our imagining. We’re not worthy to have you so much a part of everything that we are, but you promise that that is your will. That is your desire. So bless us with a kind of humble, open, servant heart. We can receive these ultimate gifts, share them with others and know that we are simply the instruments of your love and your healing and your incredible power to change the world. And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

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Isaiah 42:1-4, 6-7 | Acts 10:34-38 | Mark 1:7-11

Almighty, everliving God, who when Christ had been baptized in the River Jordan, and as the Holy Spirit descended upon him, solemnly declared him your Beloved Son, grant that your children by adoption, reborn of water and the Holy Spirit, may always be well-pleasing to you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

It’s impossible to celebrate this idea of being baptized from anything that has to do with the way in which Christianity takes root inside of a human being, even though we realize now that the idea of needing to be baptized is not so literal as we first thought, that you had to be baptized. At least as Catholics, we believed, unless you were baptized in the Catholic faith, you didn’t have any chance of being infused with grace and power from God. We know that the ritual is not that crucial to be received by someone as much as it’s the mystery of what this sacrament represents that is essential. The Catholic Church talks about a baptism of water in a church. It also talks about a baptism of desire. When a person lives a good life, they feel the presence of God in them. A baptism of fire, where someone gives their life over to the truth, those are all ways in which we can celebrate the fact that God enters into human beings. It’s his will. It’s his desire. It’s the plan, God living in you, God living in me.

From the beginning of the story of God working with human beings, even from the Book of Genesis, there’s always this image of a promise of someone who’s coming who will crush the enemy, will get rid of whatever it is that we are struggling with in this world. Throughout the Old Testament, there’s the promise of this Messiah who is going to come, who was considered at first to be a person who would be in charge of the way the world works politically. It would be a political leader and not a spiritual leader but eventually evolves, no, this is about a kingdom that is not of this world but a kingdom that is eternal, and so we have a Messiah who’s going to come and teach us what it means to enter into life — to enter into life. I love the image in Isaiah when it says that the Lord is going to grasp us one day by our hand, and he’s going to form us into this people. And this people are going to be described as enlightened. That means they’re going to be wise, and this enlightenment opens the eyes of everyone to see what’s real, to see the truth. And what we’re going to find in that truth that we see for the first time is that the darkness that is part of the world is a place where we can get caught and be destroyed by the darkness, or we can pass through it. And the idea is, when God’s wisdom enters into you and to me, it opens our eyes, and we see darkness very differently than we could without this grace of wisdom. Darkness is not the enemy we thought it was. Darkness puts us into a situation where we have to look at what the real enemy is. It is not that the world isn’t what we think it should be. It’s not that I’m not who I wish I was. It’s not that I wish all the people in the world that have impacted me in a negative way wasn’t there. It’s nothing as simple as that. It’s saying that, when there is darkness, there is a way through it that brings life and light. In fact, there is no way, it seems in Christianity — unless you go through darkness, you can’t enter into light. What does that mean?

One of the things that’s powerful about this set of readings to me is the reading from John. We know that John is always the mystic in the group, and all of us are called to mysticism. What is mysticism? It’s a way of realizing that God has a desire to directly communicate with us, and a mystic is nothing other than someone who is listening attentively to God in all the things that are happening around them. They believe that God is there with me, in me, teaching me, showing me, and a mystic is a person who’s listening attentively to everything going on around them and trying to see something in them that’s a pattern, a pattern that Jesus has taught us through his very life. And what is the pattern that we’re looking at? It’s celebrated in baptism.

So let’s look at the life of Jesus for just a moment. What is it that was his greatest struggle and his greatest teaching? We know that he came to the world blessed. He knew that he was chosen for this work, so he had a sense of his own destiny, as we should all have a sense of our own destiny. And he did what we all do. He grew in age and wisdom over a long period of time, and then he engaged in the work of his life. That’s when we become adult, and we find ourselves in relationships that are committed, and they’re complicated, and we have to look at all the aspects of those things. Let’s call that life, and so when Jesus is in the midst of his life, he’s living the work that he’s longed to do. He’s there to speak the truth. He’s there to heal, to transform, to do all these mysterious, marvelous things that imply that he’s there as a lover giving life to people. And then the enemy sees it all and says, “We have to crush him.” The enemy wants to destroy goodness, and that enemy is still with us. He’s been conquered, but he hasn’t stopped working or she, whatever it is. Evil is there in the form of darkness. Something isn’t the way it should be, and when we’re caught in darkness, as Jesus was in the moment in which he realized that his Father was asking him to surrender to evil, surrender to the darkness — let it kill you, and you’ll find light. It doesn’t make any sense to the ego. What normally the ego would do, when Jesus was caught in the situation he was in, where all this evil was there trying to destroy him, even when he was on the cross, he realized, “If I wanted to, if I was giving into my ego, I would do that, and I would say, ‘God, take all these people and wipe them out.’” And then he could have destroyed them all, and then Jesus would have gotten off the cross, and we would have thought that his life would have been so effective, but it would have been a disaster, because he would have been teaching that we who believe in God have the power to overcome all darkness just by destroying it. You can’t destroy darkness. You can’t destroy sin. You can’t destroy people in the world that come into the world with evil intent. I don’t say they come into the world that way but turn out that way.

So what are we looking at? Somehow in the mystery of the life of Jesus, we’re learning that there is something about giving into the darkness. What does that mean, that we don’t care, that anybody can do negative things to us, anybody else, that’s all right? No, no. It’s nothing like that. The key is in the words of John when he said, “This is what it is. Jesus came into the world to do something, to show us something. Open your eyes and look carefully at the life of Jesus. He comes into the world, and the one thing that is clear from the very beginning — it’s clear in the baptism of Jesus — that he is anointed. He is called the Anointed One. God’s Spirit enters into him. He has truth living inside of him. He is empowered to see reality exactly as it is and to surrender to the plan that God has for us in this world, which includes dealing with evil. If you think that God does not plan for us to have to deal with evil, then you must be very confused as to why God hasn’t been more effective in destroying evil. If God allows evil in the world, darkness in the world, it’s for a purpose, because everything that he allows in the world is for you and for me. He’s a lover, and his promise is that he, just as he entered into Jesus and gave him wisdom, he will promise, if you open your heart to him, he will come in and give you the wisdom you need to have in order to know how to deal with the darkness. And how was Jesus taught to do it? It’s water. It’s baptism. What is water and baptism? Not a cleansing of the outside, not getting rid of all our bad habits, not training our wills to do what’s right so that we do everything right, so that we don’t ever do anything offensive. No, that’s not it. No, it’s not the cleaning of the outside. It’s a death to something inside. It’s a dying. You get held under the water as if you’re dying, and you come out of the water a new person. What dies when you’re being baptized? What is it? This strange, mysterious way in which the ego decides that I, I, I will make the world into basically my world, what it needs to be, and I will not fail, and if I do fail, I’m filled with shame and guilt, and if I surround myself with people who won’t fail me and will never do anything harmful to me, and if they do, I will kill them. If I’m in that way of thinking, I’m in darkness.

It’s the darkness we all know. We find ourselves angry over things that are not the way they should be, and when we’re angry, we seek someone to blame or someone to destroy. That’s the great enemy, not that there is evil, but that when we encounter evil, we attack it. And then we feel like, “Ah, we’re justified.” And that hatred that the world, imperfect as it is, creates in us is the greatest evil in the world. So what it means is we have to learn how to deal with the darkness, meaning all the things that we’ve done that we’re ashamed of, everything that has happened to us that we’re angry about. If we can surrender to that and knowing that somehow if I allow it to be what it is and forgive it, then I’ve found life. So the Spirit, the water and the blood are God’s wisdom telling us exactly what the world is like. It’s going to be dark, supposed to be dark, and the darkness is supposed to teach us how to surrender to it without retaliation, without anger, without attacking. And then blood, when Jesus dies on the cross, he said, “I’m forgiving all these figures in the world that have done this to me.” And then he rises, and he’s unstoppable, and he knows, and he lives and teaches for 40 days in a way that he never could have taught before.

So what’s the key? The key is understanding that this great baptism celebrates an event in the life of Christ, which is his surrendering to reality and never turning it into something where he decides he’s going to be after the people that caused it, destroying them. The way this works most insidiously is that we find in our own selves, when we fail to live up to what we think we should do, when we’ve done horrible things to other people and we decide that we need not to learn from this wisdom, but we don’t have this wisdom, but we decide, “All right, somebody needs to pay for this thing that is done,” then we attack guess who — yourself. So if you have difficulty in forgiving something you’ve done in the past, pay attention to this teaching of Jesus, because he’s saying unless you can surrender to that reality — you are human. You do this. We all fail. If we’re living our lives and struggling, we’re going to fail miserably. The harder we try, we’re going to fail miserably at times, and when we do, there’s only one response to that kind of darkness, and that’s surrender and forgiveness — surrender and forgiveness.

I’ve had the weirdest thing happening in my house. These last couple of days, there’s been this red bird who keeps attacking herself, and it’s a reflection in the mirror, or rather in the glass. And every day for the last seven days, this bird has been out there at times, not all day but every now and then, every day, she’ll come and beat herself up trying to attack herself, attack herself, attack herself. I’m sitting there wondering, “What is that about? That’s never happened in my life.” I’m working on my homily this week, and then you’ve got this bird constantly beating itself up on my window. So what’s that about? And it just dawned on me when I was preparing. I said, “Oh, it’s about shame.” It’s the insanity of shame, that when you’ve done something wrong and you can’t surrender to the reality that that’s what we do — human beings do wrong things, and so you forgive it, not in the sense of saying, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. I’ll do it again.” No, no. It does matter. It’s wrong, and you know it’s wrong, but what you really don’t ever want to get caught up in is the constant living in a self-attack mode of beating yourself up every day. That’s the greatest danger and the greatest enemy that shows up in my life and in your life, and that’s shame. And it does more damage to take us away from the peace that God has won for us, but the key is to understand what the baptism represents, the most essential teaching. We have to believe in it. Believe that surrendering to the way things are, without trying to find someone to blame or someone to attack, and forgiving it is life. It’s enlightenment, and it always leads to peace.

Father, when your disciples ask you to increase their faith, you imply that there is not so much a case of degrees in faith.It’s either you believe it or you don’t. Help us to believe in the greatest of all these mysteries that you share with us, the idea that our goal in life is to surrender, most especially, to the reality of our life that you have created for us, and help us not to fall into the trap of resisting and fighting and blaming and attacking things that we don’t think should be there. Give us a great faith of surrender and acceptance to those things that we cannot change, and then we believe — I know we believe that you are who you say you are, and so keep us close to your promise of, when we trust in you, we find the fullness of everything. Help us to have a lot of faith in you. Amen.

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Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14 | Colossians 3:12-21 | Luke 2:22-40

Oh God, who are pleased to give us the shining example of the holy family, graciously grant that we may imitate them in practicing the virtues of family life and, in the bonds of charity and so in the joy of your house, delight one day in eternal rewards. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This Feast of the Holy Family is very interesting in terms of the offering that the church gives to me, a preacher, teacher: two sets of readings. One set focuses primarily on the family, the holy family, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and their life together. And there is another set of readings that is an option, and it develops around the theme of the bigger family, when God first called a community of people together through Abraham. And that family has certain qualities and aspects to it that are important for us to understand, as does the holy family, but I think it’s the first year, in 53 years or whatever, that I’ve decided to use the readings from Abraham. I’m not sure why, but I am. And so it’s not so much focusing then, these readings you’ve just listened to, on the nature of the, what I would call, the core family, mother, father, children, but on a much broader, bigger family of God, God the Father and his people and his people’s relationship to each other.

And so I’d like you to join me then in reflecting upon this mysterious thing that we call community, unity, oneness. It’s impossible to talk about Christianity without talking about community. It can never be an isolated, individual experience of just you and God, and even though we have people who seem to separate from community, normal community life, live in a monastery, have a very unique role of being there almost as individuals but part of a community, but mostly their life is dedicated to prayer, and they’re not the example that we would use for what would be called the normal Christian life. The normal Christian life is the most fascinating thing, because it deals primarily in relationships. And so instead of focusing on the home in Nazareth of Jesus, we’re going to focus on God calling for the first time after he created Adam and Eve — he enters into history, and he said, “I want to create a family of human beings that live together, work together, grow together, die together, change together.” So that’s what we’re going to focus on in this homily.

So let’s look at basically some of the major themes. The most interesting thing starts with, with the first reading with Abraham, that he has a longing, as a human being, to be effective, to have an impact on people, and one of the things that’s interesting about the Old Testament is there’s very little reference — especially in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, there’s very little emphasis on life after death as we, as Christians, understand it, going to a place either like a place of purification, purgatory, or a place of heaven, a reward, or possibly we could choose to refuse the forgiveness of God and end up in a place of destruction, in hell. God never sends people there. People choose to go there and refuse forgiveness. But basically we have in that image a people who are destined for something, and their destiny is somehow connected to the inter-flow of life between each of them. So we see in this figure Abraham that he has a longing to accomplish something in life where he has some kind of lasting effect, some kind of influence on the world, like more than just his own little life. He said, “I want to have posterity. I don’t have anybody coming after me.” And that’s interesting, because in the Old Testament, when there wasn’t an emphasis on life after death, the most important thing was you would continue to live in your descendants, in those that you created, and Abram was without any descendant. So God enters into his life and said, “I am here to create for you posterity.” And the way he does it is to give him a miraculous birth through a — the way God does things, I can’t describe him enough to say that, when he really wants to make it clear that he’s the one doing it, he does something that doesn’t make any logical sense, a woman in her 90s having a baby after she struggled all her life to have children. So what this is about, this promise, is that God is a God who is dedicated to awakening in human beings and empowering human beings to create life. We’re here to have an impact beyond just our own life. We’re here to have a long-term impact on the world, and that isn’t something that God tells us we should do. It’s something deep inside of us that we know we long to do.

It’s funny. I’m now in my 80s and thinking about things like, “Gosh, I’m going to die sometime soon, and I want to leave something to my sisters, to my family or whatever.” And I never thought about that before, but there’s something about human nature that, when we think about leaving this world, we don’t want to leave it without having a sense that we have had some impact, some influence on it. And we long for the influence to be powerful and to be good and to be life-giving. That’s just in our DNA, and so the story of Abraham and the story of God creating this family is a story about saying there is a responsibility in all of us that we have an impact on one another that brings life to the world. And that’s a beautiful description, I think, of what’s in the heart of every human beings. It’s called love. “I want to be of some kind of grace, goodness, effectiveness to other people.” And when you think about that, it’s a beautiful way to imagine a drive that’s in us that is there in seed form that needs to grow and develop, and how does it grow and develop?

What I’d like you to imagine with me is that this ability to give life to another begins when we realize that this is something that has been given to us. The whole story of Abram turning into Abraham is that he finally gets past his fear that he has no influence or no real effectiveness on what happens to him after he dies. He believes. He believes that there is something given to him that enables him to do that, and it’s a son, Isaac. And the interesting thing about his giving, been given this gift, he believes, “My gosh, God has entered into my life, and now I am able to leave something in the world that will continue my effectiveness in the world, my posterity.” That’s the way he thought about it. But then think about this: he had that sense that, “This is why — this is what I’ve always longed for.” And then he sees it happening in a miraculous way. So when God says, “Can you let go of this gift? Can you destroy this thing that’s been given to you?” It’s so weird why Isaac — why Abraham would be asked to give up Isaac, to kill him, but then the reason that he was willing to do it, though he was stopped by an angel, but the reason he was willing to do it, he figured out, “If God can do this miraculous thing of taking my barren wife and making her fertile and giving me an offspring, he can bring life out of things that look like death.”

And that’s the mystery. God can enter into things in our life that look like there’s no life there, there is something missing, and enter into a relationship somehow with us where it produces abundant life. That’s faith. That’s the faith of Abraham, the father of faith. If we can believe as Abraham believed, we’d create a role in the family of man that we’re going to be here constantly. When everything looks dark and lifeless, we believe that everything that’s happening somehow has the potential in it to bring life into the world. That’s the promise. What a gift, that we’re given that kind of hope. And we see it then most fully experienced by then Jesus, who comes into the world, and he too has this longing to have an impact on the world. He wants to change it. He wants to radically open people to the mystery of his Father’s intimacy that he knew personally, firsthand. He wanted people to experience it, and so his calling was, “I have to show people this wonderful gift and how amazing it is.” And the interesting thing is the way he proves, in a sense, that he is the Son of God is that he goes through a process that is at the heart of this work of being in the family of man, meaning we’re here to always find life where it seems there’s only death. And so it seems essential that Jesus had to go through the experience of feeling, fearing that his life was cut short and wasn’t able to fulfill its obligations, wasn’t able to be all that he intended it to be, and when in a sense, all of his human energy and action that went into trying to be the best Messiah he could be and maybe not doing it as well as he could of, in terms of the way he angered the system and made them turn against him and all of that — but at the bottom line, what we see is, when he surrendered to what seemed didn’t seem like it was going to be enough or didn’t seem like it would bring life, when it actually looked like he thought he was going to end his ministry prematurely, he gave into it and trusted that somehow in this seemingly thing that’s called death comes abundant life. That’s the moment of faith, of trust in the work of a family, in the work of a community. Think about it. In all of the situations that we live in, there is always something that we can look at and say, “This should never have happened. This was bad. My background is not what it should have been. I wasn’t loved enough. I wasn’t supported enough, and therefore I can’t find a way to support others.” All those things, we can say those are the darkness, but when we think about it in the way that Abraham’s life was unfolding and Jesus’ life was unfolding, it’s all about the mystery of how do you enter into what seems to be the worst thing and find that it’s filled with life. That’s a way of living in community, of living in church, of living in society, that what seems to be destroying us, if we look at it carefully and work through it and grow because of it and enter into a more mystical dimension of trusting in something that we can’t understand, giving birth out of things that seem to be only filled with death — until we do that, we haven’t really entered into the family that God has called us to be, believing, trusting in the way in which God uses darkness to bring light. That’s the gift. That’s the mystery, and I pray that this season, this whole season that we’ve been through now, ending with this Feast of the Holy Family, that it brings about a unity and a oneness that perhaps wasn’t there before, and God bless you.

Father, we feel responsible to do the work that you’ve given us to do in this world, and yet we don’t realize fully that this is a work that you, you in us, you with us can only, you, make it happen.So help us to be more trustful in the spirit of your life within each of us so that we don’t really face any darkness without the conviction that you promise everything that is difficult brings life and fullness and joy. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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2 Samuel 7:1-5, 8B-12, 14A, 16 | Romans 16:25-27 | Luke 1:26-38

Oh God, eternal majesty, whose ineffable word, the Immaculate Virgin received through the message of an angel and so became the dwelling place of divinity, filled with the light of the Holy Spirit, grant, we pray, that by her example, we may in humility hold fast to your will. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

This is the last chance I have to talk to you before we celebrate the great Feast of the Incarnation. I want you to imagine with me that this particular part of the revelation that God had planned to reveal to people from the very beginning took a very long time before he felt they were ready to receive it. No one quite knows how long human beings have been around. The numbers are all over the place, but let’s just, for a round number, let’s just say about maybe almost a million years. And what we’re learning over that time about human nature is that it slowly and steadily evolves, changes, grows, becomes more what God intended it to be — what God intended human beings to be. And how do we know whether what he intends us to be is good or evil? Well, I think one of the ways you might understand it is what he said is, “I have made you in my image and likeness.” If God said, “I made you in my image and likeness,” then we have to be people who are fundamentally good, loving, caring, nurturing, forgiving. If we’re made in God’s image, that’s who we are. But one made a statement to me once that stuck with me forever, and it goes like this. It says, “We were made in God’s image, and once we understood that, we returned the favor and made him in our own image.” But the problem with that is the own image that we made him in is not truly who we are, because it seems to me, if you look at the history of human beings with God, especially in the Old Testament and now even in the New Testament, there’s a way of imagining God as one who is in charge but is a demanding God who expects from us certain behavior, and if that behavior isn’t there and we’re judged to have fallen short of it, we have then a response from this God, and that’s judgment and then condemnation. So God has, in a sense, put us on this planet as a test to see if we’re worthy of him, and so when we do the things that we do, if we do them well, out of our will and our determination, then we get a star, a gold star, and we’re told, “All right, now you’re doing what I asked you to do. Come into my kingdom.” And nothing could be further from the truth.

Yes, that might have been the way people understood God in the Old Testament because of the way, in a sense, human beings had to be cared for. They had to be given something that was important before they understood the importance of it, and they had to be given a motive. And the motive was always destruction. So the fear of being destroyed is a great motivator to do what is right, so let’s just say, as you might give punishment to a four-year-old, “Don’t do this, or you’re go to your room,” or, “Don’t do this, or you’ll be spanked,” or something like that. It works, and so let’s just imagine our human consciousness at one point in the history of our being was such that that’s all it could understand, but there is this thing called evolution, moving closer and closer to who we are intended to be.

I love Catherine of Siena. She’s a marvelous woman that lived in the Middle Ages, and she basically had this relationship with God where she could speak to him, and he would speak to her. She was a true mystic, a direct connection to God and Jesus, and one day she asked him, “What can I do for you? What can I do for you? I’ve already done everything. I’ve given my life over to you. I’m in a monastery or whatever. I want to do more for you. I’ve got my life probably the way you want it to be. I’m a good person and doing good, but what more can I do?” And he said, “I don’t need anything from you, but if you want to do something that pleases me, that gives me joy, then treat my brothers and sisters like I’m telling you that I treat them. Love them, forgive them, nurture them, help them to grow. Let them see and encourage them to see their weaknesses, their darkness and not to think that that’s who they are but to believe that there’s something about that role of evil in the world that is there for the purpose of awakening us to more and more of the light. The darker it is, the more you seek light. So there’s this wonderful, wonderful way in which Catherine of Siena grasped the thought that this God of ours is not a God of judgment, of condemnation but a God that wills and wants nothing more than for us to grow and to become who we are. She also made another statement that is great. She said, “Become who God has intended you to be, and you will set the world on fire.” Set the world on fire. There’s a great prophecy about Jesus wanting to set the world on fire by transforming it into what it’s intended to be.

So on this third Sunday or this fourth Sunday, rather, of Advent, we look carefully at what we’re asked to imagine this Feast of the Incarnation is all about. So it’s about surrendering to the fact that there is something in this God that longs more than we could ever imagine for us to grow and to change and to become who we’re intended to be, and it was clear that it was hidden forever, as the second reading talks about. St. Paul says, “There’s a mystery that’s been hidden forever.” Well, it was hidden from those who couldn’t understand it, but what it is, is that we have a servant God who wants to enter into us and to partner with us in this extraordinary work of becoming fully who we’re intended to be. Tell a four-year-old something about maturity and saying, “I’m going to be there with you, and if you’ll let me, I’ll infuse this maturity into your four-year-old brain.” The brain just isn’t ready for it, so it took time, and we’ve been engaged in evolution of consciousness.

Now for as long as we’ve existed, and it’s growing, becoming more and more evident, that the ultimate goal of a human being is to be a gift to other human beings. To find out how they are empowered to do this work is the gift of enlightenment. Light comes into our life to show us the reality. Reality is we’re a mixture of good and evil, but fundamentally we are good. Fundamentally we want what is best for others, because ultimately we will see with a fullness of consciousness that the most pleasant, the most wonderful feeling, the thing that gives us a sense of value and dignity, is when we have improved the life of another person. That’s the joy that we are made for, and it’s the joy we see so clearly in this figure God in the Old Testament. He’s slowly revealing himself. “I want to take care of you.” He called the people together. It was his voice, the word to Abraham. “Form a people for me. I have something to say to them that I need to say to them as a community.” Those words were finally written down. They were rolled up in scrolls, and they were carried with the Israelite people as they went on this journey from darkness to light. It was a tabernacle, and it was in a tent. Then ultimately that tent ended up in a temple in Jerusalem. If you look at those images, first the intimate word from God to us — but it was only to a few, to Abraham and those prophets, patriarchs. Then when it was written down, it was carried as a presence of this wisdom, and the tent went wherever the people went. But then when it got into the temple, something began to happen. It was in the temple that it was in the center of the temple, and the people were kept on the outside, that weren’t believers, and the inside was first women, and then next were the men, and then the only ones that could get close to God were the priests, supposedly the holy ones. So what we see is God finally saying, “All right, I dwelt with you in a word to the prophets, then in my written word, and then in a place of worship, where this word was honored, but that was all set up to bring you to the point where we are now.” We are now in the most amazing time of the presence of God entering into you and me and dwelling in our hearts, indwelling presence. And what he’s saying is, “If I come to dwell within you, then I am there to be the source that you need to move in the direction you know that you long to be,” though it’s an unconscious, sometimes, realization. I want to be there for others. I want to be like Christ. I want to forgive. I want to accept. I want to encourage. I want to enlighten people.

So in this first reading, we see this image of God talking to David through the prophet, and he’s saying, “Look, you want to do all these things for me. You want to build a house for me. You want to create something majestic and powerful for me. I don’t want that. I want you to understand that I’m not the God that is looking to be served by you,” and this is shocking for so many people. “I’m the God that wants to serve you. Stop making me into this king figure and let me be your servant.” That’s what God wants. “I want to serve you. That’s the only joy I have, is enabling you to become who you’re intended to be.” That’s the seed of goodness in every human being. It’s there. It’s growing. It’s becoming. We’re getting better. The world is better now than it’s ever been. I believe that with all my heart, because the world is more consciousness than ever before, and what we see more and more in people is a recognition. Maybe it’s an idea. Maybe it’s just the illumination that this is who we really are and who we’re meant to be. Other people see it more in a mystical way. This is God in me, coming in me, dwelling in me, talking directly to me, showing me things, correcting things, never with judgment and condemnation but with love and forgiveness. That’s what the Old Testament, the Book of Samuel, is trying to get across. “I have come to dwell within you, indwelling.”

Think of a dwelling. What is a dwelling? A space, some place you live in. The scariest thing about human nature is that we can create a dwelling that is harmonious and loving and life-giving, and we can also create in our imaginations one that is fearful, terrifying and about to destroy us all. We create our dwelling sometimes, and nothing could be more dangerous than to create a world that is less than God intends it to be, particularly when it diminishes the role that we actually have while we’re here and diminishes the power of God so that we don’t believe that he is the servant God that he is, enabling all these things to happen to us, because he wants it. He wants it more than you do. He wants your happiness more than you want it. He wants your joy. He wants you to feel his presence, and in the feeling of his presence, like in Mary — she’s the one who represents — this is the fullness of revelation. Mary is the church. Mary is all humans, the feminine part of all of us that is receptive and open to mystery, and she’s there to say, “This scares me. I don't know what we’re doing. I don't know how this is going to work, but if you say that you need me to allow you into me, I will do that. And you want me to name that presence in me? Okay, I’ll name it — I’ll do the name you want, Jesus. What does it mean? God saves, God loves, God heals, God takes care of us, God improves us. She’s got that. She comes into the world, and she becomes the first fully-conscious human being, a human being walking around with divinity growing inside of her. And in nine months, when that growth was inside of her, before it ever manifested itself, and then there was even the nurturing years she had to go through and develop and give life to Jesus. We’re a strange species. We take forever to be weaned off of our parents, but imagine all that time of the seed being in Mary and producing life and then finally coming to life and then growing up and becoming who he was those 33-plus years. That’s what we’ve been through up until the time of this wonderful gospel story. We don’t believe in that story enough. We don’t trust in it. We stay too much in the darkness of a night, and yet we know that, when it’s dark, when it’s really terribly painful and we’ve lost hope or something, that’s when a little light just means everything. So this is a time of enlightenment, incarnation, God dwelling in us, creating a space where we are present to him, and he’s present to us. Out of that presence, we become a gift, a present to everyone around us. That’s the mystery of Christmas. That’s the hope of the future.

Father, your gifts are beyond measure, beyond our imagining, yet we find ourselves often caught in a world where they are diminished by fear, shame, anger.Bless us with eyes that see, hearts that are receptive to a presence that changes everything.It’s not up to us to see the truth.It’s up to you to reveal it to us, and all you ask is that we say, “Yes, I believe. I want this gift,” and it is ours. Amen.

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Isaiah 61:1-2A, 10-11 | 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 | John 1:6-8, 19-28

Oh God, who see how your people faithfully await the feast of the Lord’s Nativity, enable us, we pray, to attain the joys of so great a salvation and to celebrate them always with solemn worship and glad rejoicing. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This third Sunday of Advent is always set apart from the other three by one thing, the color pink. The robes that a priest wears for these three or four Sundays is usually a more penitential color thangreen, and so purple is the normal color. But then on this third Sunday, we wear a color that is lighter, filled with light. So something about this Sunday, where we pause from a kind of reflection perhaps on our weaknesses, on our shortcomings and think about something that we often forget, and that is the incredible mystery of God’s incarnation, God becoming one of us, entering into life with us in the person of Jesus and then inviting us to believe with all our heart and with all our mind that he too enters into our life. And the image of God living inside of you as a dynamic presence is so essential if you’re going to enter into the kingdom, because without it, we’re left with nothing other than our own efforts, our own struggle with darkness.

So let’s look at this set of readings, because each one of the readings has a message that it resounds in a similar way. It’s saying the same thing. For example, from Isaiah, we’re talking about — he’s talking about something that’s going to happen more fully in the future than it is right now, but there’s a promise coming from God in that God is saying, “I will enlighten you. I will anoint you.” And the anointing is such an interesting image. It’s an empowerment given to a human being that is often described as light or breath, spirit, and it comes into those that are poor, the brokenhearted, those that are feeling captive, imprisoned. And what God is so interested in sharing with us is that this struggle that we have with our weaknesses, our humanity, our sinfulness is something that we’ve struggled with mostly, in the Old Testament, by trying to do it ourselves, that first story of human beings and God together. The Adam and Eve story is all about Adam and Eve being caught in an illusion where they’d rather know what to do and then struggle to do it on their own than to find wisdom, which was the other tree that they could have been — well, that they were destined to eat some day. But they didn’t choose wisdom. They chose rather, “Give us the rules of the game, and then we, as human beings with the consciousness that we have, will do our best to accomplish it. And when we do a really good job, you are going to say to us, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. Welcome into the kingdom. You did it all on your own.’” But here Isaiah is saying, when you’re in that struggle all by yourself, you’re going to find yourself brokenhearted. You’re going to find yourself often captive by longings and needs that you have that you want to satisfy in a way that never produces what it really promises, but we’re kind of imprisoned with them. It’s called addiction. And so this first reading is saying, “Look, rejoice, because what you have to understand is that this God is faithful to you, and his plan is that this work that you’re called to accomplish, the work of evolving and growing into the people that God has called us to be, is something that he will help us with.“

“The one who calls you into a faithful relationship with him,” says St. Paul in Thessalonians, “He will also accomplish it.” Notice the word also. God promises that he’ll enter into our life to be a part of our life in terms of our being able to do the work that we’re called to do, which is the work of transformation from simply a human being on his own or on her own, trying to do the best that you can, into a being that is entitled to, by a gift, not by effort, to be in partnership with this God who says, “I am going to be with you, inside of you, a part of you, and together — together, we’ll accomplish this. Not me doing it for you, not you doing it for yourself, but it’s a partnership.” That’s why there’s a beautiful image in the first reading, from Isaiah, that he’s talking about those who are poor, those who know they can’t do it by themselves, brokenhearted, captive prisoners. What he wants to say is, “I’m coming to you, and I really want to give you something that you could never have. And what I’m asking you to receive is this beautiful, wonderful thing of you being clothed with me.” Imagine God is the clothing around you, the resonance that comes forward from you, filtered through his truth, and you’re wrapped in him, and you’re adorned like a bride, like a princess, this being adorned with a diadem, meaning it’s almost like he’s saying, “You with me inside of you, I am giving you this new authority, this authority of a regal person.” And you know what? He ends it with this beautiful image. “Just like the earth brings forth plants and everything springs up, so will God do this work inside of you. He puts it inside of you like a seed, and then it grows.” And it will grow, as long as you know that seed is there. It’s not dead. It’s bursting with life, and what he’s inviting you into is the kingdom, the kingdom of life and light and hope.

It’s amazing that we so have — I’ll just say for myself. I’ve grown up in a church that told me that, if I would just do my best and if I would work really hard, I would be rewarded, and if I didn’t do enough, if I didn’t work hard enough, I would be rejected by God — rejected, thrown into hell, like in my struggle, if I’m not, he’s going to kill me. When the truth is not that at all. When we’re in a place where we can’t accomplish the things that we know we should, we can’t move from a world of, “I’ll do my best to surrender to a law or a rule, and I’ll follow that rule with all my energy, and I will make myself in a prisoner in the sense of this system of the law. I will deny myself all kinds of things so I can prove that I’m worthy of being loved.” And God is looking at us and saying, “Wait, wait, wait. No, I’ve come to tell you something radically different, but it had to come at a time when your consciousness was evolved enough where you’d understand it.” It was impossible for someone like Adam and Eve to understand that God’s plan was to enter into a place of wisdom where we understand that God and ourselves are going to be so deeply connected that we will accomplish everything together — together. He would enlighten us to see this beautiful companionship, so to speak.

So we begin this church year, as we all do, with thinking about John the Baptist and baptism. So there’s something in baptism that I want to see if I can get to that will help you understand the way in which this partnership is going to work. And this may be hard to understand, but I’m going to do my best, because it’s kind of new stuff that I got from my meditation this morning. It’s exciting. I hope I can convey it, but it goes like this: if the baptism of John is a foreshadowing of what is to come with our redemption, with the coming of God into the world and his dying for us, that changing everything for us, bringing us into a new world and new life, then we must look at what baptism is, because his baptism of John was, as he said, it’s just a kind of baptism just using water as a symbol. But he’s saying that, when the Pharisees and scribes come to him — and you’ve got to imagine that there were always prophets evolving somewhere, coming to light somewhere, this guy saying, “I am the Messiah. I’m the Messiah.” That had to happen all the time, but here’s one that looks like he might be the Messiah. So they go out, and they say, “Are you the one? Your preaching is reaching all these people. Are you the one that we’re supposed to be paying attention to?” And he said, “No, no. I’m not him. I’m not the one. I’m not the prophet. I’m not the Messiah. I’m not Elijah coming back.” Those are all images of what they were waiting for in terms of God coming to them in the way that he always promised he would. No, he said, “I am the one that has come to point to someone. I’m the announcer. I’m the one that says, ‘And now presenting the real thing.’”

And so what is it in baptism that John was trying to symbolize that then finds its fullness in the baptism of Jesus. Okay, I’m going to see if I can do this. It goes like this: baptism is a symbol of death and resurrection. When you were baptized, water wasn’t poured over you. You were always immersed in the darkness of the sea, and so the image is there’s something in this transformation that God has planned for us that demands that something die, that something has to die. And when it realizes that it’s dying, that it has no capacity to raise itself up, one is lifted up out of the water through some kind of mystical power that isn’t in the human being itself but in God only. That’s transformation. It demands a recognition in an honest experience of, “I can’t fix this. I can’t change this. This is killing me. This will destroy me.” And when you’re in that position, you’re saying, “I’m humble. I’m not in charge of my life. I’m not the one who is going to make myself into the person that God wants me to be,” because that’s the ego working. That’s the Adam in all of us. “Tell us the rules and laws. We’ll follow them, and we’ll be saved.” No. It’s much more mysterious. “Make us aware of our vulnerability to dying,” because there is something, in a sense, that can destroy us when we’re relying solely on our own strength, our own power. That’s God’s intention. He intended it to be that way, and we can resist that all along. “I don’t need you, God. I can handle my life. I can be a good mother, a good father. I can be a priest. I can do all of this on my own. In fact, I really like doing it on my own, because then I look at myself, and I say, ‘I, I, I accomplished this growth, this change in me.’” Well, the change we can do on our own is probably not that bad but doesn’t go nearly deep enough into what needs to be transformed, what needs to die. What needs to die is autonomy, our desire to do it on our own, to be the one that is the source of all that I do that is good.

The one thing that God does ask us to do, and we have to surrender, which is kind of interesting, is our own death. And to be around people that have gone through this phase of their last moments on this earth, one of the things about the priesthood or anybody’s ministry or those who work in hospitals, there is such an awesome gift of being around people who are dying, especially when we see two kinds of death, the one that’s angry and resentful and stressful and then the one who surrenders, just gives in. “I can’t continue my life on my own strength. I have to give in. This is bigger than I am.” If we could just realize, that’s the model of the effectiveness of baptism, to say, “I am being held under water, and I will die unless I’m lifted out of this.” And the being lifted out of it is the image of being anointed, filled with Spirit, filled with light, filled with the capacity to go beyond our human nature.

So I see in this baptism of John then a real foretaste of what it is that the New Testament is engaging us in, and it’s this mysterious, intimate relationship with the incarnate God. And I say the incarnate God, because he lived in human beings first in Jesus, and so when we think of God living in us, we often say at the same time, “So does the Spirit live in me. So does Jesus live in me, so I am like him.” And what Jesus did is he surrendered with all the power he had as a God, in a way, though he was 100 percent human. But he surrendered to the fact that he could not change the way the world was, in terms of its desire to reject him and destroy him, and he went ahead and let them do that, which meant he gave up all shreds of his ego and all shreds of wanting things to be the way he wanted them to be. He surrendered to a thing that didn’t seem to make sense to his ego or his human nature. “I have to surrender to my enemy in order to conquer my enemy, in order to overpower them.” It’s all in that mystery of forgiveness, acceptance, surrender. When one person does it, everybody benefits. So when you think about what are we here on this planet to accomplish, it’s not perfection in some kind of sense that the world or ego might see perfection. No, it’s in going through this very simple, powerful experience of surrendering to a reality that we are not enough to make this world into what it’s intended to be. We have to do it with God as a partner, and we die to that in baptism.

So what, in a sense, John was then saying is, “Baptism that I’m doing is water. The baptism that’s going to come with Jesus is a breath of life and Spirit and energy and power. “ That’s what we should be happy about, joyful about. It’s our gift, and it’s a gift that is life.

Father, your intention is that we live a joyous life.Yes, we struggle.There’s pain.There’s suffering.There’s letting go of things that we try so hard to cling onto, but your promise is that you’re there with us to enable us to go through this process, and on the other side of it, we find such peace, such joy.As we surrender to all that is, we just accept our reality in knowing, in surrendering to that, trusting through that, growing because of that, we enter as fully as possible into the kingdom while we still live here.Fill us with this joy and this peace, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11 | 2 Peter 3:8-14 | Mark 1:1-8

Almighty and merciful God, may no earthly undertaking hinder those who set out in haste to meet your Son, that may our learning of heavenly wisdom grant us abundance of life and admittance into his company through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

I love that image of wonder and wander, because it seems to me that, in the journey that you and I are invited into, we are always being asked to make a decision about what is happening to us. How do we read it? How do we think about it? And one of the mistakes that so often we make is that we’re looking for nice, clean, clear answers or nice, easy steps. Do this, then this happens, and that happens. You and I know that life is made up of a promise that God has made to us, that he’s going to take us to a place, and he promises to feed us, to gather us, to carry us, to lead us, to be a shepherd for us. And the most difficult part of that is that, when he promises that he will lead us and take care of us, the one thing he’s asking us to surrender to is a thing called suffering — suffering.

So it seems that this first reading in this set of readings is saying, “Okay, I want you who are suffering to receive something.” Jerusalem was suffering because of their sins. Suffering means you’re going through something painful, and the one thing about suffering is that it is something that is natural to human nature. When something’s not right, something’s not going well, we feel pain, we feel uneasy, we’re not sure, and we get anxious and sometimes filled with too much shame, because maybe we caused it, or fear that it’s never going to get better. This first reading is talking about comforting people who are going through suffering, and what is the nature of suffering? The nature of suffering is not just that you are in pain, but it’s that you are called to surrender to it, to accept it and to grow from it. And what this set of readings is pointing out is that there is this process we’re going through. It’s very mysterious. It’s only the mystic in us can really understand it when we surrender to something we can’t fully figure out with our brains but we kind of feel or sense or know inside, “Yeah, this makes sense.” And the suffering we go through is the constant, slow exposure of everything that is negative and everything that is a lie and all that it creates in terms of pain, and you’d say to God, “God, why would you allow us to go through all this suffering? Why can’t you just give us the way to live? Why don’t you just tell us? Give us the energy we need to do what’s right.”

There’s a lot of us out there that have thought about religion as a way of saying, “Okay, God, make me perfect. I want you to give me everything I need so that I will stop being imperfect, a sinner, a mistake-maker.” Well, he’s not going to step into your life and make you into something you’re not as a kind of gift, like poof. No, he trusts in something inside human nature that is we don’t want to be given something as much. We want to work for it, but the thing we forget is working for it is not something on our own. It’s something that God promises that he’s going to do with us. He promises that. “We’ll do this together. I’ll be in you. You’ll be in me. We’re going to be into this incredible, interesting journey. It’s going through all the sufferings, the joys, the pain, all that in life, and somehow, as dark as it gets or as good as it gets, I’m going to be there to keep you level, to keep you grounded, to keep you authentic.” It’s the road that is talked about in that first reading. The deep valleys, it’s going to make them level. The high peaks that are too high to reach, he’s going to lower that. We’re going to be on this path, and the path is God’s incredibly intense desire to enter into your life and mine and feed us and gather us and carry us and lead us to a kingdom. And the kingdom is truth and authenticity.

And the suffering that we go through is really interesting, because without it, we couldn’t grow, because suffering engages us, yes, into something that we’re looking at that’s difficult, but what it demands is developing acceptance. When I ask God, “Please help get me through this situation,” the first thing my brain says, “Yeah, take it away. Stop the pandemic tomorrow. We’re tired of working with this thing that seems to be so debilitating for us in terms of who we are and how we like to live. Take it away. Take it away.” And he’s saying, “No, I’ll take it away when it’s time, but what I want you to learn, what to do is to accept it. Accept it as this is the way it is right now. This is where it is, and we have to go with that, stay with that.” Some people want to say, “Well, this is there, because we’re being punished.” No. This is there, because we need to grow. Yes, how do we grow going through something that we don’t like? By surrendering to it and believing there is something in it for us. Something in it is going to be a gift. How do you believe that? That’s so hard. Think of your own wound, that thing inside of every human being that is just, “If I could just get rid of that, if I just didn’t have this one problem, this one addiction, this one desire for something I know is wrong, but I keep going back to it all the time, hoping it’s going to produce goodness, and it never does. And then I’m angry, and I feel shame, and then I go back to it again, over and over again.” That’s the world we sometimes find ourselves living in and can be very pessimistic about and say, “Well, I never get better, and nothing ever really works.”

Well, here’s the thing. The promise of Advent is the coming of God into your life, into my life. He’s going to be there. He’s going to be there in a way beyond our imagining, and here’s his promise. We’re living in a world of time, and as time continues to move on, we are going to grow in our understanding of the insanity of lies and illusions, because we keep going back to them, and they never really give us what we think they can. We put our promise in something that is not healthy, and we think it’s going to work, and it never does. And so the way in which the evolution of our species continues to go is that everything hidden, every lie that we’ve ever been engaged in is going to be revealed for what it is. Everything will be shown for what it is. What an amazing, interesting way of imagining salvation. Every lie, every illusion, everything that we get caught up in, greed — think of all the major sins. Envy, greed, selfishness, using people, we choose those, because we think they’re good. We think we’re going to get something, and it’s so painful to go through the experience of knowing we’ve been choosing things that are devastating to ourselves and others. We have to face that’s what we’ve done. That’s the suffering, and if we can accept that, stay with that, believe we’re forgiven for that but don’t diminish what it is but understand it and feel the regret that comes with repentance, that’s the gift. That’s the work.

So let me go through these four things I mentioned earlier about the work of God in your life and in mine, and if we are aware of what that means, it means that God has direct contact with you and me inside of our hearts. We don’t have to go to some authority outside of us. Those authorities are valuable and helpful, but we have it inside of us, the thing that you know that you know. It’s not because you’ve been told it, but you know it. That’s called full awareness, consciousness, and here’s what we need to be aware of, fully conscious of: in this journey on this earth, we are in a process of evolving into something more than we could ever be on our own. God is in us to help us on this process. My homilies that I give you every week, what am I trying to do? I’m trying to open you to the fullness of who God is in you.

It’s interesting. I was driving here this morning. I was imagining that — I was struggling with what I was going to say today, as I always do, driving down Grand Avenue to Fair Park, where I do this recording, and I’m thinking, “God, I wish this was clearer in my head, because I think I know what I want to say, but I’m not quite sure.” Then I thought to myself, “You’ve been doing this for 33 years. All you’ve got to — go back in your files and pick out what you said three years ago or six years ago or nine years ago on this same Sunday and just re-read it.” And I thought — I started laughing to myself. I’ve never, ever thought of doing that. What does that mean? That means that whatever I said back then was where I was then. What I’m saying now to you today is where I am now. I’m not the same person I was three, six, nine years ago. Nor are you. Nor is the world the same. So what I’m saying about that is there’s a way to go back to these images that we have in our faith life and reevaluate them over and over again in light of who we are now and what we’re going through and believe with all our hearts that this God is now working with you as you are now in the context of the world we’re living in now.

Three years ago, the word pandemic didn’t mean very much to me. Three years ago, I took advantage that I could go anywhere, travel anywhere, be with anybody I wanted, and that’s gone for a while. There’s hope on the horizon, yes. A vaccine is coming, thank God, but have you been fighting that? Have you been angry at that, or have you been surrendering to it? Have you suffered it? Have you suffered this whole thing by saying, “I don’t understand why this has to happen, but I believe that, if I can accept it, not resist it, not be angry over it or blame someone for it, if I can just give in to it, there’s going to be life on the other side of it”?

Here’s the way I want to use these images of the Good Shepherd, because that’s who’s coming. He comes to give us a gift in baptism. The baptism is the promise that God is going to overlook all of our sins and enter into us with the hope that, if he can show us our sins for what they are, we will change. We will grow with his help. That’s the promise, and so when I use these four words — he feeds us, he gathers us, he carries us, he leads us. I’m going to try it this way. The feeding is the world you and I are in and the person we are, our life. He feeds you this mysterious, mystical thing that existed before you were on this earth and will continue after you are on this earth, this thing that you are and I am. We’ve been fed with a story from our ancestors. We’ve been fed with a way of seeing from our parents. We’ve been fed by religion that we’ve lived with. We have all of these things being given to us, and that’s what is ours. And it needs to be embraced and accepted, suffered. When I think about resisting who I am because of what happened to me, and I hate that part of me, and I hate the people that made me into less than I am or all that stuff. That gets us nowhere. No, we have to see every single thing in our ancestors, everything in my family of origin, everything that’s happened to me between the day I was conscious and today, every abuse, every gift, everything, both ways, that’s our food. So accept it. Suffer it. Take it in, because he’s going to gather us. And the gathering is the circle of friends that we’re in right now, the people he’s given to us to share our life with, the people that now feed us and challenge us and irritate us and please us. So we have to realize, “Okay, I have a history that has been given to me to incorporate into my life, and it’s been given to me so I can share the wisdom that it is for me in the circle I have.” So we’re always in community, and then he carries us. And carrying us means that he is there as a way of being able to accomplish this, but he’s not doing it for us. He’s being there when it’s too much. He steps in and somehow gives us a strength we never, never imagined having. So he carries us only when we are almost completely exhausted, when there’s no breath left in us. When there’s no chance for us to say, “I can’t do this anymore,” he’ll pick us up and say something, give us something that keeps us going. And then he leads us, and what’s he leading us to? Life, the kingdom, peace, beauty, love all comes through suffering. That’s what he wants. That’s our inheritance.

And so we’re looking at this season called Advent. It’s about the coming of something into the world that was never here before. You and I live in the New Testament. Billions of people lived before that, but here we are in the world we’re in. And God did the same thing for those in the past that he’s doing for us now, but the comfort we have now is so different than what they had. And if you don’t believe in this mystical union that is our inheritance, if you don’t believe that there’s a gift given to us so we can understand and see how we’ve been fed and how we’ve been given friends to share what we’ve learned and been taught and that is there, when we really fail, and that he wants us to get to the place that he always promises we can get to: wholeness, holiness, peace, joy. It’s our inheritance, and to not realize that that is our gift that’s coming to us, we will not enter into the season as we’re intended to. We’ll still stay on the peripheral, on the outside, wondering, “Why, why, why. Take it away. I can’t stand it. Change things.” No, it’s all perfect. It’s all the way it is supposed to be. Surrender, surrender. Suffer, suffer. Accept. It sounds so easy in a way, and I just know how hard that is. And if you just know that that’s the way he’s working with you, and then you can maybe go back and say, “Well, this part of it I don’t like. I don’t want to be around a lot of people. I don’t want to share what I’ve learned, or I don’t want to learn from other people. I don’t want to give them what God has given me. I don’t believe he’s going to pick me up and help me when it’s too much. I don’t really know if I understand the goal.” That’s where we need to work. That’s what we need to do. That’s the challenge of Advent.

That last piece of music, Lord, is powerfully representing what you long for us to see.The great song, the great gift, the great life force that has come into the world is that you have become one of us, and becoming one of us, you become intimately connected to us in a way that was never possible before.Help us to feel the enthusiasm that your presence brings to us, and take away the negativity that we get caught up in and the fear and the shame that keep us from recognizing the beauty of this life you’ve created.You in us, we in you, being able to share that with one another, it is truly a marvelous and exciting coming into our world of a grace that was not there before.And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Isaiah 63:16B-17, 19B; 64:2-7 | 1 Corinthians 1:3-9 | Mark 13:33-37

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming so that, gathered at his right hand, they may be worthy to access the heavenly kingdom. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We begin a new church year, a new focus, and the focus is on the Gospel of Mark, and as we begin this season, we’re probably used to hearing a gospel that is about the coming of Jesus and John the Baptist preparing his way, and he says something like, “Prepare the way. The Lord is coming. The Lord is coming.” That’s always been the image of this great season of Advent. It’s about coming. It’s about something arriving, something we’ve longed for, something we’ve needed, a Savior, a God person who became human and is like us and able to reach us and awaken us to the truth. We’re longing for the truth, and Jesus is the key, which is another way to say that humanity and divinity together is the key to finding life. But in this gospel, we have a story that is clearly important for you to understand, when it comes to being given this command here, which is be watchful, be alert, pay attention.

And the context of this is, when Jesus is with his disciples, he’s showing them the temple, magnificent temple that took 80 years to build, and Jesus made a prediction about this glorious temple, and he said, “I will destroy it. I will replace it with something else.” Of course what he was talking about is this place, the temple, was the image of the power of the religion of the Old Testament, which had lost its way, which had become a kind of control of people’s behavior by focusing primarily on the law and then on justice. “You do what I tell you to do. You work up the energy and the power to follow the rules, and then I will give you a reward, and you will be able to step back and say, ‘I, I, I won my salvation by doing exactly what I was asked to do.’” There’s a way in which this religion of the Old Testament, by the time Jesus came, was so distorted from what it was that it was — because it was doing nothing but feeding the ego, feeding the ego, and just think of this temple, then, as a monument to the human ego. It’s a great gold dome. It’s a gigantic, beautiful temple, and the disciples are just marveling at it. They just say, “Wow, it’s such a gorgeous place.” And when Jesus said, “I’m going to destroy it,” and literally, it was finished — as I said, it took 80 years to build, and within seven years after it was completed, the Romans came and completely destroyed it. A fire was set inside of it, and this fire was then melting the gold dome that was so famous and awesome and a sign of worldly power and the ego. And the reason there was nothing left of the temple was because the gold melted into all the stones, and so they mined gold out of all those stones. There was not a stone left upon a stone, as it was predicted, and what is all that about?

It’s about what Jesus came to correct. It was about a way of seeing yourself and the world and God and understanding something that could not be explained by people being told what to do and using fear as the motive for making them into who they felt they had been able to create themselves, into something really powerful. Think of it. It’s the most classic problem of human nature. There’s kind of two of us. You look at — people look in the mirror, or you hear somebody say, “I can’t stand myself. I don’t like myself.” Eckhart Tolle has made a kind of — he started a book called The Power of Now about all that, and he just said, “When I was so depressed and so discouraged about who I am, I was so unfulfilled. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I said, ‘I hate myself.’” And he said, “Well, who is the I, and who is the myself?” And the I was his true self, the thing that God has created us to be, dependent upon something outside of ourselves to be living inside of us and coming inside of us and changing our very nature in the sense of moving it from an egocentric, mind-centered world to the world of the heart, to the world of indwelling presence, to the world of God living inside of us. That’s the thing that we need to be aware of. When we are forcing ourselves, because of the pressure around us, to become someone, and that someone that we’ve created is not who we are, there’s symptoms that we should pay attention to. The symptoms are fear, shame, excessive anger, and where do those come from? They come from deep within the human spirit that is made for something other than being in control of who we are, being forced to be something that other people will promise us that, if we do what they tell us to do or to be, we’ll be accepted, we’ll be honored, we’ll be lifted up, we’ll become important.

So funny that fame, in the eyes of the world, is the most elusive, unfulfilling thing there is. In fact, it has a real negative impact. You look at people that win the Olympics, and the suicide rate among those people is staggering, because what do you do after you’re the best? “All right, I am now the best in the world.” Then what? There’s nothing else to do if that’s your goal, to be the best. And what is the best? Well, the best is what people around you say you ought to be, and somehow there is this image around us. It’s in us. Human beings respond very positively to somebody who’s evolved and developed and done their craft so beautifully. Yes, we do honor that, but that’s not what connects us. In fact, that separates us. To be around the perfect one, and you’re the imperfect one, is not going to draw you into a relationship with them. But the real challenge is not to be better than other people, which the ego loves, not to be the tallest, most powerful building in the world with a gigantic gold dome that everybody is in awe of. That’s the ego world. No, but the other world, the other world is what we’re made for. I swear, when I read this gospel, it’s so clear when I hear the words, “Be attentive. Pay attention.” It’s talking about consciousness, that I talk about all the time. Consciousness is an awareness of the world as it is, human nature as it is. In that first reading from the Old Testament, a beautiful image of our ego out of control, and the author of that passage is saying there is something in all of us that is just not destined to be anything other than a kind of destructive, empty, mold, rotten — what is it, rotten rags? The image — there’s something in us that, when the ego is in control, there’s nothing that attractive about us, because we are standing in front of everybody saying, “Look at me. Look at what I’ve achieved. I am the best.” And that’s an abomination, in a way, meaning it’s a complete caricature of who God has created us to be.

There’s a beautiful line attributed to Saint Bonaventure. It says that the reason God created human beings is because he was lonely, which means he wants a relationship with us. That’s all Bonaventure is really trying to say. He’s not really saying God was sitting around saying, “I’m miserable.” No, he’s just using that image of saying that there is something within God’s nature that longs to be connected to everything he creates but, most especially, the thing that is like him. He wants a relationship with us, but he will not force himself. He will not push himself into us, but this author of the first reading is saying, “Why don’t you do something to get our attention? When we separate from you, when we’re working out of our ego, we’re a disaster, a disaster, separation from our destiny. We’re miserable. So come on down and do some magic, wonderful, powerful thing and slap us around and get us to trust in you.” And you often wonder why God doesn’t manifest himself more often like that. Why doesn’t he? Because he wants you and me to figure this out. He wants us to grow up, to be conscious of who we are and make a free decision that, “I want God in my heart, in my life. And I need an ego to get around the world, but I will not feed the ego in a way that it is designed to be fed to become the source of everything.” It’s weird. It’s almost like you have this person living inside of you who wants to be the best and wants to be honored and wants to be the center of attention or wants to be the most — the smartest man in the room or the most cautious man in the room or the most — all the different personality types we have. You can narrow them down to — the shadow of every one of them is when it wants to become the center, and what is in the center? Really, what’s in the center? It’s our heart. The heart is the essence of who we are, and the heart is made to be a container of a presence, of a God who said, “If I could just befriend you and you would befriend me, we would be in a relationship where we would work together, and I will lead you into a place that frees you from excessive fear that the world is not —”

Fear is something terrible is going to happen to us. Well, if we’re relying upon our ego, we know that there’s always going to be somebody better. It’s so fragile. There’s nothing there to hang onto, so yes, there’s going to be a lot of fear, and because you’re not really who you know you should be, there’s a lot of shame. And then there’s a lot of anger, because there’s something wrong, because you can’t find any kind of satisfaction. Those are all the signs of an egocentric human being, and the frightening thing to me is, when you’re caught in that and you don’t realize that there’s another way to live, there’s another way out of that, what you end up being caught up in is a very destructive way of life, and it leads to suicide. And it’s so interesting to me. When the world gets really crazy and starts honoring nothing but the ego — and we’re in a world like that. We’re in a world that honors people powerful to the extent that they get things done, even if it cost lives of people or threatens their well-being, people that are so drawn to their positions of authority and power that they forget about the ordinary needs of a human being. We’re living in a kind of world like that, and the more that world is exposed, we begin to be afraid. And that’s when we should turn to something more, more life-giving, authenticity, our truth, who we are, God living inside of us, each of us knowing we have a responsibility to take care of people. Why is it so hard for the ego to realize the core is to take care of another, not self? But it is so self-driven, and all that we’re invited to do, it seems to me — because we are made in God’s image, he’s created us this way, and he’s going to work with us. And I believe with all my heart, when he promises that he is going to get to all of us somehow, he’s going to save all of us by opening us up to the relationship that we’re made for, his presence living inside of us, balancing our ego and our hearts so that we are strong and effective in many ways but also always with something like the focus is for the good of others. And whenever you do what’s best for others, you’ve done the absolute best thing for yourself — so simple, so clear.

So being watchful, being attentive is really the challenge, and how do you do it? How do you become attentive? Well, you live in the present moment, meaning you live in an awareness of what’s really going on. Human nature is amazing if you just slow down and step back and try to look at it as it is, and that prayer to God, “God, show me how I am.” We pray to God for that. We pray to the deceased for that. “Show us what you know.” We ask angels, “Show us what you can do for us. You are our connection with God. Show us. Reveal it to us.” That prayer is always answered, and yet do we ask for it? Well, it seems that, when we don’t, there’s something that’s going to destroy us, and if your life is built upon the power of the ego, the power of the mind, it’s going to be destroyed. And the scary thing, when I was talking about depression that comes when there’s too much anger, especially too much shame, it leads to suicide, and the second largest cause, the second greatest cause of death between people aged 10 and age 32 is suicide. The first, accident, then suicide, then homicide, but think of it. Why would anybody, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 years old take their life? It would have to be that whatever is presented to them is life is so frightening and so unattractive on some deep, deep, deep level. They say, “I just don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be in a world that focuses only on the ego. I want to be in a world where I want to be with God. I want to be free of this.” It’s amazing, the human drive and longing for truth. It’s so real, and if you just pay attention to it inside of you and connect with it, you will find life. You’ll find a new life coming. Advent means coming, and we pray for that new life now.

Father, our nature, our loving nature is a reflection of who you are, yet we are able to create another world, another person, another way of being in the world, and it’s what you’re here to help us see and to free ourselves of that.But to choose it ourselves, to be authentic to who you’ve created us to be, that’s the gift.And that authenticity is a connecting with you that is so life-giving, yet the ego thinks we should do it on our own.So bless us with being alert to this very, very important way of seeing ourselves in the world and you, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Ezekiel 34:11-12, 15-17 | 1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 28 | Matthew 25:31-46

Almighty everliving God whose will is to restore all things in your beloved Son, the King of the universe, grant, we pray, that the whole creation set free from slavery of sin may render your majestic service and ceaselessly proclaim your praise. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

I feel like a professor who is now having his last class with his students at the end of a long semester of studying one particular aspect of Christianity, and what we’ve been studying these last twelve months is the gospel of St. Matthew. So we’re finished with it, and one of the things that it ends with is a very hopeful note, in a sense, if you pay attention primarily to the second reading, because it’s about Paul’s understanding of what Jesus actually brought into the world: hope, forgiveness, compassion. He’s basically saying that what’s happened is God has come into the world, or Jesus has come into the world as God incarnate and is there to save us, to save his sheep, to tend them, to care for them. And what we all struggle with as sheep following our master is sin, this thing that came into the world, we say, through Adam, but Jesus has come to free us from sin. That’s what the cross is so clearly in our tradition as Roman Catholics and as all Christians. The cross is our hope, our hope for the future, because it means that every sin we’ve ever committed has been taken on by this figure, God/man, and he says, “I will take the punishment that is due to you. I will take it on myself, and I will destroy the negativity of sin in your life, and I will free you from it.”

It’s a powerful, beautiful image, and so what it’s also saying is what Paul is realizing is that there’s going to come a time, when the work of Jesus, who came to free us from sin, when finally sin is completely subjected to him and no longer is sin necessary, because it’s done its work, because — the interesting thing about our relationship with God is our struggle with sin, and God has allowed sin to be present in the world, because it has a very, very crucial purpose and reason for being there. It’s what we deal with in order to evolve and grow into a much higher consciousness, more like God the Father who created us. We’re on this journey of struggling with our darkness as we continue to move into the light, and the more the darkness is exposed, the more light comes in. The more we admit the darkness that is in us, the more likely God is able to infuse it with light and transform it.

So there’s a hopeful thing in this second reading, so beautiful that we are on a journey, and basically the world is getting better. I believe that with all my heart, yet we live in a time of such amazing exposure to everything that’s dark. It’s like the underside of everything is being turned over, and we’re looking at sin in situations and places we never expected it to be. We had a kind of naive, at least I did, a very naive notion that there is good institutions and bad one, there’s good people and bad people, good institutions only do good, bad institutions only do bad. That oversimplification that I came into the world with, most of us come into the world with — good people do good things; bad people do bad things. A good person doesn’t do bad things, and a bad person doesn’t do good things. That’s what I thought but — this may be a silly thing to bring up, but I remember, in 1967 when I was ordained, and the oil on my hand was still moist from my ordination, and I watched a film in 1967 that came out, and it was the story of Bonnie and Clyde. It seems silly to say this, but I remember, in that film, I was shocked by my compassion and my feeling for the relationship that Bonnie and Clyde were struggling to have as people that loved each other. I had to shake myself and say, “What am I doing? These are horrible, murderous, unfeeling, terrible people, and I feel sorry for them? I have compassion for their relationship?” I thought, “That’s weird,” but I think what it was is I was already — I was so freshly infused in my ordination with this sense of who God really is. I didn’t really — I’ve grown into it, I think, over the years, but all of a sudden, what I was realizing was our God is a God of compassion, not judgment only but compassion and judgment. And the two always have to go together, mercy and justice, and they seem, when you’re oversimplifying things, they seem to be contradictory, the opposite. In fact, many times you’ll find that you’ll come to the truth when you look at two opposites that you think do not really work at all together, because they’re completely opposite, and you find out they were perfectly made for each other. Without justice, we’re kind of mushy, emotional people. Without mercy, we are violent demanders of justice and destruction for those who do evil.

So the danger to me, in this set of readings, is the gospel, because it seems at the end, instead of the more hopeful thing we see in St. Paul, in this particular passage, it seems like what God is going to do, when he comes at the end, is not to finally destroy evil but to destroy evil people. And so we have this image of the final thing that Jesus does for the world is come into it and separate all bad people from all good people, and all the good people go to heaven; all the bad people he takes some delight in putting them in a place of destruction. And there’s a reference to these kind of people in the first reading when we see — the first reading is all about compassion in Jesus, manifested in Jesus. It’s God’s compassion, but look at this first reading in light of the gospel and see if I can’t come up with something balanced, because the first reading seems to be all about mercy and the gospel all about justice. Yet the two, as I say, are perfectly matched, because justice makes clear what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s life-giving and what’s death-dealing. It’s focus is on the action itself, but compassion, it relates to the person, the individual struggling between right and wrong, good and evil. And we know all of us are susceptible to evil. All of us are sinners. That’s the understanding that we have from the ministry of Jesus. He comes, and he said, “The only people I want to talk to in this room are people who will admit their sinners.” So he talks to sinners. What does he say to them? “I love you.” And then I love the way in which Jesus is the incarnation of this first reading from Ezekiel when it says that — when God says, “I, myself will come and take care of my sheep, and when they have made mistakes, when their life is somehow filled with darkness and confusion, I’ll come and take care of them. And when they’re lost in their self-centeredness, I will seek them out. When they’ve strayed from who they really are, I’ll bring them back. When they’re injured by whoever has defended them or done something wrong to them in their past, I’ll heal that, but if you don’t admit that you have these weaknesses, if you don’t admit that you are in need of my compassion and my grace, then you consider yourself sleek and strong, and you will be destroyed, not by me, not by my choice. I don’t want to destroy anybody. I don’t want to lose anything that God has given me, but if you choose to turn away from everything that you are intended to become, if you deny your birthright of being a compassionate, loving creature, reflected in the Father that created you, if you say, ‘I will not accept any of that,’ then no, you will self-destruct. You will end up never finding life.” And does that kind of person exist? I suppose, because if we’re free to make any decision we want, it’s conceivable that then somebody could say, “I choose death.” But God is not going to look at a sinner and say, “I choose to destroy you, because you have failed me.” How can he do that? Justice works so beautifully with the mind, because the mind is much more binary. It’s like good things/bad things, right things/wrong things. It’s clear. Destroy the wrong, and reward the right. It’s frightening to me that some people can live that way, judging themselves that way and judging others that way, and they live either a miserable life, or they repress everything negative in themselves or in the people they think are good, the institutions they think are good, and they say, “Well, there’s nothing imperfect in this.” They think perfection is what God’s looking for. God doesn’t look for perfection. He looks for a hungry, longing heart to evolve and grow into who they’re intended to be, and that means facing their darkness and their shadows and looking at them and naming them for what they are. And when they see the danger and the destruction that is in those things and they can feel it and sense it, they’ll change. They don’t need to be kicked out. They don’t need to be destroyed.

How many times, when we listen to a story about somebody that we respected and loved for a long time, and we find out that they have this shadow, this darkness inside of them, whether it’s using their position of authority and power to feed themselves only or whether they’re abusing someone? Does that mean that everything about them is evil, and that means that, if they’ve made mistakes, that there’s nothing they’ve done that’s good? How many times have you heard of a story of someone who has a dark side, and yet you’ve seen them do such wonderful things? You’ve seen them be effective. You’ve seen them loving people, supporting people, giving people. What is it like for a child to find out their parent maybe has this dark side to them? Does that mean that everything the parent has done for that child is worthless, valueless, that they have to say now, “I’ve never had a father that loved me, because he has this problem”? No, that would be too much justice. What you have to understand is, when a person makes mistakes, if we understand human nature well enough, it’s because of weakness mostly, not because of intention, or it’s because of confusion, not because of clarity of thought. And most people, when they do something wrong, do not say they — they do not feel in the moment they’re doing something wrong, or they camouflage it with something else. And that doesn’t mean that they haven’t done something destructive and wrong, but it means that they’re not evil-to-the-core people. You can’t write people off because they’ve made mistakes. At the same time, you can’t make mistakes not seem important.

So that’s the difficulty of this human nature that God has given us. How do we work with these two things other than to say, “All right, I cannot be a follower of Christ unless I understand justice, and I understand what is right and what is wrong. I cant’ be a follower of Jesus unless I don’t work just out of my mind and in a binary way, but I have to be filled with something that only comes from the heart and is not judgmental, and it’s understanding, and it’s compassion”? When sin is committed, there are two victims, in a sense, the person who’s done the act and the person who’s received the negative impact of the act. They both need compassion, but it’s so rare that you find the person who was the victim having the compassion for the abuser. It’s so rare, and yet it was a — I think you might remember a court scene in Dallas where a young man whose brother was murdered by this person accused of the murder, he embraces her at the end of the trial, and it sends a chill through everybody, because it’s saying there is this possibility of reconciliation with human nature, which is imperfect. And in a way, when you embrace a person who has done something wrong, you’re embracing the human condition, which means we are all sinners.

So in this great solemnity of a King who has come to free us from evil, one of the ways in which it’s done is by changing our attitudes and evolving us into more both just people and compassionate people. It’s the perfect blend of what it is to be human and what it is to be a follower of a God who is filled with both but most especially who shines as a King of the world because of his compassion.

Father, your life is within each of us.It’s our gift, and when we manifest it as it is, we are building your kingdom.Help us to be always filled with both an understanding of right and wrong but at the same time a deep, deep compassion for our human nature, our struggle with evil and knowing that somehow, in your divine plan, we are moving, growing, becoming more and more who we should be.And as it’s revealed where we fail, keep us hopeful that every revelation of the destructiveness of evil leads people more and more to turn to the right, good, loving thing, and we ask this in Jesus’ name.

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Proverbs 31:10-13, 19-20, 30-31 | 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6 | Matthew 25:14-30

Grant us, we pray, oh, Lord our God, the constant gladness of being devoted to you, for it is full and lasting happiness to serve with constancy the author of all that is good. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

As I’ve mentioned often to you, we’re at the very end of a church year. In other words, we’re finishing up a whole reflection on this beautiful gospel of Matthew, and as we get closer to the end, we’re focusing on what should be the impact of this work, what should be happening within us. If we paid attention, if we’ve opened our hearts to the mystery of what this man, Matthew, is trying to share with us, we’ll come to understanding something, and the understanding we’re looking for, it seems to me clearly, from this set of readings, is we’re looking carefully at who are we. Who are we as a people? Who are you? Who am I? What’s our essence?

And if I look at these set of readings, it’s interesting. You’ll see that the first one gives us an image, first of all, that there is this way that God speaks about who we are, when he says, “I want to marry you. I want to be with you. I want you to have a relationship of me of intimacy.” So what we know somehow is that we are children of our Father, and that Father wants a union with us that he compares to marriage, which means it goes well beyond parent to child but more person-to-person, God to us as an adult. So we are a people who are connected to God, married to him. Listen to the images that are in that first reading. We see a man who is married, and the man is married to a woman, and she is a great joy to him. She is the image of who we are to become, and so what does she do? She has two things that she does for her husband. She makes material. She creates warmth, comfort for him, and then also she reaches out to the poor and the needy. And so her praises, her song is not that it’s her body, her beauty, but it’s her actions, her motives, her intentions. She gives warmth, and she gives some kind of wonderful care, nurturing, a beautiful image of who God — when God marries us, what he’s expecting to see happen to us because of our union with him is we become more like him. We are children of our Father. We are made to be like him, and marriage is a beautiful image of the way in which he’d like us to imagine we have a relationship with him, one of intimacy. And out of that image comes a quality of warmth and service.

Then in the next reading, we see Paul talking about who we are also, and he’s talking about we’re not people of darkness. We’re not people of depression and darkness and sin. That’s not our nature. No, what we’re made for is light. We are made to be enlightened. So we have an image of we are basically children of our Father, but we’re called to be like Christ. Christ is the anointed one. What was he anointed with? A human being in one sense, filled so much with this anointing, enlightenment that he saw so much and understood so much as a human being, because he had within himself this incredible talent, this incredible gift that was that he could see his relationship with God, understand it and know that God was living inside of him. And everything that Jesus was able to do, he made clear, was not he alone who did it. It was his Father within him enabling him to do it, and so we see the other image is that we are children of the Father, but we’re also called to be like the Son. And the Son is this amazing figure that is filled with this capacity to heal and to bring life to people. And what is it based in? It’s based in the fact that God has promised to live within this figure Jesus to such an extent that Jesus is God. For us, it is like that but not the same. We don’t become God. We become like Jesus, anointed with what? Mysterious talent of bringing life to another person.

So then we go to the gospel, such a fascinating parable. One of the things I love about parables is how they are so filled with multiple layers of meaning. I can go back to a parable year after year after year and still come out with something I never saw before, but there’s something really beautiful about this particular parable about this relationship that we have with God that empowers us to be a source of life for the people around us. And that gift of indwelling presence is given to people in different levels and different ways. So let’s just imagine that there are three groups. Some groups of people are given all kinds of amazing gifts, and they realize it, and they have a lot of talent. And what do you think of — talent in this image is money. It’s a form of money. So what that might mean is — if I think about what is money, what does money give you? What does it do? Prestige, importance somewhat, but the real thing that money is, is energy. If you have unlimited funds and you want to do something, having that kind of energy is a resource that will achieve all kinds of things. So let’s just say talents, in the form of money, is energy. So this parable is about God sharing his presence, his energy in another human being, and to some, he gives them amazing talent. But the clear image is that this God figure in this parable is the owner who leaves his servants in charge of something, and the thing that he gives them is the energy to fulfill the obligation, and their obligation is to make it work for others. And so the one who receives a great deal of talent goes off and makes a great deal more. So let’s just say that he took the gifts that he had. He shares them with people, and as he shares them, they became even more. He became more gifted, more enlightened, and then the next one was similar. He has, let’s say, an average amount of talent. He has two talents. He does the same thing. He takes those two talents. He believes he has them. He knows he has them. They give him confidence, and he goes out and makes two more. Living the life that God has called him to be, he becomes more what that is — that very thing that he is intended to be. The more you have, the more is given to you, but then we get to the real issue of this parable. The real focus is this last person, who isn’t that talented. He didn’t get that much. I think it’s just fascinating. I never thought of it before, but it would be probably harder for this last person to believe that the talent was enough to be really successful, so he was really worried about whether or not he would be able to do whatever he was called to do to make this grow and become, which would be living it out, doing the things that God called him to do, saying the things that he was given as an insight to share. He didn’t believe in it. He didn’t believe they were that good perhaps, and he worried about something else. He worried about the way in which it might work, the way it might go, and what if he fails? So he was a fearful person. He thought, “Well, what if I get in trouble?” All of us that have gifts from God often worry about, if we have an insight that seems new and different, we’re afraid to speak it, because we’re liable to be looked at as some kind of crazy person or something, and we don’t have confidence in what’s just been given. So we sort of bury it. We just open — we don’t open our mouth when we aren’t invited to by God with an insight that is given to us to give to others. And so he buries it, and that’s the point. What happens, when you believe that God dwells in you, that you are his child, that you have been given this gift, and this gift is given to you to be given to other people, and when it comes to you to be given, you’ve doubted, because you’re afraid you’ll be ridiculed, or maybe you’ll be looked at as stupid or whatever?

I know that feeling. I think most of us know that feeling, a lack of confidence in the reality of who we are, who God has made us to be, who he has intended us to be, who he has empowered us to be. We doubt it. We don’t believe in it enough, and if you don’t believe in the gifts that you’ve been given, you lose them. That’s what the whole parable is really trying to say. Those who have been given something, and they believe that they’ve been given it, and they share it, they are the ones that are fulfilling the role that they’ve been given in this kingdom. But those who don’t, who doubt it, who are afraid, they bury it, and they don’t say anything. They keep all their insights, all their sense of things to themselves. So what are we learning? Well, one thing is clear, that this image of this man, who is a man who’d you first say, “Well, he’s afraid. He’s a fearful guy.” But at the same time, when God talks to — well, in the story, when the master calls him, he doesn’t call him fearful. He calls him lazy — lazy. “You lazy, worthless, wicked servant.” Lazy means you didn’t do your work. So what didn’t he do? Well, you say he didn’t share what he received, but the real work would have been receiving it. The work would have been, “How do I believe in the things that God has given me? How do I trust in those things? Where do I get my confidence?” And it’s in this deep, demanding question that we all have. Who am I, and what am I here for? That’s the big issue in this parable.

Do you really believe in what God has revealed in scripture, that we are these incredibly gifted people filled with God’s grace and power to be instruments of his healing and his enlightenment that he gives to other people? Do you really believe that? Because I don't know what you think about when you think about, “Who am I?” But some of us think about, well, it’s our feelings. That’s what makes us who we are, or our thoughts, that’s what makes us who we are, or our possessions or our bodies or our gender or the color of our skin or our possessions. All those things, is that who I am? No, not really. No, the work is asking the hardest, most profound question, and it goes back to something more than just who am I, but when you look at the world, you have to say, “What am I living in? A temporary place of examination and testing and finding out whether I’m worthy to be rewarded with the next place, or is it something much more subtle and much more exciting? Is it about being a part of the evolution, the enlightenment of myself, my circle of friends, the whole world?” That’s what I’m engaged in, and God has given everybody, depending on their destiny, a whole lot of power, a little bit of power, a little bit of insight. It doesn’t matter, but the point is, unless you believe that you’ve been given this gift, it evaporates. So the image at first doesn’t sound fair. If you’ve been given a lot, you’ll get more. If you weren’t given much, you won’t have anything. Well, it’s not the giving. It’s the receiving end of that that’s so important. If you don’t believe that you’re a gifted, life-giving figure in your circle of friends, you’re going to not be able to be, in the moment, confident enough to express things or just feel things for them. And we think we communicate primarily by words, but it’s so much more complicated. Our intention, when we’re with friends, our intention for whether we want — we’re competing with them or whether we’re wanting to empower them, those are things that are powerful communicators, and all God is saying is, “You’ve got that in you, but that’s not really you. Who you really are is who I created, and what you’re here for is what I gave you a destiny for, and believe in that and trust that.” When you do, then you’re filled, whether you are the most insightful person and wrote 50 books or whether you said something in a moment that changed someone’s life, it doesn’t matter. What matters is you understand it. You believe in it, and you’re living it. It’s a challenge that is probably at the heart of why we’re here, and it takes work, real homework to exam almost everything, especially yourself.

Father, your gifts are so abundant, and we often feel that we are in a relationship with you where you are judging us and wanting us to be more and more.And your desire is that we just be who we are meant to be.It’s a natural state, and we have to learn.We have to learn to be familiar with that incredibly wonderful experience of being a source of light for others.So bless us with this gift.It’s hard for us to grasp.We are fearful, and we are afraid of making mistakes.If we just trust more, we’d be fine.So give us that great gift of trust, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Wisdom 6:12-16 | 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 or 4:13-14 | Matthew 25:1-13

Almighty and merciful God, graciously keep from us all adversity so that unhindered in mind and body alike, we may pursue in freedom of heart the things that are yours. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Today’s readings are, like many of them that come at the end of a cycle of readings, are going over some core, main teachings of the scriptures, and this set of readings is loaded. What it’s talking about is, first and foremost, if I go to the second reading, I see in that a way of reminding everybody that this world that we live in is temporary. It’s hard for me to hold onto that at times and probably for you. We’re not made for this. If we’re looking for the world to be a place where we’re easily fulfilled and it’s all working together perfectly, that’s never going to happen. What seems to me is that we are in a place where we are working with both the truth and that which is against the truth, wisdom and the opposite of wisdom, which is, you might say, a lie. So what we have in this reading is a reminder that one day — we’re ultimately made, first and foremost, for union with God. That’s our goal, and we will one day be with him in this mysterious place, and we will have our bodies back. The teaching on the resurrection of the body, which is crazy, when you think about it in a way. How is it that all of us who have ever existed are all going to live with our bodies in this wonderful place? But that’s the promise, and when it doesn’t fit into our way of understanding, that means we’re too much stuck in the brain, and we have to move to the heart where things like this, mysterious things, can be embraced and understood and believed in.

So then we go to the issue of wisdom, and wisdom is so important to understand. What it means is that — wisdom could be interpreted, in my way of seeing it, as reality, knowing what is real, knowing what is true, and this truth is in us. It is all around us. It is speaking to us constantly, and I love the images of the feminine wisdom that is like, if you’re paying attention to her and you say, “I wish she was here,” you open the door, and there she is. She is, wisdom, this truth that we’re longing for, is everywhere. It’s reflected in everything that’s happening in the world if we have the eyes to see with the heart and not the mind. The mind judges things as good or bad. The heart is open to the mystery of what’s going on, and what is it saying to us? There’s one thing that’s going on in our world today, at least in our country. We’re looking at an election, and we’re looking at — the thing that makes our country so great is that the decisions that are made, as far as the direction of our country, are in the hands of the people, not just those leaders, and we can choose our leaders and make decisions. And that’s a powerful, wonderful thing to imagine, that we have that gift, yet what we’re realizing now is that there’s a split in the way this country is — the direction of it, and that’s disunity. And in a way, there’s something valuable about pondering that. What is this that separates us? And I wanted to go to this next. The separation, things that separate us, are the antithesis of what wisdom is calling us into. Wisdom is calling us into unity, oneness, oneness with God, oneness with who God intended us to be, understanding that our role here on this planet is to be connected and in union with other people, and through that union, to carry something that’s been given to us as our unique gift, amplified by the presence of God, divinity inside of us. We resonate that to one another, and the effectiveness of that is union, communion, oneness.

And we’re so aware, I think, in the culture that we’re living in right now, of the things that divide us, and the things that divide us are based in a mind that is filled with judgment. Then that judgment leads to a kind of acceptance/rejection of what is different, of what isn’t understood. We think about it in a way that, when I think about judgment, I think about it as living in a world that’s binary, and things are either good or bad. So a binary world is filled with judgment, and just think about it, how we judge people so quickly. Look at the decisions that we’re making over two different leaders and the judgments we have about them. We’ve decided one is good and one is bad, and that’s not true. They’re all a mixture of good and bad, and somehow wisdom is the one place where we can go to begin to understand that mystery. We’re called for unity, oneness, and that unity and oneness is a result of a heart that is open to wisdom, and it moves us in that direction.

So let’s go to the gospel, a powerful parable. What’s it talking about? Wisdom. What’s the image of wisdom? Oil. Oil is that thing that the ten women that were to guide the groom to his wedding, which is an image of the movement of the effectiveness of wisdom is to move us always towards union and communion with one another, with ourselves, with God, and that union can only happen if there is a kind of energy, a sense inside of us. It’s a sense of reality, the way the world really is, and when you have a sense of that, and it’s in you, and it resonates out of you, when you’re not quick to judge, when you don’t live in a binary world where somebody can be judged because of one action. I think so many people today, you can have a life of goodness and doing all kinds of things, and then something happens, and you’re judged by that one action, that one thing, that one picture on the Internet. And they write you off, because they say, “Well, goodness and evil can’t live in the same person. If you’ve done one evil thing, then you’re evil.” It’s insanity, that kind of judgment, and the oil is the wisdom of understanding reality, that we are this incredibly powerful, beautiful mystery of goodness and evil, and we’re struggling, and we’re moving. And what we need is less judgment and more understanding and more compassion for each other, and the more we can unify and become one, the quicker we will move into a world of fullness and the environment in which people truly flourish.

So let’s look at these women in the story. Their job was to get the groom, to get to the bride and to have a wedding, and the beautiful thing about weddings — I’ve done a zillion weddings in my life. They’re the best parties ever. I know in Italy, where I’ve spent a lot of time, a wedding is usually in the afternoon on Saturday, and then they gather usually in a place, if it’s out in the country, they have a big tent by their homes, and then they party from late afternoon until the morning. It’s — why — we don’t do that at birthdays or anniversaries or even Christmas or Easter. Why are weddings so enthusiastically embraced if they aren’t some archetype or some metaphor for something that we’re all longing for, unity and oneness? When two people find something within each other that is life-giving and they recognize they each have a unique gift for each other, and they fall in love, we call it, and that means they are convinced that this person is someone that they’re going to receive something wonderful from, and they’re going to want to give something wonderful to. And it’s called — that thing that we give each other is understanding, wisdom, reality checks over and over again. I’ve never been married, but I know if I was, there’d be so many decisions I probably wouldn’t have made the way I would, because somebody would be saying, “Are you sure that you want to do that?” And right now, in my personal stuff, I make my own decisions, but there’s something about a loving presence of someone else that knows — the goal of union — I’d say the unity is a means of a goal that is a flow of life and love and truth between two people. And what a gift that is, and if we understand that this beautiful call to unity and oneness is at the heart of what it means to be alive, to be here, then the knowledge of how the world works, the knowledge of an aspect of God, called the Spirit of God, which is feminine — I think it’s so fascinating. And this feminine wisdom is seeking you and me and not looking at us like a judgmental male figure that is sort of saying, “Unless you shape up, I’m not going to be even interested in giving you any information. Clean up your act, and then we’ll treat you with dignity and respect.” No. Wisdom looks at you and says, “You are filled with potential. You’re filled with something that is uniquely yours, and you’re here in the world to share it with someone else in a group of people. That’s reality, and this oil I’m trying to place in your heart is this knowledge that I, and only I, wisdom, can give you.” And those worthy of this great gift are just simply the ones who sit there and say, “I want to know. I want to see. I want to know who I am and why I’m here.” And that’s so different than living in a world of simply walking around and judging everyone and separating people because of judgment, and anybody that’s different is considered to be suspect and a little bit scary to some people. And we categorize people and divide people, and it’s the sin of the world, disunity, separation, isolation.

So finally, this pandemic is creating an artificial separation, isolation, just to give us a sense of what it is like to lose that union and communion that we so long for. All right, so now we’re doing it to protect each other from a disease, but think of it as — the pandemic is a teacher, just like everything is a teacher. Wisdom works with every single thing in the world to give you and me a better perspective on what we’re here for and what this world is about. So if we live in a world, where we’re consciousness of protecting one another from that which harms us, that makes us sick, that could even kill us, if we knew that that was the judgment that we have toward each other, that feeling of being right, when you can point to everybody else as being wrong, that addiction is a disease, because what it does is it kills the uniqueness in every person that God has created. We need to live in an environment, in an atmosphere of radical acceptance, of differences and stop judging people over one action. Stop saying, “You have a life of service to everyone, a marriage that’s long and been wonderful, and if there’s one mistake made because of a drunken night or because of some — I don't know — some mistake, some misjudgment, then you’re written off as some kind of predator, some kind of adulterer, whatever.” Mistakes, mistakes, they’re made, and yeah, we pay attention to them. But we don’t judge the person as if they are the mistake, because we want somehow to be a vehicle of wisdom to this person who is struggling to us as we struggle. In a way, it seems so simple, when you understand the goal of religion, unity, oneness, togetherness, and that’s because we have this gift of truth given to every individual. And that beautiful image at the end of that parable, when these foolish people come and say, “Hey, God, I’m here. Let me in,” and he looks at them. He says, “I don’t recognize you.” Well isn’t that a perfect image of what it’s like to live in a lie? You aren’t yourself. You aren’t who God made you to be, because you’re afraid of that, or you don’t know that yet. What a horrible thought, that you live a long life on this planet, and you don’t become who you are, and therefore you can’t be the source of life and truth and wisdom you’re called to be.

The gift of your wisdom is the greatest gift you have offered us.Open our hearts to embrace the mystery of life, the mystery of why we’re here and what you call us to be, and let us focus on those things that bring life to us and to one another.It’s called the kingdom.It’s called Christian community.It’s called family.It’s called love.So bless us with wisdom as we seek this gift, and help us to bring it to everyone, everyone on our planet, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14 | 1 John 3:1-3 | Matthew 5:1-12A

Almighty, everliving God, by whose gift we venerate in one celebration the merits of all the saints, bestow on us, we pray, through the prayers of so many intercessors, an abundance of the reconciliation with you for which we earnestly long. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We’re coming to the end of our year reflection on the gospel of St. Matthew, and as we come to the end of every year, we have this set of celebrations. And the one that we’re doing today is the Feast of All Saints. It is followed by another great feast, the Feast of the Holy Souls, All Souls Day. And what I’d like to do is take the readings and draw something from them, but I really want to get into something that is somehow captured by these two feasts that are always together, an awareness of those who have gone before us that are with God, and they are our intercessors. They are our helpers. They are there for us. We often don’t realize how much the dead have a part to play in our own personal journey toward a fuller understanding of who we are and who God is and why we’re here, and also the idea that there are people who have died who are not fully yet, not mature enough, let’s say, to enter fully into the relationship with God. And we as Catholics have a very strong faith — a lot of other religions don’t believe in a place called purgatory, but it’s a beautiful teaching, I think, because it’s not so much that we are being punished for every sin we do and have to somehow make up for it, which never really made sense to me, because God said, “I remove the burden of sin from you. I forgive all of your sins.” And so to go and have to pay for every one of them, even though we’ve been forgiven, doesn’t make a lot of sense, because if we’ve gone through something that is a sin, I guarantee you, as we grow out of it, as we evolve past it, we’ve probably experienced a lot of pain because of that sin. Sin is not just this thing that’s like a game where God just scores us to see if we hit the mark or not. No, it’s God’s longing for us not to be engaged in something that harms us or someone else, and so the idea that we also have this feast called All Souls is that there is a way in which the people who die have this opportunity to continue to grow. It just makes sense to me that we’re never finished growing.

So what I’d like you to imagine, these two feasts together are reminding us of something that I think is so important. Why — what is it that we’re here to do, to accomplish? And it’s not to stop sinning. That was my most naive and over-simplified notion of what it means to be a Catholic or a Christian. Stop sinning. I don’t think God is looking at us as a scoreboard that says, “How many mistakes have you made? You make so many, you go to purgatory. You made a whole bunch. You go to hell. You haven’t done any mistakes. You go to heaven.” That just doesn’t make a lot of sense, but what is it that we’re here for? What is it we’re called to do? We’re called to evolve, to grow, to change. There’s an image in All Saints, in the feast and the readings that says that some day we will see God face-to-face, and when we see him, we will know him. And what we will know about him is that we are like him. He is like us. Think about that. You look at the activity of human beings. You can see incredible acts of self-sacrifice and love and giving, and other human beings can be so seemingly bent on an evil, destructive force that fills them. So what’s the difference between a saint and a sinner, let’s say? The difference is that there’s an awareness in one that is grown and evolved and gone through a process that’s been painful.

Look at the beatitudes. It’s kind of a list of an experience of human beings who are empty and broken and lost, and they’re found. It’s like this journey that we’re on is not toward perfect literally but toward something that means that we go through painful things, like the survivors in the first reading. They’re washed in the blood of the lamb. What does that mean? It means they’re forgiven. Well, why is forgiveness so important unless God expects us to sin, expects us to make mistakes? How do you ask a child to grow up and never make a mistake? But those mistakes, if met with forgiveness, then there’s a possibility of the one who’s caught in an illusion that leads them to sin to say, “This is stupid. This is irrational. This doesn’t make any sense. Why am I doing this?” So that’s our process.

How do we grow on a daily basis in this life, moving toward higher consciousness and more awareness of just what is reality? I love that image that a spiritual person is the most real person. There was a time when we thought that spiritual people had to separate themselves from the world, because the world was somehow unclean. But the opposite, in a sense, is true. Certainly there’s a reason to leave the world, and some do that. And I’m not judging them, but I’m saying for most of us, the call is to enter into the world as an element of grace and life and love and God. As we become more like God, we become more like the Christ who is God incarnate, and we find in him this man who didn’t go around so much telling people what to do as witnessing what they can do. His presence was so powerful and so life-changing and transforming and healing. That’s who we are, people in the world, bringing that into the world, and when we encounter the opposite of that, we have forgiveness in our heart and don’t reject anyone for that.

So this is a course that’s tough, and here’s my main thought I want to share with you this morning. God has created a kind of ecosystem, a kind of system where we — a healthy ecosystem is every element, every living thing in an ecosystem has a purpose. If you take one of those things out of an ecosystem, the whole thing gets out of balance. They found that, if there’s a group of animals that live in Africa and you take one of those out of there that’s been a natural part of that, let’s say a predator, you get rid of that, and then the whole thing gets out of balance, and nobody is able to do what they really need to do. The animals are not able to flourish as they’re intended to, because the balance is off. Well, in the spiritual world that you and I live in, we have all kinds of sources that empower us to be who we are, to help us to know who we are, to know who God is. Certainly religion is one. Scripture is a major one. Great wisdom, teachers from the past, they’re important, but the thing that we have to realize is the most important source we have of growing and developing of human beings is the presence of God within us. That indwelling presence is the greatest source of wisdom, because God truly does speak to us. But the beauty of his plan is that there’s more than just this God within us. There’s a community of people around us where God is present in someone else, and they manifest to us the things that we need. God uses our relationships as vehicles through which he works with us and guides us, but the other things that we often don’t pay attention to are angels and saints. Saints are those who have died, those who have gone before us, and those who have been close to us that we know, they could be in purgatory working still to grow and evolve as that teaching teaches us that there’s a way in which God continues to help us to grow after death. They could be with God in heaven, but either way, they’re there for us. They have the power to intercede for us, to work for us, to encourage us. I especially think those in purgatory are really aware of maybe where they failed us, and we pray for them as they grow, and they pray for us as we grow. And it’s a beautiful relationship between the dead and such a sadness, and we lose contact with that. But the other thing is angels. These are creatures that God created from the very beginning, before he created human beings, and some turned against him in terms of his plan to help us and to get angels to serve us. I think they felt — some may have felt that it was under their pay grade to help human beings, but God said, “No, that’s what I want you to do.” And those that said yes, that’s their whole reason for being. They want to be there to be messengers between God and us, and to not be aware of this powerful source of wisdom that comes from the dead, not to be aware of the work of angels in our life — they have this mysterious power to even be able to take human form and speak to us. Sometimes people have someone in their life, and they were there for the right moment, and then they were gone, and they never see them again. And they say, “I think that was an angel.” They’re probably right. It’s real, but think of it. They’re so effective in being able to do what they do, and they even, as I said, have this power to be present in a physical form. And they can be that strange person you encounter somewhere where they helped you, and then you turned around to help them, and they weren’t around or something like that. All that’s real. That’s so real.

So the thought of not being aware, not being conscious of these beings is a real, real shortcoming to the way in which God has planned forever for us to journey through this life, growing from sin and darkness to light and truth. So to not have them in our awareness is to lose something about this beautiful system that God has created for us. God is there for us. The dead are there for us. Angels are there for us, and those last two we tend to maybe not pay much attention to. But it’s like being given all these sources. Think of what makes a healthy human body. We need nourishment. We need moisture. We need vitamins. To cut out any one of those is going to limit our ability to grow and to become who we are. Well, these beautiful creatures that God has created that never die, that are angels, they’re there for this beautiful, beautiful reason. God does not want to lose anyone. He does everything he can to save us, and saving us means helping us to grow into who he intended us to be. It’s such a beautiful system, yet we sometimes turn it into something so much less exciting, even dark, where all he does is count our sins and holds them against us. No, he took care of the sin problem, which then opens us to being able to be courageous enough to grow and to change and to try things. And we live in a world of forgiveness, and we live in a world of these creatures that are there for us. The richness that comes is beyond our imagining. Think of it. God’s longing for you to become who he intends you to be is so much greater than yours, and he gives you all of these ways in which you have the capacity to receive, receive, receive wisdom and truth. Pay attention. Don’t let them slip by. They’re real.

Father, your world is filled with you, with your love, with your longing that we grow and become all that you’ve intended us to be.So bless us with eyes that see and ears that hear and a sense of things as they really are so that we can grow in the fullness of who you want us to be and drink of all those ways in which you continue to pour love and life, forgiveness into each of us.And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Exodus 22:20-26 | 1 Thessalonians 1:5C-10 | Matthew 22:34-40

Almighty, everliving God, increase our faith, hope and charity, and make us love what you command so that we may merit what you promise. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

If you remember last Sunday’s homily, it was a story of the Sadducees, who were considered to be the most influential and the most important of those who cared for the temple. They didn’t believe in the resurrection of the body, and so they had a dialogue with Jesus, and Jesus was somehow able, with his wisdom and knowledge, to basically expose their error. And so he corrected the Sadducees, saying that God had used terms, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob,” proof that there was such a thing as life after death, something the Sadducees didn’t believe in. Pharisees did, so maybe the Pharisees felt, “Wow, he’s on our side.” And so they came to him with a really sincere question. I don’t think they were trying to trip him up like the Sadducees did, but they just asked — and this was a question that was very common to the Pharisees, because the Pharisees were more engaged in interpreting the law, interpreting scripture. And so basically, they come and ask Jesus, with a sincere heart, “What is the heart of the law?” Because that’s what people had asked them over and over again. “What is the heart of the law? For 600 rules, can you boil it down to something more easy to grasp?” And the answer that was given in the past, but the answer Jesus gives, is all about love. That’s the heart of all these commandments, treating each other with love, understanding that love is your nature, and the thing that brings you the greatest joy and the greatest happiness is following your nature, living as you were created to be. We are made in the image and likeness of God. It’s a beautiful, beautiful image, and so it seems they were pleased. But Jesus also added something that I’m not sure was ever added before, but he also said, “When you say love God, I’m asking you to be a lover, not just to love God, but you have to love your neighbor, and you have to love yourself.” So it’s not something you do. It’s something you are. If you’re a lover, you love everything. If you say you’re a lover and you love these things and hate those things, you’re really not a lover.

So Jesus is setting the stage to say, “This is the heart of my message. This is what I want to say to you, and my Father was not able to say it to you in the Old Testament.” This is really fascinating. Why not? Well, listen to the first reading from the Old Testament, and basically it’s stating the way God dealt with the people of the Old Testament. And they were much lower in terms of their level of consciousness as to who they were. They were more, I would say, rooted in more their animal instincts. So the biggest thing about the people in the Old Testament at the time was that they were concerned very much with self-survival. They needed to get what they needed, and they needed to mate so they would continue their race. But it was all basically self-centered stuff, and when you’re dealing with self-centered people, what’s the best motive you can give them for doing something that would be more helpful to the people around you? That is a threat to say, “If you don’t do what I’m asking you, I’ll kill you. I’ll take your — I’ll go against your most basic instinct.” When you hear that phrase in the scripture, it just pops out, because the God of the Old Testament is not different than the God of the New Testament, but the God of the Old Testament had a different audience, and he had to say things to them that they would understand. And so when he says to them, “If you mistreat each other, I’ll kill you. I’ll just come with a sword and chop your head off, because I’m compassionate.” Wait a minute. Who is he compassionate to? The one that’s abused. How does he feel about the abuser? Kill him. Now, what is that supposed to mean? Is God mean? Is God vengeful in the Old Testament, and then he has a big awakening in the New Testament? No, he’s working with his audience as they would understand, and one of the things he’s basically saying to them, which is much deeper and much more powerful — the people in the Old Testament, caught up in their self-centeredness, had no idea how interconnected they were with everyone else around them. What the wisdom behind that statement is: if you hurt someone else, you’ve hurt yourself. If you kill someone else, you kill something in yourself. It’s a wonderful, wonderful wisdom that eventually is revealed in Jesus, and it’s this connection that we all have.

So what changed the audience? Why, when Jesus came, were there some people who could really accept him? That was because there was a slow growth of consciousness in the Old Testament. There was experience after experience that led them to say, “I wonder why this isn’t working, because every time I go to kill someone, they come back and kill me.” They grew up a little bit, to say the least, and so finally, when Jesus comes, he is basically the law incarnate. He is the truth. So Jesus does his teaching not by explaining it so much but by being someone. He was a lover, and he had anger and resentment to those who were not — especially if they were in a place of authority, they were not teaching anything in the direction that the Old Testament had in seed form, but they didn’t let it grow. They didn’t let it evolve, and they were still locked into a justice system where condemnation was going to be the best motive of fear, creative motive of fear to control people. They were controlling people. They weren’t awakening people to their true essence. So how did it happen? What happened? Well, it’s called redemption. We could talk about how loaded the image of Jesus on the cross is, but there’s something in it and — well, we’ve talked about that at other times. We’ll talk about it again. There was something in that very act that awakened something in human beings about their nature that they realized is surrendering to something that they don’t understand, and loving those that hurt us is the key to any kind of spiritual growth and change. It’s the key to peace. It’s the key to being able to live in community. So we see this so beautifully producing a change in people when they see it and they understand it.

So listen to Paul to the Thessalonians, because he’s saying the same thing. He’s saying — let me say he would say to them if he was going to amplify it. Jesus came into the world, and he was the word made flesh. He was love. He was not there to tell you how to act. He was witnessing what it’s like to live as he lives, and he has such a powerful, unbelievable, effective effect on people. His very being healed people and changed people and changed their mind and their understanding. So Paul in Thessalonians is saying the same thing to the people of Thessalonia. They’re saying, “Look, you’ve been the model, just like Jesus, and it’s so beautiful to see it working, because people are changed because of who you are, not because of what you’re teaching.” The early church was not a case of everybody signing up for classes. It was a case of people watching people take care of each other in a way that was absolutely foreign to their understanding of what human beings are for and what they’re really made for and how they really are designed to work. Think of it. When you live out your life as God intended it, doesn’t that make sense that it’s going to work, and you’re going to find peace? But when you’re living it out of an illusion, let’s say, of separation and isolation and the idea that it’s all about me, and the more I can take and get from people, the better, you can see how that is going to lead to a life of emptiness, frustration, depression, fear, shame, anger. It’s all there in a world where you’re forcing yourself to be something you’re not. And what a difference when you realize, “I am — I am love. That’s what I’m made of. That’s what I’m made for. That’s my nature, and if I can just trust in God awakening that in me and allow that to work, I can become a witness to the world that’s going to change the world.” That’s what he’s saying.

It’s funny. We have this tradition in our church about the first sin, Adam’s sin and how we, when you — but that isn’t understood correctly, and it’s very misleading as it is. Even Pope Benedict XVI wrote a beautiful article about the dangers of misunderstanding that teaching, because it almost implies that God created evil people, and when tested, they showed up they were all evil. We’re not evil. We’re not damaged by our humanity. Our humanity is a gift, and we’re going to integrate that into our humanity, and the two are made for each other. And the misunderstanding of sin and the sinful nature is that that’s who we really are, so the only way to control that is by fear, by making people do it out of the same place they’re in when they choose to hurt somebody, self-centeredness. It’s playing up our self-centeredness. That’s who we were made to be. That’s the danger of the original sin. It’s like we came into the world selfish. No, we didn’t. We came into the world with a heart ready to grow into love. We still are born as infants into a family where we’re meant to love, and if we learn from the family love is the essence, we’re going to have this amazing capacity to evolve. But if you grow up in a family, like most of us did, like I did, it was always based on obedience, reward and punishment. That was in 1940, and I don't know if it’s changed a whole lot in most families, but I believe it has. I believe people now are much more sensitive to how you raise children and how important it is that they feel that they are loved and that they’re valuable and that they have dignity and worth. And whenever you see a system that just denies that and works with power and control, then you know you’re not in a place where people are going to flourish. You’re in a place that’s going to draw them back into a dark place, a place of less consciousness, less awareness of who they are.

So it’s a beautiful message in this set of readings, I believe, and to summarize it, it means that we are born, by nature, to be like our God. And God said, “I am here to help you evolve into that. And you can’t do it on your own. So when you think about all the things you’re guilty of and all the things you’ve done wrong, I’m going to wipe all that away. It’s called redemption. I’m going to die on a cross so all your sins are forgiven.” Now, having your sins forgiven is something we don’t really believe is as complete and total as God is saying, but what he’s really saying, not so much that you’re off the hook completely and that you don’t have to pay for anything you’ve done. No, what he’s saying is, “No matter what you’ve done, I only respond to you by loving you. That’s all. That’s all I ever do.” If you do that to your brothers and sisters, if when anybody does something wrong to you, you just love them more, believe that this is not who they really are, trust in a goodness that’s in them, if you love it, it will be awakened, that’s the genius of Christianity. And it’s so simple, and it’s so basic, and it can be done by anybody. And it’s not tied to one religion. It’s everywhere. it’s the truth. So I pray that — the world today especially needs to understand this compassion that God has placed in all of our hearts, and the idea that we follow rules and laws that abuse and use people or hurt them and we think that that’s good for some other reason, like it helps the economy, helps me in my job, or it helps them, but if it’s using people, if it’s abusing people, it’s wrong. And it’ll never bring peace.

So this timely, timely message is look for people who love. Look for people who have respect for one another. Look for people who have this capacity to be more like the God that created them, and then celebrate that unity that we all have and feel one with each other as we witness and live this truth. And I know the world will be changed. I know things will be different. I know that whatever separates and isolates us — and certainly we have a disease that is reminding us that there’s something in us that, if we’re not careful with it, it’s infectious, and it can hurt, and it can pull us down, and it can rob us of energy. Our senses go down. It’s all there. Pay attention. Enter into what’s happening. Learn from it, because it’s the teacher. And it’s always teaching the same thing that Jesus longed for — love.

Father, your gift is our heart, the part of us that is made for love and understanding and compassion and communion, union, oneness, surrender to what is, learning, growing.You put your heart in our hearts.Help us to be connected to that great source so that we know that the work you ask us to do is not based on our power but on your power in us.We can love like you love.It’s our inheritance, so bless us with an awareness of its effectiveness — loves effectiveness and the power you give us to do it.And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Isaiah 45:1, 4-6 | 1 Thessalonians 1:1-5B | Matthew 22:15-21

Almighty and everliving God, grant that we may always conform our will to yours and serve your majesty in sincerity of heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The prayer that was being offered in this piece is a prayer of a mother praying for her son that he learn to honor God rather than the world, which underscores a problem that has been there from the beginning of time, the world of God and the world of the world. This set of readings is really fascinating to me, and it comes at a time that I think is so interesting. If I look at the gospel and start there, it’s clear that this is a story about the world and about God’s world, and I remember, often when I would go to this, it was a clear indication, and it kind of – think about taking a statement in scripture that is so loaded and so filled with meaning and then reducing it to something so simple. It sounded like this is Jesus saying, “Okay, you have to put your money in the church, and you also have to support the government.” So you have an obligation to pay either one of these things. They’re both services in some way. And it’s so much deeper than that, so much more powerful than that. It’s about paying attention. Where do we put our attention? Everyone, I think, knows, if you are a serious, spiritual person, you have a longing for truth more than almost anything else, and so you have to find where is the truth. And the interesting thing about – what does the truth produce? It produces people who have a heart that is open and receptive to other people. The core of all religions is the way we learn how to be open to a God and then, through that openness to God, receive the gifts that he gives that we can be gift-givers to other people. That’s the heart of almost every religion. It’s about service, about caring for people, but it’s also about learning the nature of who we are and who God is so that we can work with this duality, in a sense, of, “I turn to my God, and he speaks to me through my religion, but then I turn to the world, and there’s nothing there of any value.” That’s the fault that we fall into. This gospel is saying, “No. No, you have to pay attention to God, his world inside of you.” We believe that God dwells in us. We believe he dwells in our hearts, and that indwelling presence is called God consciousness. And when we go there for wisdom, we say we’re going into our conscience, and in that privilege we have is we have the authority.

Through the Catholic Church for sure and many religions, we’re saying you go to that inner place with the anticipation that it speaks, that it gives you answers, but not answers about how to fix things but how to work with the world. How do we allow the world to be the source of life that God has created it to be and not put it in a position of the world is evil, and then religion is spiritual? Yes, we listen to religion leaders. We listen, and we engage in practices of our faith. As Catholic, my background is a sacramental life, and it’s so rich and so powerful when I look at it and realize what it’s drawing us into. And what it’s offering us is a mystical world, that we live in a world where things aren’t what they seem. A piece of bread can be the Christ’s body. A sip of wine can be forgiveness. How does that work? Well, we don’t have to know how it works. We have to know it works. We have to believe in that, believing that God is a God that communicates, and he uses ritual. He uses stories. He uses church leaders. He uses the community more than we ever realize. The community is where all the power is, in the believer. So we know that religion is a rich source of information for us and things we need to ponder, but at the same time, what this reading, I think, is telling us so clearly is so is the world.

Now, look at the first reading. It’s about Cyrus. Cyrus was one of the greatest emperors. He’s one of the ones that created the first civilization 500 years before Christ, and the interesting thing about this man who was – basically he was calling people into – he was working to conquer people. Doesn’t sound like the most holy thing in the world, but what God is saying to us in this reading is that Cyrus didn’t know that God was a part of his whole plan, that God was the one that was allowing him to do the things that he did, even though Cyrus had no idea about who God was, didn’t pay any attention to him. You’d say he was an atheist, but God was using him to bring about a change in the world that was going to allow his people to return to Jerusalem. So there he is. God was in that work that was a pagan emperor/conqueror, and God was using him to achieve a goal that was good for his people. Now, just take that image and say, “All right then, if we believe that this God communicates to his people, and let’s say we’re caught in that narrow vision of he’s only going to talk to us through our religion or through scripture, then that’s the only sources we have.” No, no. The world is the source of his wisdom, and what he’s asking us to do is to pay attention to that world and read it. Read the signs.

It’s so interesting. For example – let me just go back for a minute to St. Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians. He says, “We give so much thanks to you people who are believers now, and we recognize something, and you recognize something.” Something has happened in the world when Christ died on the cross, and I’d like you to think about it as the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, wisdom, the feminine has come into the world in a way that is beyond anything that could have ever happened naturally. It was a supernatural action on the part of God to awaken people to a new way of being in the world, not just working out of our minds and our wills, which is what everybody did – some people still do – but working out of this new experience of a heart that has the capacity to take in things that are going on and to read the signs, both that are in scripture, in a ritual, in the world, read those signs and listen to what they are trying to say. But the listening is the strangest thing. It’s not like the mind and the will that sits down and figures out why this is all happening, who caused it, what’s the fix and how do we get out of it. That’s the way the mind works, but the heart, the wisdom that has been poured into us, that Paul is so excited about how it’s changed these brothers and sisters who are living in the way of God because they have faith, they have hope, they have love for one another – and what Paul’s pretty clearly saying is, “This is a gift. This didn’t come because you all of a sudden had this – you figured it out. No, it’s been given. Wisdom is given to you.” And think of wisdom as something you have inside of you, but what God is saying, I think, in this gospel, is, “Yeah, wisdom is inside of you, but it’s also inside of the world and what’s going on in the world.” How do you read the world in a way that you can say, “God, I think I understand in some way, or I can feel what’s going on in the world is your will.”

And what is going on in the world? My God, three or four things stand out like crazy. Never in the history of our civilization have we had access to what’s happening everywhere. The news now is not about Dallas and its suburbs and the United States. No, you listen to the news now, especially on something like NPR, and you hear what’s going on in a small town in Africa and what’s going on in the Antarctica and what’s going on in Mexico. It’s like we’re getting this information, information, information, and a lot of it is, in a way, disturbing, because it’s about people struggling – people struggling, people being oppressed, people being abused, people struggling to get out of that. It’s everywhere. And then it’s like we’ve had this period of time when we’re looking at all this, and we see it so clearly. The world looks terrible in a way. It’s frightening. It’s falling apart, and then you have to remember that, when things are falling apart, that means what? They’re going through transition. They’re changing. The world is changing at a pace we’ve never, ever experienced before, and our task is to pay attention. My church, the Catholic Church, has changed so radically since a thing that happened in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, the Vatican Council. It was the most amazing transformation of a focus of a church from being the protector of orthodoxy and saying no to every new thing that came along that wasn’t true to now a place where we are open and receptive to the mystery of this world that God has created for us. And the dignity of the individual has been lifted from – it used to be the hierarchy was the holy people and the priests and the nuns. Now it’s like, no, no, we are all equally capable of reaching holiness if we’ll just allow the Spirit to enter into us and change us to the point that we do not any longer try to fix any problem or blame it on some other place.

Look at us. We have amazing uncovering of imperfection in almost every industry, from churches to government to industry to politics to medicine. There are abusers everywhere. Did we all of a sudden develop these people? Is it they’ve never been there before? No, they’ve always been there. Has there been individuals that have been robbed of their dignity and their value by a government that doesn’t feel that they are the essential reason why government is in place, to guide and help these people? Yeah, that’s been there forever. So what do we do with something like that? One way is get depressed and go inside, and the other is to use your mind and your will and say, “Okay, who caused this,” till you find an enemy that did it to us. And then you go after that enemy. Or you do an insulation kind of thing. You pull away from the world and say, “No, it’s only about our country. It’s only about my life. That’s all I care about. I don’t care about the world. It’s too much to handle.” All of those are just easy ways of not doing the work of paying attention to the God who speaks consistently, constantly to every soul, every heart and is saying the same thing. “Wake up. Pay attention to what is going on. Don’t fix it. Don’t try to change it too quickly. It’ll change. But ponder it. Hold it in your heart. Wonder.”

One of the things that’s so interesting about this pandemic is its effect on people, and one of the things that is so clear, the friends I know that have it that aren’t really that sick to go to the hospital, they say it’s a fatigue. You’re just so tired. Then I realized all of us now are going through a kind of – they even talk about it, the fatigue of the virus, the fatigue of not being able to be out there in a world that we were so used to. It’s weighing on us. It’s wearing us out, because we keep trying to figure out what it is and fix it. It’s not to be fixed yet. It’s going to take its course. No matter what we do, it’ll all unfold as it is, but if you don’t believe and don’t pay attention to what it’s saying and don’t believe that it will turn into something wonderful, different, not back to the way it was but back towards something so much better – do you believe this? This is so crucial right now. Hold it in your heart. Ponder it. Don’t try to fix it or blame anybody for it or understand exactly when it’s going to be over. Just stay with it. It’s like the whole world has been asked to go on retreat and reflect and ponder and decide what kind of world do you want to live in. What kind of world do you want to support? It’s got to be a world closer to what our Creator created the world to be. That’s the direction we have been moving in since the beginning of the human race, growing in consciousness and becoming more and more like the God who created us and making the world more like his kingdom.

Each of these pieces that we’ve played today are prayers, and this prayer is a beautiful prayer, the Prayer of the Pilgrim. This question is: on what path am I journeying? What consolation do I have? Am I on the path of error or truth? It seems appropriate for the theme of this liturgy of the word, and I pray – well, let me just close with the final prayer.

Heavenly Father, you have called the world onto this amazing path of growth and transformation. It’s interesting that we’re not needing more information about what’s going on. We need more formation, transformation into being able to deal with and listen to and learn everything you’re saying to us. Nothing in the world exists without your permission, and everything in the world you promise us is for us. Open our eyes to the heart of our belief. Open our eyes and hearts to the world. Let us hold both and listen to both and not look for answers as much as to wait to see the fruits of all that you’ve planned for us, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Isaiah 25:6-10A | Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20 | Matthew 22:1-14

May your grace, oh Lord, we pray, at all times go before us and follow after and make us always determined to carry out good works. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The scriptures today, on this 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time, they’re filled with hope, and hope is that mysterious conviction deep inside of us that promises that are made to us by God will be fulfilled. We are going to receive the gifts, the promise, everything, but we have a process that we go through that is anything but a nice, smooth, even course going upward, better, nicer, richer. We go through these cycles of being full and being empty, being filled with understanding and being totally confused, and that’s the way we learn. That’s the way of the world, the way of human nature. Paul makes it clear that he’s experiencing that when he says, “There are times when my life is so full I can hardly stand it. It’s great, and I have abundance. Everything is working out, and there are other times when I have nothing working out and I’m depressed and discouraged.” And he says, “I’ve learned how to deal with both.” One is not a sign that the hope is going to happen and it’s going to be wonderful, and the other is not the opposite of saying it’s all going to go to pieces. No, there’s a way in which we’ve learned, need to learn, Paul learned that we deal with good times and bad, times where we understand what’s going on, times when we’re totally confused, times when the truth seems evident, times when the truth just can’t be found anywhere. That should feel familiar to most of us, living in the time we’re living.

So let’s look at the promise that God has made, because that’s the thing that holds everything together, the promise of God, and one of the things about the song I chose, Deep River, is about the longing of people throughout history of finding a better place, a promised land, a better way to be, a better, fuller experience of life. It’s like there’s a seed placed within us, and there’s something about being a human being that knows that, wherever we are, there’s more, not necessarily what we have is not enough, but there’s something about the way we are made that makes us feel that there’s something coming, something better, something freer, something more whole and complete. I want to call that just human nature’s consciousness deep inside of us. It’s like a seed planted there by God, and we long to know. And consciousness knowing is not the same thing as figuring things out or having all the right answers or having all the information. You can have all the information in the world, but what we really need is some kind of understanding of the mystery of how it’s all unfolding. We need to, in a sense, surrender to the process, and that takes time and maturity and understanding.

So let’s look at the first reading from Isaiah, because it’s all about the promise, and from the beginning, God seems to have given us, especially if you go to the call of Abraham, that he wants to unify us, call us into one people and take us on a journey. And where we’re going, we’re not sure, and the image of the journey is to go from slavery to freedom, slavery being that you have to do things because you’re told, and if you don’t, you’ll be punished. If you do, you’re rewarded. But freedom is something radically different and somehow not feeling that you’re forced to do things, but you choose to do the things that are necessary for the growth and development of who you’re going to become. It’s so core to who we are, but we get lost, lost in some kind of self-centeredness that demands that things be different than they are. It’s really kind of the addiction of the mind and the will. Need to fix things, make it right, make it good now, instantly.

Let’s look at these promises that Isaiah reminds us of. First of all, the idea of a mountain is an image of, I think consciousness, a place high up where you can see more. You see, what I want to do is I want to get you to this mountain. It’s safe. You have clear vision, and you’re going to be fed there, rich food, choice wines. He repeats it, rich food, pure, choice wines. That notion is that the God that we believe in knows our needs and knows we are struggling, but we have to believe with all of our heart that he’s giving us everything we need to be able to make the next step. So we should never feel like we are empty or unable to move or we don’t have the energy or the ability. No, he’s there to feed, feed, feed us, and one of the effects of being fed by God, that is with the truth, something will happen. The veil that veils people, the web that is woven over nations, he’ll destroy those and wipe away sadness, the tears from every face and forgive us for everything that we’ve done wrong. That image of the veil that veils all people, you can think of that as a form of racism, a form of anything that separates us. It’s kind of interesting that we have to wear masks today because of the pandemic, and there’s something about when someone wears a mask, it’s funny if they wear sunglasses, I don’t think that I – if I can’t see their eyes, I still don’t feel like I’m separated, but when I meet people or talk to people in a mask, I have no idea who they are or what their response to me is. It’s really interesting, but that feeling of separation, isolation is what God said, “I’m going to take that away from you, and all the complicated negotiations, this web that’s woven over nations, that keeps nations fighting each other instead of working together, I’m going to bring peace into the world. I promise. I’ll unify you. I’ll bring peace. I’ll destroy that which destroys, and I’m going to take away your tears.” It’s an amazing prophecy, and why do we believe it? Because he said it. He said this, and we listen to it, and we believe in it, and we look forward to its working itself out. And we have rest. It feels so good. It’s an amazing, beautiful promise. Nurture us, unify us, forgive us, bring peace.

So let’s look at, then, the gospel that’s based on – the first reading and the gospel are always chosen to work together. So here we have the promise in the first reading, and then what happens in Matthew, we see the response to that promise. And there’s always a problem with the response, because if somebody doesn’t believe it, then the promise cannot be fulfilled. It’s weird. Here’s God saying, “I’m there. I’m with you. I’ll do this for you. All I ask is that you recognize me and allow me to join you,” because here’s the core teaching. Everything that God promises cannot happen if we decide we’re going to achieve it on our own. It just won’t happen, and God knows it shouldn’t happen, because the last thing he wants us to do is to feel that he’s created us, placed us on this earth and then left us. It’s called deism. God creates the world, checks on us at the end, checks off whether we did right or wrong, rewards or punishes – such a caricature of the beauty of human existence.

So let’s look at what this story is trying to say. Jesus again, the third week in a row, he’s talking to the scribes and Pharisees, not the disciples, and they have a problem. They have a problem with Jesus. They have a problem with really interpreting the Old Testament properly. They have lost their way. They have – I love the description of the Pharisees that Jesus came out with, “making converts twice as fit for hell as you are.” There’s something about them that was completely off, way off, and what was off, they were enslaving people in a system of the temple where they had to perform in order to be loved, in order to be saved, and if they didn’t, they were condemned. It’s the classic shadow of all religion. And so he said, “All right, gentlemen, I want you to realize something. I’m going to give you a parable.” And parables were interesting, because they were always made to create in a person – or to ignite an imagination, because logic, linear thinking, this happens and that happens and all that, all that mind and will stuff is valuable, absolutely, and terribly important in the world. But it’s limited in being able to enter into the spiritual world, which has a mythical, or rather, a mystical side to it. Unless you can be, in some ways, a mystic in this world, unless you can understand there’s something bigger than just the literal story, you’re going to be lost, and you’re never going to find the kingdom. It’s like looking at the world today and saying, “I want a nice, clear answer as to what’s happening, why it’s happening and how to fix it. I want somebody to step in and fix it all.” Well, that’s not the way life works, and generally, when you look at leadership, the leadership is so important, but in a sense, what’s more important is the individuals’ relationship to each other and to the world that is the power force. That’s where you want to get to. You want to get to the ordinary people being filled with an understanding of who they are and why they’re here and who God is and the plan of God. If you believe in that and you believe he is the truth, then we’ve got this potential of the people being the real power. How you are dealing with other people is the real power, not so much what a government or a religion is forcing you or telling you to do.

So we look at this image, and the image is beautiful, the parable. It’s about a man, a king, who has a wedding. His son is getting married, and he’s so excited, and he wants to celebrate with everybody. Well, what’s that? What’s the incarnation? God entering into humans. The Old Testament has a quote that I love. – I go back to it all the time – where God said, “I just want to marry you. I just want to be inside of you. I just want to be a partner with you, and I’m not going to take away your freedom. I’m going to be there to enable you to be fully who I intended you to be, and it’s not a competition. It’s not who’s in charge. It’s like I’m the source of whatever you need, and you make the decisions, and you make the choices. But you need wisdom, and you need understanding, and you need compassion and empathy.” Those are things that human beings can – we do have that capacity, but somehow God says, “If you let me inside of you and let me be the source of these things along with you, then –” Really this is what I love about God. He’s always asking us to do something that doesn’t quite make sense, and if we make it literal, it just dies. “Okay then, God, you do everything. I just sit here like a puppet, and you’re working through me.” No. “Well then, I’m going to do everything on my own. Then that’s the way it’s going to be.” No, no. It’s always both and. It’s always this mysterious – you can’t go to either/or in the spiritual world. It’s not that clear. It’s mysterious. So this mysterious union is what we’re here for, this incredible union. And so everyone’s invited, and the people who were invited were the people who were the religious leaders. And they had no intention of doing it, either because they were too busy – one goes to his farm; one goes to his son’s work – either they were too busy doing whatever they were doing, or they simply were more demonic, in a sense, or were darker, when they would say, “No. I think I know this message is going to come and save people. So I’m going to stop it. So I’m going to kill these people that are talking about this.” That’s the Pharisees. And so Jesus said, “Well, all right. I’m going to bring everybody in, good as well as bad.” And that’s what he does. He welcomes everyone into this banquet, but there’s something curious about the ending of this story, which I think is the heart of it. Think of it. These people are grabbed off the streets, and so then they say – the king says, “Where’s your wedding garment?” And that doesn’t make any sense. They just were called in. Parables don’t make sense, but what was the deal? He said, “You are not understanding. When I call you to this banquet, I don’t just call you by name and just as an anonymous person. I’ve chosen you, and my work inside of you is very deliberate. I need your gifts, your wisdom, who you are. I need your history. I need your ancestors’ influence on you, all that. I’ve chosen you to do a particular work with a group of people.” That’s full consciousness. When God said, “I want you to come and serve me,” well, it’s not just this, “Okay, I’m just one of the many that’s being hired by a company.” “I want you to work for me, but that’s it. Go work for me.” No. He said, “I have a job for you, a particular job.” That’s the beauty of it. “I’ve given you a destiny, and I long for you to say yes, because we together can complete it.”

Father, you’ve promised you are in us. You are with us. You will hold us up. You will give us strength. At times it seems so confusing and difficult and demanding so much of us in terms of giving in to what we don’t really want, like not having the kind of job or the kind of support. So give us, at this time, more strength, more ability to trust in you than ever and knowing that the things that make us strong, the things that make us happy, the things that make us confident that we’re doing something really good is founded in the way we treat our brothers and sisters. We look to authority to fix the world, but really it’s only fixable by ourselves when we deal with the way we deal with each other. Bless us with trust and faith in your plan but most especially in our capacity to love, forgive, nurture and care for one another. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Isaiah 5:1-7 | Philippians 4:6-9 | Matthew 21:33-43

Almighty and everliving God, who in the abundance in your kindness surpassed the merits and the desires of those who entreat you, poor out your mercy upon us to pardon what conscience dreads and to give what prayer does not dare to ask. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that our world is in a very precarious place. Probably there’s more division and separation in terms of religion, politics, almost any subject. People take extreme views, and when they take extreme views, there doesn’t seem to be any way to negotiate any kind of coming together with any kind of mutual agreement that might bring peace. So what does this reveal to us? What are we supposed to – what’s our reaction to a world that seems so divided and so angry and confused and somehow losing a sense of direction? The thing that is so fascinating to me about the role that I have as a Catholic priest or as a minister of the word is to go to scripture over and over again to say, “There’s got to be something in this treasure we have of a record of a particular time in which human beings have existed for the last, basically, 4,000 years.” We have a written story of how human beings have evolved, and it gives us a very clear understanding of what the struggle is. And I think it’s fascinating that, when you look at this story about human nature evolving and growing and changing, which has taken place over maybe, what, 100,000 years, but only in the last 4,000 have we taken a chance – we have a chance to look at what is going on in a literal way, having a history. And the history is surrounding an image of a God who created us entering into our life and saying, “You need me to help you do something, and I’m here for you. Please, please open your heart and let me in to do something. I want to form you into a community of life, a place where you can live together in some kind of beautiful way we call the kingdom of God, people there for other people.”

So it began by calling the people together and saying, “All right, I know you know how power works in the world and how human works, and gods work in the same way. So I’m going to show you a god that is not like any of the other gods.” So he comes onto the scene and said, “I’m calling you into a unified body called the kingdom. So here’s what I want to do. I want to enter in and give you direction. So I want you to listen to me, and I’m going to speak to your mind and your will. Your mind understands things, and your will can make things happen. So I’m going to tell you, I’m a God who has a desire to save you, and if you do what I say, I will save you. And the doing is about perfecting yourself. Make yourself a better person.” So the Old Testament is all based on human’s ego and will, and God speaks to it. He said, “All right, I want you to focus on yourself and make yourself into the best person, because if you don’t, I’m going to kill you if you don’t. If you do it, I will give you life.” Now, that’s the beginning, and think of it. It’s the way we begin teaching a child, not that we threaten them so much with eternal punishment, but we’re saying, “Look, you do what I say, and we will take care of you and make you part of our community. But if you don’t, we’ll reject you.” So that’s the community God tried to form in the Old Testament, rules and laws calling on the mind to understand that it makes logical sense to do what you’re told, because you’ll be rewarded. It’s all focused on the ego and the self, and so what comes out of it is perfection. What do you have in the church when Jesus comes back to – the first time God comes in the flesh, male figure? What is it? It’s completely out of balance. It’s not doing what it’s intended to do, or let’s just say it did enough of what it intended to do, but now there’s got to be something more. So you have an Old Testament and a New Testament. What’s the difference? The Old Testament focuses on mind and the will and getting things done correctly, and the danger of that is, once the will decides what is correct and another will decides something else is correct, then you have a real problem. So there’s something about the Old Testament that can only go so far in bringing about something good, and that thing that it worked so hard for was justice. You do bad, you’re going to be treated bad. You do good, you’ll be treated good. It worked. It helped, but it never produced – it’s like a vineyard. It never produced what it was intended to produce, grapes, wine.

What is the symbol in scripture of wine and grapes? Well, Jesus used it so beautifully when he said, “Wine is that calming thing that, when you take it in, it’s intoxicating, and you relax, and things seem better,” even though they’re not maybe. But what he’s saying is, “There is something about wine that is a symbol of what I want to empower you to be, and that is a human being that creates a place of warmth, closeness and peace. And what I did to make that clear is I did something that just flies in the face of the ego and the will. I accepted a way of life that my mind and my will just said, ‘No, no, that’s wrong. That’s wrong. I am here to save the world, and I’m going to save it by doing exactly what I’m doing, and I’m going to do this work.” And Jesus was a human being like the rest of us, and it seemed logical that that’s what he had to do. But God said, “No. If you’ll surrender to something that doesn’t make any sense to your mind and your will, you’re going to get closer to what I want you to be. So surrender to something that only another part of you can understand – the heart.” So the Old Testament works with the ego and the will and gives rules and laws, punishment and reward, and that just didn’t produce what we hoped it would produce or what our mind would think it could produce. So he said, “No, here’s the problem. I’m going to create another kind of vineyard, and the vineyard is that I want somehow to be able to come into that vineyard and enter into the work that the vineyard is there to accomplish. I want you to know you need me to change you into who I know you’re called to be.” Not that that is forcing you to be someone you’re not, but that’s the evolution of you becoming everything that God always intended you to be, like the one who created you. The God in the Old Testament was the God of justice. The God in the New Testament is the God of mercy, forgiveness, intimacy, closeness, understanding, compassion. That’s in us, but it’s not in us in a way that we can get to it without some kind of support, without some kind of insight, and all Jesus is saying is, “Look, I showed you in my life what the insight is.” How do you surrender to something that doesn’t make a lot of sense to the mind or to the will? How do you open yourself to this part of you that’s like a seed that’s been grown since the creation of human beings that’s moving ever closer to this world that God intended us to live in, a world of peace and a world of goodness, all those words that Paul says in the that second reading? Graciousness, love, peace, intimacy, these are the things that the new kingdom is going to bring about, not because human beings are so capable of doing it, but because they’re capable of being empowered to do it. We have the capacity to surrender to a truth that’s bigger than us. That’s what’s missing. How do I surrender to something that I can’t figure out with my head? How do I give in to a power that’s going to make me feel that I’m impotent in a world of power and control? That’s called redemption. It’s called transformation. It has to be accepted.

What Jesus does in this vision of the kingdom in the New Testament is saying there’s going to be a new covenant, a new relationship. Jeremiah, 500 years before the coming of Christ, prophesied that something would have to happen to human beings where God would no longer tell them what to do and frighten them or motivate them by reward and punishment. No, it’s going to be replaced by God writing his law on your heart so that nobody will be asked to learn how to live a life of peace and love and goodness. It will be in them. It’s there. It’s potentially written on your heart, not on tablets of stone. It’s interesting that Jesus calls the Pharisees dead inside. “You have hearts of stone. You’re not receptive to anything outside of you that doesn’t make sense to your will and your mind.” And he’s saying, “Look, unless you let me enter into you, unless you let me be the vine and you be the branches – I will produce fruit through you, but you must let me in so that I can touch and change and renew and empower.” It’s interesting that egos don’t necessarily want to be empowered by another force. They want to be the source of power, and once you have that mindset, there’s no negotiating. There’s no coming to anything, because the only way you can come to something is to give up something that you believed in, something you thought was the right way. And that’s exactly what the death of Christ on the cross was. He had another way that he thought he would save the world besides ending his ministry in three short years. He had to surrender to something that made no sense, and where did he get that? How did he do that? He would always say, “I didn’t do it. I can’t do it. I don’t even want it, but I will allow it to happen if God will empower me to do it.”

Not my will but your will, that’s the whole moment of redemption. How do you give yourself over to something that doesn’t rely upon you, that demands you surrender to some power that’s there? And we’re made for that kind of surrender. We’re destined for it, and it’s going to come. It cannot not come, because it’s promised. If you don’t believe that we continue to move and evolve into that figure that Jesus promises we can be, you’ll be falling into despair. So we have to see clearly the world around us, and where it’s not functioning effectively, we have to say, “Why?” And we look at the reasons, and then we say, “Okay, how do we change that? How do I do it?” And there’s a voice that says, “No, I’ll do it for you. Just trust me. Trust me to enter into you and to other people, and when you let me in, I’ll be a force that will eventually change the world.” It’s called consciousness. The more people that understand it, the more people that believe it, the more people that are empowered to be a negotiator in these times of extremes, the more they appear, the more they grow, the more that your world will change. That’s the trust that we have to have in a God who said, “I will never leave you, and my kingdom will come.”

Father, your life is promised to be a part of us, that you want to dwell within us. You want to transform us, but when you do it, you never take away our freedom. You never rob us of our sense of our value, but you enhance it in some mysterious way. Help us to believe that the salvation of the world, the growth we want to see take place in the world to bring us to a place of life and peace is something you intend, and all you ask us to do is open our hearts to you and let you use us. And we need to trust in that to know that it can change the world. It’s not about who’s more powerful. It’s about who is the most open to a wisdom that you’ll share, and that wisdom will bring life and goodness and peace. And we trust in that, oh Lord, amen.

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Ezekiel 18:25-28 | Philippians 2:1-11 or 2:1-5 | Matthew 21:28-32

Oh God, who manifests your almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy, bestow, we pray, your grace abundantly upon us, and make those hastening to attain your promises heirs to the treasures of heaven. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

It’s confusing to a lot of people; the way God has revealed himself to us. It’s clear that there were human beings for a very long time before God began to speak to them, when he spoke to Abraham. And he had a longing that he wanted Abraham to understand, and that was he wanted to call the people separate from the way the world was, a people that would be dedicated to him, that would listen to him most especially and grow from what he wanted to teach them. And as the story evolved, it became clear that there was a focus in what God was going to do for people. He wanted to free them from slavery. He wanted to free them from a master who would control them and tell them what they had to do, and if they did it, they were rewarded. If they didn’t, they were punished, and that’s exactly the way people understood gods. It made sense to their egos, because that makes a lot of sense to the ego. Do wrong, and you’re punished. Do good, and you’re rewarded. The focus is on my actions, what I do, and so many times people would say, “Well, God is so unfair. He’s always condemning us.” And this first reading is beautiful, because it’s trying to say, “Well, look, you’ve got to be careful about judging God. You think he’s unfair. You think when you do something wrong, he condemns you, and if you do something right, he rewards you. And you think that’s wrong. What Ezekiel tries to say is, “Look, God is not the one punishing. God does not go after the sinner and want them to be destroyed. If they choose to do something that is destructive, they will experience destruction. If they do something that is life-giving, they will experience life.” So whether or not or – how we’re treated by God is not unfair, because we set it up. We are the ones that choose to live in the way that will either produce life or produce death. If we are who we’re intended to be and we act on that, we will find life. If we choose to be someone we’re not and choose to be something that is against our very nature, we’re going to be miserable. So that doesn’t seem unfair to God, and it isn’t unfair.

So what is the distinction between the two? What is it about doing what we are called to do and finding life and doing what we’re not called to do and finding death? Well, St. Paul, in the next reading, makes it pretty clear. He said basically when we saw, when we feel the full revelation of who God is in Jesus, we see something that is very different than the God of the Old Testament. In a way the God of the Old Testament was master. He was demanding, and he said, “Do this or die,” and it looked like he was the one causing all the punishment. Well, that was something the ego certainly understood, and we have to understand, at the time that those readings were proclaimed for the first time, they time they were written down, all of that, this was all at a time when human beings were very different than we are now, meaning there’s been an evolution of consciousness that began at the very beginning of the human race, whenever it started. And human beings have been growing and growing more in response to a seed that has been placed in every soul, every human being that is made to evolve and develop into what God has always intended us to be, and we are surprisingly, according to the New Testament and according to the revelation that comes through Jesus, we are made in the image and likeness of God, and we are to become like him. And so in the Old Testament, it would seem easy that people would say, “Okay, I need to master myself. I need to be like God who masters us and demands that we change.” That would make sense to an ego that is in charge, and a part of us that’s who we are is yet undeveloped. It’s like finding a criminal or maybe a sociopath. And a sociopath doesn’t have any empathy or compassion, and so when they start acting in a way that is destructive to others, someone has to step in and say, “Stop it. Control that behavior. Don’t do it, or you will be punished.”

So you can see that there is this image of being a master in life, to your life, that is grounded in the Old Testament, but then in the New Testament, God does the most amazing thing. He reveals himself as someone who is not what we thought he was, and so when Jesus comes into the world as the perfect representation of who God is, he comes in in a certain appearance. His appearance is that of a slave, a servant. Now, Jesus is God incarnate, so what’s happening for the first time, though there are hints to it all through the Old Testament, who God ultimately really is and what we are intended to understand as who he is, he’s a servant God, not a master God. Yet the master God is something that keeps creeping into religion. When I was a young boy learning about my religion, I figured that I had to master myself by making sure I stopped sinning. So control, control, control. Don’t let yourself do those things. Focus on your actions, and if your actions are bad, then you’ve got to step in and use your will and your mind to figure out, “This is wrong. This is dangerous. Don’t do it.” And you’re controlling your behavior. And for many people, that’s all religion has ever been, a way to control behavior, to change your actions. It’s an action-centered religion, a moralistic religion. That’s the antithesis of what God really wants. He’s not interested in your ego controlling your life. He’s more interested in something else much more subtle, and that is discovering your nature. Who are you? And yet everybody is on a, maybe, different level of how far they’ve evolved. Some people come into the world. They’re way further evolved than other people, but there are more and more and more people in the world that understand the only way to find life in this world is to turn your life around, from being the master of your actions to being a servant to other people’s needs. That’s exactly what Paul is trying to say, and he’s saying, when God revealed himself as a servant God, that is the glory of God, that he forgives, understands, loves and gently continues to move us in a direction of being more and more interested in being who we’re intended to be as being a servant. Use your gifts and your life for the good of others. It’s the only thing that really satisfies the heart.

The mind loves to be in charge and in control and master over people. Leadership is usually considered to be very good when it’s strong and powerful and makes decisions without considering all the ramifications of those decisions. They seem to be – in the eyes of the ego, these are great leaders, powerful leaders. Then you get somebody in there who is a servant’s heart, has a servant’s heart, and they are a different kind of leader, and they can’t make these sweeping changes and decisions without caring for every individual. And once you start caring for the individual, it’s very difficult to make major decisions. And the only way you can do that is with the grace of God’s presence inside of you, which is another way to say the seed that’s placed inside of you and me in terms of who we are intended to be is there in seed form, and we keep moving closer and closer and closer to it. And the beginning of really being able to discover it is discover who God really is, because when we know who he is, we know what we’re made to be, what we’re destined to be, and when we’re not like that, there is no rest, there is no calm, there is no real peace. So when I describe life this way, I think it makes sense. What I’m saying is that we’re here to change. That’s it. We continue to move, evolve and grow from a master spirit to a servant spirit.

So look at who Jesus is talking to in the gospel. It’s always important to say, “Who is Jesus talking to?” He’s not talking to his disciples. He’s not talking to the people in the streets. He’s talking to the chief priests and all the elders, all the people that represent religion, and that religion was a religion of a master, control, perfection. And these men fell into it, and they did it. And the irony of any perfectionist is that they have a low self-esteem, and they’re desperate to look better, stronger, more powerful, more perfect. So when you’re in that world of perfection, in the world of mastering your behavior so that you look to yourself and to others as perfect, you are so far off the track that God is calling us into. That is something essential when we’re dealing with people with a very low level of consciousness. They have no way of understanding what it’s like and why they should ever want to serve someone else, and those people are still with us. We call them sociopaths. They have no empathy, no compassion, and they will always be in the world. And they’re in the world for a reason. They’re in the world so that people can see the misery that they create. They can see that it doesn’t work. They can see the anxiety and the stress that’s in that life form. When you talk about a world of peace and a world of union and communion and oneness, that role of being a master and controlling people never creates unity and oneness and peace. It creates the opposite, separation, anxiety, stress. So when he’s talking to the Pharisees and scribes, he’s saying, “I want you to understand something. You have been called into the world to represent my Father, and you’ve bought into something that is the antithesis of my Father, but it was truly something that you were not innocent of. You’re not innocent. I mean, you are innocent in the sense that that’s the way, in a way, you can read the Old Testament. He’s a master that’s demanding that, if you don’t do what you’re told, you’re crushed.” And that’s the way they treated other people.

It’s so interesting. When you think of these men, these chief priests and elders of the people, think of the way they dealt with sinners. They weren’t allowed to talk to them. They weren’t allowed to get near them. That’s the interesting thing about perfection. Perfection is getting rid of everything that isn’t perfect. It’s like Nazi Germany. If we kill and destroy everything imperfect, we will be perfect, when the truth is very different. When you embrace and accept everything imperfect, when you forgive it, when you long for it to change, when you serve that person who’s struggling with something that’s self-destructive and long for them to change, then you’re in the kingdom. What I love about this is a subtle thing that I noticed when I was reading this over and over again. The first master goes and says, “My son, would you go out and work?” And he said, “No, I’m not,” but he changes his mind and went. Well, that’s what he’s begging these disciples, these elders to think about. You’ve got to change. But when he goes to the other guy, who is the perfect one, who represents them, what’s his response? “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I’m always here to do everything you want.” That’s the way the Pharisees presented themselves to the world. “I am doing everything that God wants me to do. I do it perfectly with perfection. I know the law. I follow every one of those rules and laws.” But their hearts were so far from what God wanted them to be. They had no compassion, no interest in anyone else but themselves, and they wanted to seem to the world as – they were presenting to the world an image of who you would become if you surrendered to their teaching. And look at them. They were hated by the people. Why? Because they knew, the people knew they had no concern for them. They had no interest in them, always called to do something that was an action. They were treated as if they were there to serve the temple. The temple was there for them, but they were not ever receiving from the temple, only demanded – demanding, demanding, demanding from the temple. Sacrifice this. Buy this. It was expensive, and these men were powerful. Their image was perfection. They were wealthy. They got wealthy, they got rich over all of this, so there was money involved. It’s the classic syndrome of power, and what Jesus wants so much to teach them is that, “That is death, and you’re choosing it.”

Now, he forgives them for this. “Father, they don’t know what they’re doing.” At the same time, he is desperate to show them that, when anyone acts against who they are, really are, when they do not follow their basic, core instincts that flow from their heart, their compassion, their understanding, when they don’t do that, they die. And that’s so interesting, because that’s the way Jesus talked about the Pharisees. “You’re dead. You’re – inside you’re dead.” What does that mean? The very nature that God has created for them to evolve into was absolutely so undernourished and so unfed that it died, and that’s the great tragedy. That’s the heart of sin.

Father, your love, your gentleness, your kindness is beyond our imagining. Your desire for us to experience the fullness of the life that you’ve created for us is your burning passion. You will do anything for us. Bless us with, first and foremost, awareness of your servanthood, your desire to serve us, and let us receive this gift. As we receive it, it changes our awareness of who we are, and we begin to reflect you in everyone around us in terms of our dealings with one another. Then we’ve found the kingdom. Bless us with the kingdom. It’s so needed today, more than ever, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Isaiah 55:6-9 | Philippians 1:20C-24, 27A | Matthew 20:1-16A

Oh God, who founded all the commands of your sacred law upon love of you and of our neighbor, grant that by keeping your precepts we may merit to obtain eternal life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

I think back to my earliest days 80 years ago when I began my life on this earth, and I think about the things I learned about my God. It was so clear to me that God made sense. He was very much like I was, in the sense that he would tell me that, if I would be a good little boy, understand his will and do it, then he would love me, and if I didn’t do that, then he would disown me, well, not just disown me. I was frightened, as my seven-year-old mind, when I heard these words for the first time. It basically said that he would destroy me. He would burn me forever in hell. All of that made total sense to me. It was not mysterious, and I think for the most part my early part of my life, maybe more than just the early part but maybe until I started really thinking and meditating and wondering and entering into silence more and more. After I retired, I began to see that, no, this is not the God who is. This is not the God who created me. He is not a logical, just God. He is so much more than that, and the thing that became more and more clear to me as I grew in my latter years of understanding human nature, I realized that we, human beings, are some very interesting, complex creatures, and we have these different aspects of ourselves that we need to learn how to use and how to work with. One is the mind, and one is the heart, and one is the will. And to me, I never thought much about the heart. I always thought about the mind and the will. I was told who God is, and my will would say, “I believe.” I was told what I should do by my mind, and then my will would say, “I will do that.” And that seemed to be all that was necessary.

I guess I was in my, gosh, late 60s when I began to learn about the heart and what it is and what it does, and I began to wonder about it. I remember looking up in the concordance to how many times heart was mentioned in scripture, and there were column after column after column after column. And then I looked at the word love, and it didn’t have nearly as many. Now, granted there are loving and loved or different words, but nevertheless, what surprised me was how often the scriptures made reference to the heart. And then I learned that, in ancient civilizations, the heart was always considered to be the very center of the being. It was who they were. They wouldn’t think his mind was who he was, but his heart was who he was. And what’s the difference between the two? Well, the beautiful thing about the different, and I’ll explain it in a moment, is that they’re made for each other – made for each other. The mind logically figures things out. It plans. It executes. It figures out what’s needed. It’s the tool that, I would say, we have in our being that allows us to live in the material world as it is, but then we know there’s another world besides the material world. And the other world is the spiritual world, and somehow my religion never really made that crossover into the spiritual world like it should have, because it all seemed so practical and so ordinary and so natural that you do good, you get good, you do bad and you get bad. And earning love seemed to make a lot of sense to me from the family of origin that I lived in. That’s what I saw working around me, so it all sounded just fine. What I didn’t realize is that the goal of religion, the goal of God’s plan for you and for me has little to do with perfection, in the way the mind understands perfection, but has everything to do with something else. The something else is so interesting. It’s not about perfection in terms of doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong but to become someone, to become who God has intended us to be, that the task of religion is not perfection in the sense of using your mind and your will to do everything God tells you to do, but it’s much more mysterious. It’s about the heart and the will, and the heart knows something that the mind can’t fathom, and it’s called mystery. And the mystery is that there is something in our being, like a seed that was planted there by God, that is growing and becoming, and what it’s becoming is a pure reflection of who God is. We’re here on this planet to discover self, who we are, and nothing would please God more than you and myself thinking, reflecting, being silent, asking God, “Who are you, God? And who am I, and what is it we’re here to do? What do you want from me?” He doesn’t want perfection. He wants a relationship. He wants intimacy. He wants unity, oneness.

It’s so interesting that the mind is so prone to making divisions among people. It likes to divide the world, and one of the most basic things that happened in the evolution of religion is a man by the name of Mani, who was a prophet in Iran – I guess it was probably in the third century, late third century. He came up with a way of taking all religions and looking at them and saying, “Here’s the essence of what religion is. It’s about a teaching that says there’s a great chasm between the material world and the spirit world, and the two are not compatible. One is good, and one is bad.” The material world by nature is bad. The spiritual world is good. So the less you can engage in the things of the earth, the things of the body, the better you are, and I look at that kind of spirituality, and it’s still pervasive in the world today of Christianity. The body’s our problem. Material things are our problem. Money, power, all those things are our biggest problem. No, our biggest problem is disunity, not connecting to who God really is and who we really are and what we’re really here for. So the pressure on us is not to be perfect but to be honest, transparent, open, to be receptive to who God is and who we are, and the thing that is so interesting, when I started my faith, I had – I was just a seven-, eight-year-old boy, and I was studying the catechism every year in Catholic school. And I remember there was a thing about why did God make us. It was one of the questions. Well, God made us to know him, to love him and to serve him. I need to figure out who he is. I need to muster up love for him, and I must love one another, I must love others. And I think to myself, “Well, how do I do that?” I guess it meant that I had to go to some expert who would know who God is, the church, the priest, the writers of theology, and I would say, “Tell me who God is.” And they would tell me, and then my will would kick in and say, “Okay, I believe that because of who’s speaking. I believe what you said.” And then the love of him was something that I should come up with. So I should learn to love a God who is just, who can condemn me as well as save me, and it was a little hard to muster up love in that direction. But I sort of said, “Okay, I do love him,” but I didn’t feel in love with him. Then to serve him, well, what does God need from you and from me? Does he need us to love him? Is he lonely without our love? No.

I’ve said this to you often. I love this quote of Catherine of Siena. When she asked God, “How can I love you? How can I love you?” He said, “I don’t need your love. I need you for me as a response to who I am and what I long for you to be. I want you to love your brothers and sisters. That’s all I ask.” St. Paul, in that second reading, says it so clearly. “If I stay here, it’s for you.” It’s so interesting, that shift from my own imperfection and evaluating everything I’m doing, whether it’s right or wrong and mostly coming up with the things that are wrong and not being able to change them and feeling a sort of undercurrent of shame all my life. “There’s something wrong with me. I never can do what I’m supposed to do,” living in that fog of shame. And he’s saying, “No, that’s not – if you want to serve me, you just serve your brothers and sisters. That’s all. Be there for them.” And I think to myself, “Well, that’s a tall order. How can I be there for them? How can I know what to say to somebody?” If I go to my mind and say, “I’ve read about this problem. This is what the experts say to people with this problem. This is what I say to these people with that problem.” No, he’s not saying that. He’s saying, “If you in your heart intend to be who I call you to be, you will know that I’m there for you to love someone else, not you doing that act of love but you bringing that love that is in me for another to them in a way that makes them feel, know, experience love.” To know him is to have him speak to us of who he is. To love him is not to muster up love in ourselves but to somehow allow him to love us that way. He’s going to give me everything I need to give to the people that I love, and that love that comes through me that is his changes them. It’s like having all the money in the world that you need to fix a problem. I carry within myself the wisdom and the presence of a healing, loving God that I can share with you by willing it. That’s service. So it’s not to know him. It’s to allow God – maybe here’s a good way to say it – not to know him but to be known to him, to know ourselves as he knows us, and then not to love him but to allow him to love us so that we feel that he’s filled with nothing but kindness and gentleness and mercy for everything. He puts us through difficult things to grow and to change, but always the intention is, “I want you to be the person I intended you to be,” because that is the place where we find fullness and happiness, by myself, imperfect but not without an incredible, powerful gift.

Mani founded this religion that was all about good and bad and about evil and goodness, and it was all about duality, duality, duality. And Manichaeism has been a heresy that started in that third century and lasted until the 13th century, but it lingers always everywhere. Why? Because the mind understands it so clearly, so easily, where the heart is this strange organ that you have to work with. You have to enter into it. You have to listen to the heart. I remember when I first started this work, it seemed strange to me, but I didn’t go to the heart saying, “Heart, you speak to me.” But what helped me more than anything else is to listen to scripture., and what it said over and over is, “I am in you. I am with you. I live in your heart, not your mind, not your will, not just your flesh, but I dwell in this organ that also thinks, that is connected to your endocrine system and to your nervous system and all that. It is the font of everything we need, and the font is not the heart organ but the person who dwells there, the God who is there. And one of the things that has helped me more than anything else, in terms of trying to get in touch with the wisdom that is there, is through this exercise of entering into that place of stillness, knowing there is the energy, the life force, the love, the wisdom. Everything we need is there, and when we open ourselves to being a channel for it, we are in the closest union we can be to who God intends all of us to be.

It seems too good to be true. When I was younger, I always thought, “Well, the only people who could have any kind of holiness are the people who go away from the world,” much like Mani would approve, separate yourself from the material world, because that’s where everything is so negative and bad, and there’s power, and there’s control, and there’s violence.” No, you have to separate yourself from all of that. Don’t go near any of that. Stay away from evil, and go into this isolated, sort of enclosed space of you and God alone. I’m not saying that there’s something wrong with that. There’s a calling to that mystical life where they do this work, and they pray, and they’re valuable. People in monasteries, convents, all these places of separating from the world has [sic] its place, but for the most of us, we’re called to be in the world, our bodies engaged in the spiritual work. And when you understand it and see it for the beauty that it is, it makes so much sense, even to my mind. That would be the way God would work, not asking me to be acting like him on my own – that would be egocentric – but to be his presence and to bring that presence to the person that we see closest to us that needs something and believing it flows from my heart to theirs by my intention.

Father, it’s beyond our mind’s comprehension to fathom who you are. You are more than any one of us could ever have imagined a God could be, and yet we resist it, because it takes us beyond our logical categories. And so bless us with this heart wisdom, this place we can go to learn about you and to feel your presence and to know the value that we are to our brothers and sisters, and we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

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Sirach 27:30–28:7 | Romans 14:7-9 | Matthew 18:21-35

Look upon us, oh God, creator and ruler of all things, and that we may feel the working of your mercy, grant that we may serve you with all our hearts. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The theme of today’s liturgy is a fascinating theme about why we’re here, who we really are, why God has made us as we are and what is our task while we’re here. I’m going to start with the second reading from Romans, because it makes it clear that one of the things that we’re here to do always is to live for the Lord. If we live for him, that means we will find life, and we will do the things that bring life to other people, and the main thing in this reading is the idea that we’ve come into the world not to take care of ourselves but to take care of others. In the Old Testament the demand of God was so clear to his people. “I want you to obey me. Obey me. Do what I tell you, and then I will be there for you.” The level of consciousness of those people was obviously fairly low, because they only understood something like, “If you don’t do what I tell you to do, you will be seriously punished.” And over and over again, you see in the Old Testament, when they turn back to their own ways, God was furious, and when they did something negative to him, like forgot him, refused to honor him, he refused to honor them and instead would condemn them and even decided at one point in their journey with Moses that he wanted to kill them all, because they were so unfaithful and so ungrateful. And it created rage in God. A vengeful God is very much a part of the Old Testament. The thing that’s so risky about studying the Old Testament and knowing it is to understand that what God was always doing was working with people where they were. What they could understand he could teach them, but if he was asking them to go beyond their comprehension, beyond their ability to comprehend something, it would be like teaching a five-year-old calculus. It wouldn’t work. So what was it about the consciousness back then? It was that it was very, very self-centered. It remained primarily in the brain, and what ancient human beings could understand because of, in a way, their almost animal nature was they understood things that made sense to their ego. If it made sense, they would do it. If somebody attacked you and you just didn’t do anything, they’d come back and attack you again and attack you again, and so it made a logical sense that, if someone attacks you, the best way to protect yourself is to destroy them. So you destroy the enemy in order to protect yourself.

By the time the New Testament comes and a new level of consciousness exists, a phrase would come out of the lips of Jesus that said something like this: if you live by the sword, you will die by the sword. If you return evil for evil, you will live in nothing but evil, just as radical, radical change in the New Testament. And one way to imagine this is there is something in the seed that God has placed in every single one of us that is a human being more and more like the God who created us, and since God had to work with us as we expected him to be, in the Old Testament he was vengeful, and he was the source of everything. Everything good came from God; everything bad came from God. The goal of the Old Testament was monotheism. There is only one God out of all of these gods. I think to myself, “Of all of these gods,” and I think to myself, “Today where do we go for the truth?” God is truth, and I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a world more confusing as to who is the one speaking the truth. Is it a politician? Is it a businessman? Is it a pharmaceutical person? Who is speaking the truth? And the one we trust in and we believe in, they become our kind of god. We surrender to that. You can see how dangerous it is to surrender to a human figure that has authority and power over us. The difference between turning our life over to them and turning our life over to the God who exists is the difference between living in truth and lie. So the goal of the New Testament was to make a major shift from the Old Testament to the New Testament, and this was a major shift that could only happen unless there was some kind of enormous increase in people’s consciousness. And there’s a lot of things we can call redemption. Your sins are forgiven, freed, but one of the things I love to talk about is, when we were redeemed, there was a wakening in our consciousness of what our true nature is to the level that we realized there is something in us that is not made for revenge, hate, destruction but something else, something really different.

So you look at the first reading, and it’s clear that, when we look at this reading, we see that there’s a condemnation of anger, wrath, vengeance, yet you kind of listen to this, and you see God is saying to people, “Okay, if you are vengeful to other people, I will be vengeful to you.” So there is God in the Old Testament being who he doesn’t want us to be. A vengeful God will suffer the Lord’s vengeance. That’s what it says in Sirach, but if you go down further, you see the seeds of something new. He said, “You should try to forgive your neighbors in justice. When you pray, your own sins will be forgiven. When you pray for your enemies, your sins are forgiven.” You can’t forgive yourself, but if you forgive someone else, God will forgive you. Remember that you are here, it says, for a while. Remember death and decay and cease from sin. Okay, what does that mean? Well, think of it this way: in the reading from Romans, we have this image of Christ came into the world and died so we could all have life, and he’s going to be Lord of both the dead and the living. So whatever this is, this increase in consciousness, this growth of understanding that vengeance is not what God really wants but he wants forgiveness and understanding and compassion, and when you have it, you’re living for the Lord, not for yourself but for the Lord. And whether you live or die, according to St. Paul, he’s saying you came into the world to give life to the world. That’s what you’re here for. He said, “Remember that Christ came and died for everyone so that everyone could come to life.” And he’s Lord both of the dead and the living. Now, this is a little side thing, so don’t be distracted by this, but what I find fascinating about that is, if he’s Lord of both the dead and the living, that means he is a source of life for both. He keeps you alive, on this earth alive, and the dead never die. So he has people living in this world and in the next, and their goal is the same, to take care of each other. The only way you can express love for God is by giving love to another person. God does not need you to love him back. You can be appreciative and thankful and grateful for all he does for you, but he doesn’t need you to say, “Oh, I love you so much.” What he needs is for you to believe that he loves you so much and that that belief says to you that you’ve been given something from him to do for other people that you could never do yourself. Imagine, this gift of living for another person, always wanting what’s best for them, never reverting to a lower level of consciousness where you want to hurt them or destroy them or compete with them, whatever, that isn’t in human nature’s natural thing. It’s a gift of a spiritual life that’s been placed inside of us as that seed. It needs to grow and become fully mature.

So Jesus tells a story about this transformation that’s about to come, and of course Peter asks him a typical question after Jesus talks about forgiveness. He said, “Now, wait a minute. How many times do we have to forgive our brothers and sisters? Because we’re not used to that. That’s not in our DNA. We punish them when they do not do what we ask them to do. You, God, punish. Your father, Jesus, punishes people that don’t do what they do.” He said, “Well, let me tell you a story.” So it’s about a man obviously who has a debt, and he goes to his master, God, and said, “Please, I can’t pay this back. I can’t become the person I’m supposed to be in order to please you. I can’t. I’ve got a selfish, self-centered mind that has a logical dimension to it that always looks out for self first.” It’s natural, but when he turns, this man, turns to the image of the Father in this reading, he discovers that there’s a compassion in this God that was never revealed before as fully as it is here. And he feels that he has just been gifted, but listen to this. He doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t take it in. I’d wonder – I’d love to talk to him after he was forgiven, on his way to see the other person who owed him money. What do you think the conversation was like? “God, that guy was stupid. I just talked him to letting me out of it, and I got out of it. That was great. That was a great deal for me, so I got served. Thank you. Now, I’m still a taker. So I’ve got some more money, and now I think I can even get some more than that.” So greed steps in. “So I’ll not only get back what I owed somebody else, but I’m going to get some more from somebody else.” It’s just a typical figure that hasn’t yet been transformed, and so what Jesus is longing for, desiring is to move human beings into a new place of understanding, which is a new organ in your body, in a sense. It’s the heart. The heart by nature forgives, understands, has compassion, has empathy. The mind, by its kind of basic nature, is more logical and practical and self-focused. They work together wonderfully well, but they need each other to balance each – they need to balance one another. The heart, that thinks and feels just like the brain does, can override a mind’s selfishness, but how does it work? It has to work through a transformation that human beings cannot make. I can’t move the center of my being from my mind to my heart and open up myself to the presence of God there in my heart unless I’m redeemed. Something shifts inside of me. And the disciples hadn’t yet been redeemed when they asked these questions.

I just would love to know the conversations that the disciples had with Jesus in the 40 days that he spent after he died and they were already filled with the Spirit or just about to be filled with the Spirit, however timing it was. What an amazing transformation, and if we don’t believe in transformation by grace, we can never enter into this new world, because it is not something that we are capable of doing. It has to be a gift, and the gift is so sweet and so potentially powerful and brings so much peace. But it’s a gift. It has to be believed in.

Father, our ego resists being given a gift when it would rather be the one that creates the thing that it needs to be. It loves to be the source of its own stuff. So bless us with this transformative grace that you won for us when you gave yourself over to evil and refused to give in to your strong ego that would want nothing like what you accepted. Such a strong, beautiful image of who we can become, someone like you, through your gift of self, letting go of all that control. Awaken us to this great gift to surrender to a grace that enables us to be exactly who we’re meant to be and who we’re called to be, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Ezekiel 33:7-9 | Romans 13:8-10 | Matthew 18:15-20

Oh God, by whom we are redeemed and receive adoption, look graciously upon your beloved sons and daughters that those who believe in Christ may receive true freedom and an everlasting inheritance. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Having been a priest for over 53 years, it seems clear to me that I do not have the same images of the role of the church that I did when I began my ministry, and what I pray that has happened to me is that I’ve evolved into a greater understanding of who God is and who I am and what we’re here to accomplish. And to me, always any position that one takes, where they have authority, they have great power, and that line that’s in the gospel, is also in the readings last week, is a really powerful one, very hard to understand fully, because it’s easy to misunderstand. And that is one has the power, the power to be able to bind on earth, and whatever they bind on earth is bound in heaven. Whatever they loose on earth is loosed in heaven. It might sound as if you’re giving a human being the power to determine whether or not someone is saved. Excommunication would be the way that some people would mind – some people imagine binding would be binding someone to a regulation that excludes them from the community, and if you lose someone from that, you bring them back into the community, and the church used that tactic for centuries, especially during the Middle Ages to achieve what they believed were something good. They would excommunicate a king or a whole country, but the danger in that is that it seems that it gives to one person the authority that only belongs to God. No one but God can exclude someone from the kingdom of God, not so much because they don’t have the power, because they couldn’t possibly know enough about the person to make that kind of judgment. So the shadow of the church is often this image of they are in charge of your life, and they will tell you whether or not you are acceptable to God. And when that is done with the thing these readings focus on, it works. When it’s not, it’s a disaster. So let’s look at, again, these readings. They are powerful.

The first thing that we understand from Ezekiel, a long time ago he was basically telling the people that they have, as believers, a responsibility to one another, that if someone does something wicked and you just let it go or worse, treat them as they were treating someone else, do something wicked to them and condemn them, if you do that, you might be responsible for their death. But if you take time to warn them or try to show them the truth and they still refuse, then you will not die for their guilt, but they will die for their own guilt. It’s an amazing statement from way back when, but it’s a kind of legalistic formula, saying you have a responsibility to protect people from themselves and what they do to themselves and what they do to others. You have a responsibility to your brothers and sisters, which is something that is intrinsic to one of the most basic qualities that the gospel calls us to – love – love.

So Paul comes in and says the whole essence of Christianity is to enable you to grow into the nature that God has created in you, and every human being is made to be an imitation, a reflection of God. And God is love so that within every one of us there is this seed, this beautiful thing that longs to grow into fullness, and it’s called care, compassion, empathy, love. And so the beautiful thing about Paul, he’s saying, “Okay, when you look at all the rules and laws that we have in the Old Testament that demanded certain actions from people, when you boil it all down, you don’t have to have rules and laws anymore.” You just have to have a person whose heart is ignited, awakened to the role that it has of being the container, the holder of God’s divinity, and when God’s divinity is inside of you and when you allow it, it gives you the freedom to act in accord with your nature. I think it’s so interesting. For most people and for me, at many times, I was so worried about breaking a law, because I thought if I did that, I would be condemned by the church, by a priest, by a righteous Christian. So often what I did was try to be good, because I didn’t want to endure the rejection that would come with being bad. That’s a motive, but it’s a very selfish motive. It’s not based in the good of other people. It’s based in our own good. If there’s one way to talk about love, it’s to talk about a shift, a shift between I am the center of my life to you are the center of my life, in the sense that my role here in this world is to be a conduit of God’s mercy and God’s forgiveness. And God’s mercy and forgiveness is a combination of this beautiful thing called love and justice – and justice. It’s clear. If you look at the history of the church, you can see where God dealt differently with people in the Old Testament than he did in the New Testament. He told everyone in the New Testament that the obligation that God has, when he dwells in another person, is to be able to free them from the way evil insidiously causes other people to do evil. When you’re a low level of consciousness and you’re all about yourself and someone has done something wrong, particularly to you, instead of saying, “I would love for this person to see through what they’re doing and notice that they’ve caused pain that’s unnecessary. They’re causing themselves pain. They’re on a journey that’s going to end up in a disaster, and I want so much to save them.” Instead of that, we often have this thing called revenge, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and we want to do the same thing to them that they did to us. It’s a normal human, lower-level of conscience response. You do evil to me; I’ll do it back to you. That law that said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was trying to tone it down so at least, if you did that to someone else, you wouldn’t do more to them than they did to you. So if they plucked out one of your eyes, you could pluck out one of theirs but not two. So that was kind of the beginning of this growth in consciousness, that there’s something intrinsically important about being an agent of bringing something to people that frees them from evil. It’s called truth, but truth to take root inside of you needs to have a conduit, a way of getting to you. And the way it gets to you is through a loving intention – a loving intention.

Jesus said to his disciples, “I have to give in to evil. I have to allow these people to do these terrible things to me, and in response to that, I will love them, and I will forgive them. And it will radically change them, but if I do what you ask me to do, if I do what the crowd jeered at me to do – “Hey, if you’re Jesus, if you’re the Son of God, come down from that cross –” they didn’t say this, but it would be clear in the minds of those who saw what was happening and knew how evil it was – “And destroy all these people that are trying to destroy goodness and life.” And yet he does the opposite. He has patience. He knows somehow that the reason people have this side to them that is more toward revenge than it is toward transformation is because they don’t see, they don’t understand human nature. They don’t understand what we’re doing when it comes to our spiritual life. Spiritual life is not necessarily limited to any particular religion. It doesn’t even require religion to be there, through religion can be an amazing asset and sometimes not an asset if it doesn’t teach the truth, but what’s beautiful about the truth is it’s already in you. You already know it, and so we have this need to awaken our true nature. And what’s interesting about that is that we have two things going on. We have a conscious intention, like I might say to myself, “I see what happened in this family. It’s horrible. Someone did something horrible to this family. I want them to realize what they’ve done, to change their ways. I want them to not necessarily be punished, but I want them to see the light.” That’s a really positive intention, and you can say it out loud and know it’s right, and still you have something else going on, which is an unconscious intention. It’s based in your DNA that you learned when you were a child. If you learned in the family that the only way to deal with those things that were not appropriate or right was to condemn the one who brought them there and exclude them from the family, if that’s what you grew up with, it’s just like you’re hardwired that way. So how do you get out of that hardwired stuff and be able to just engage in the nature that God is awakening inside all of you? Well, you have to be given something – given something. You can’t do it on your own.

The unconscious, when it’s strong, will override the conscious. It’s like you decide, “I’m going to stop a bad habit. I’m going to stop smoking. I’m going to stop overeating. I’m going to stop not exercising.” You say to yourself consciously, “That’s not good. Yes, I will definitely start exercising and cut my diet out and stop smoking.” But there’s something unconscious in you that says, “No, I deserve anything that I can get out of this world. If it’s pleasure, I earned it. I deserve it.” If that’s your unconscious intention, you’ll never, ever change. So what you’re asking for then is an awakening, an enlightenment to see that your unconscious intention is not going to produce what it promises, because you say, “Okay, if I’m going to indulge in all these things, I should be having a good life. I enjoy it. I enjoy smoking. I enjoy drinking. I enjoy all this stuff.” None of that’s wrong unless it’s in excess, but still it’s so fascinating to me that we can have an ideal of who I should be, but unless we take serious time to reflect on who am I really, what do I really want most, and when it’s, “I want to live in the truth. I want to live with the truth that’s in heaven, and it’s also made to come to light on earth. And I want to be a person that brings that truth into people’s lives.” And when you go into their life and tell them, “Hey, what you’re doing is destroying you,” and the intention, the deepest, clearest intention is, “I want you to be freed of everything that robs you of life. That’s all I want. I’m not interested in making you feel bad about what you did. I’m not interested in punishing you. I want you to change.” And there’s some mysterious way in which that intention called love does something that nothing else can do, not any rule, not any law, not any threat of punishment. That’s the secret of this whole thing that Jesus is trying to awaken in you and me, the possibility of transforming the world, and when you do it with another person, when two or three are together, another way to say when a community is filled with this kind of intention, which should be the church, it’s really powerful.

I know, when I walk into a room of friends, I know when I’m in the company of people that are lovers, and I can walk into another room, where I don’t know that many people, or maybe I do know them, but I know I’m not in a safe place. As you grow into your sensitivity to this quality that is so intrinsic to our spiritual life, you’ll notice when it’s not there, and it’s frightening. But the delight is, when it is there, it’s so life-giving.

Father, sometimes we misunderstand your teaching. We’re not really conscious of who you are and what you’re longing for within us. I thought forever it was perfection you wanted and you hated our sins, and now I see your compassion, your empathy goes so far beyond that kind of judgment. And all you long for is life, full, rich, joyous for all of us, and yet we choose something less. Bless us with openness of heart. Bless us with a new consciousness of who we are and why we’re here so we can experience this joy of your kingdom, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Jeremiah 20:7-9 | Romans 12:1-2 | Matthew 16:21-27

God of might, giver of every good gift, pour into our hearts the love of your name so that by deepening our sense of reverence and thy watchful care keep safe what you have nurtured. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

There’s a beautiful image in the opening prayer of our liturgy today, and it’s this image that there’s a God who has a work to be done for us. He ministers to us, and in return, we minister to him by ministering to each other. But one of the things that we prayed for is, “God, continue to do what you’ve been doing all along, nurturing us, nurturing us.” An image of nurturing us is also then – we find it in that wonderful reading from St. Paul when he’s saying, “Be careful.” Paul says, “Do not conform yourselves to this age,” but there’s so much that the Jews had learned that they have such a hard time letting go of, a misconception of who God is, too much emphasis on the law, too much emphasis on perfection and sacrifice and for sins. So he has this longing to free people from that kind of system that keeps us from receiving the most beautiful, the most powerful thing that God can share with his people, and that is wisdom. “Let me renew your mind,” he says. “I want to give you – I want God to give you, I want to give you the hope and the trust in a God who will give you discernment so that you will know what God wants. You will know what is good, what is pleasing, what is perfect.”

Now, if you’re like me – I grew up in a religion. Mine was Roman Catholicism. It was a – it is a marvelous tradition. It’s the mother lode, they call it, the oldest of the Christian traditions, but what it really is that I want to say is that I have learned most everything about God through my religion, through pastors who mostly preached to me and through teachers in Catholic schools and through witnessing of people that are Catholic. And so all those things tend to give me a sense of what it is that I’m supposed to do and who God is and what I need to believe about him, and we need that kind of information, especially as long – most especially if it’s grounded in the essence of the message of Jesus, the pure message of Jesus. We know that every religion is also not only guided by divinity and guided by the Spirit, but it’s also human, so we don’t expect perfection. We shouldn’t expect perfection. What we should expect is that we would get the thing that God wants us most especially to know and to feel, and that is his relationship with us as a source, a direct source of wisdom and understanding of who we are, why we’re here and what is good, what is right for us. You, we all came into the world, in a way, filled with certain understandings of who we are. Because of our ancestors, we have certain traits we have that we pick up from our ancestors also, but basically what we come into the world with is this openness to, “Who am I? What is this place?” And we start taking it in, and we learn from the people around us. We’re memetic people. We imitate. If we have parents that are loving and kind and gentle to us, we tend to be that way. If we had parents that are constantly at war with each other, we have that kind of understanding. That’s what relationships are, I guess, but all that comes into us, and it seems to me that, once it’s set, then there’s a tension between the person we are and the person we’ve learned to be. And there it is. There’s the real challenge of living a spiritual life. How do I find my authentic self?

So what I’d like to look at and see from these readings, we get something really interesting about the experience of Jeremiah and the experience of Jesus. That’s what I want to talk about. Now, Jeremiah is such an interesting prophet. He was supposedly called to this work when he was very young, but the one thing about anybody that does any kind of work – if God gives me something to do, like I’m a pastor, and I do it, and I see people responding positively, and there’s respect for me and love, and I love them, and they love me back, and it’s wonderful. But Jeremiah was-- he never found that kind of satisfaction in his work, because every time he went to people – and they were always doing something that was destructive to them, and so he had to tell them, “You are destroying yourselves. You’re destroying each other. You’re going to self-implode if you don’t change, if you don’t change.” He was always crying out vengeance, outrage. “Stop what you’re doing.” And he would just be crucified for it. He would just be thrown into cisterns, sinking in mud, all these things, and so he said, “You know what? I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m not getting anything out of this. I keep trying to work with people, and they do not respond. But then there’s this thing in me, this life in me that is not me maybe, or it is. It is me. It doesn’t feel sometimes like me, but I cannot not do this work. There’s an energy, a life force,” calls it a, “fire burning in my heart. It’s imprisoned my bones, and I can’t hold it in. It’s like there’s a me that wants desperately to be, even though it’s not working, even though it doesn’t feel like it’s satisfying.” Now, the most interesting thing about the frustration of Jeremiah, who’s often called the weeping, complaining prophet, is there’s something about him that’s so unique to me, and that is he gave a prophecy that seemed so powerful, because this is what he said. He said, “This system of people trying to follow a law – they’re told, ‘You stop this, or do this.’” He sees such resistance. He calls their hearts hard-hearted evil hearts. They aren’t receptive, and so he said, “There must come a day when there’s going to be a kind of miracle that’s called redemption.” He didn’t call it that, but he said, “Somehow God is going to enter into people’s hearts, the core of their being and write his law – his law for them on their hearts. So no one will have to worry about being taught anything. They will have the teacher inside of them, awakening them to what is their destiny, what is their authentic self.” Or another way to say it, which Jesus talks about, is it’s their life – their life.

So there’s much more we find in Jesus teaching in this when he’s describing to his disciples the way his life is going to go. It’s planned that way. It’s God’s will for him, and let’s face it, Jesus was not greeting this way his ministry was going to go with open arms, saying, “Oh, this is great. This is what I always knew it would be. This is perfect,” because we don’t always have, as human beings, a full understanding of what our destiny is. It’s something that’s revealed to us slowly, slowly over time, and we have to pay attention and reflect on everything going on so we can figure out, “Who is this person I am called to be by God? It’s not the person that other people have told me what I should be.” That’s always dangerous, or even what you in your – if you have a misconception that what God really wants more than authenticity is perfection, if you get caught in that, you’re going to put yourself under all kinds of pressure and condemnation and shame over the fact that we’re not perfect. None of us are. We’re not intended to be perfect, sinless, but aware of who we are, aware of our sin, aware of our shadow and embracing that and then waiting and listening and watching, looking to God who then is working to speak to us personally through our hearts, through kind of these mysterious ways, through dreams and things that seem – or that you can’t really figure out that easily, and then also just through the events of our life. He’s teaching us all the time.

So when he’s describing what life is for him, and he’s having a hard time with it, as we know, then Peter comes up and does what we all tend to do. “Well, wait a minute. That doesn’t sound like a God that would – no God would do that to his Son or to you who are so close to God. He wouldn’t put you through something as painful and confusing and makes you look like a failure. Why would he do that? God forbid anything like that should ever happen to you, Jesus,” is Peter’s words. And then Jesus just says, “No, you’re blocking the work of me finding, accepting and living my life, not the life I wanted, not the life everyone else expects me to have, no, the life that I’ve been given from God, that’s what I’m here to do, to live the life.” It’s so interesting. There’s a wonderful quote by St. Catherine of Siena where she said, “If anyone would become what God wants them to be, intends them to be, it would set the world on fire.” Nothing is more important than living the life that we’ve been giving, and living on this planet has that work built into it of discovering that which is my life. So that’s when Jesus explains something to his disciples, and this is always one of those statements that, for most of us, at least for me, it never made any sense, but it does now. “If you want to come after me, if you want to follow me, take up your cross and follow.”

You have to take up your cross. What is the cross? Well, in Jesus’ case, it was this moment of crucifixion, but the cross, crucifixion is a part of everyone’s life on a regular basis when we come against something that we think we know is true, and we have to let go of it, and to let go of something that we’ve based our life on is a painful, excruciating situation. And we feel like we’re losing something. “This is the way I’ve always been. This is me. I can’t let go of that. I’m so comfortable with that person that I think I am.” No, if you want to save your life, if you want to be not just living but fully alive, then you’ve got to let go of your life. So it’s like, “Wait a minute. To be alive, to be in life, I have to let go of life?” Well, it’s obviously there’s two lives in this. There’s the life that the world tells you to live. There’s a life where control – your ego tells you, “That’s a great way to be in this world, to be successful. How about to be better than everybody else? That would be wonderful.” All those are images that come both from our culture and from our ego, and they can create this being called me or you, and we can be caught up in these things that just do not produce what they promise. And so what Jesus is saying is, “I will show you your true self, and your work is to look at that that is not you and let it go, let it die.” Because what is more important? What is your life worth? Having an easy life, having a rich life, having a powerful life, is that better than the life God is giving you? It’s the thing that makes you most satisfied. It’s the thing that is most authentically you. It’s the thing that will make the biggest on the impact on the circle of people God has given you in your life, and if you have any expectations of exactly what it is before you start asking the question, you will not get an answer. He wants you to be open to his revelation of you, the life he’s asked you to live, and it seems like – it’s so funny to me in a way. I’m just saying this because it sounds like, “Of course I would do that,” and then I looked at myself, and I see there’s so many things I refuse to let go of. I like to be comfortable. I like to be well-thought of. I like to be in the center of things. I’m a three on the Enneagram. I love performing, all those things. Well, those are good things, but performing how? So I get all kinds of accolades in return? Does that work? If I pattern what I say so that people like me, is that going to be feeling good for me? No, the only thing that really feels like me is when I’m up there doing what I believe I’m being asked to do, and somehow when you spend a lot of time reflecting on this, you can begin to feel what’s your fake self and what’s your real self. I know when I’m sitting in a room feeling like, “Why isn’t everybody talking to me?” What is that? You need to be the center of attention all the time? Well, there’s something in me that thought that was a really great way to live my life, to be the center of attention, and now whenever I get that, I say, “Are you kidding? That’s not what I want to do.” You ever been at a party where one person runs the whole dinner party and talks unceasingly? What’s your reaction to that? It’s not a pleasant thing to be engaged in, somebody demanding attention from everyone, and yet if I be honest, I used to do it all the time.

So that’s what I’m talking about, God entering into you and into me and giving us those insights into who we really are meant to be. And when you’re in that state, the things that tend to disappear, the three things I talk about all the time that get in the way of being who we are called to be, living the life we’re called to live, and that’s fear, anger, and then the big one, shame. Whenever I am not who I unconsciously, perhaps, know that I should be, there’s going to be a mild feeling of uneasiness, that something’s wrong. And the wonderful thing about shame, when it’s in its right place, it reminds us, tells us, makes us aware that something’s off, and if we say, “Well, life is just lousy. There’s no joy in life anymore,” no. Look at what it is that seems to be robbing you of your joy and ask God to reveal it to you. And if you say, “Okay, I’ll change it,” you’ve made the biggest mistake. All you have to do is see it, admit it, name it, own it, and then say to God, “Please, open my eyes, the eyes of my heart and let me see who I am.” I just know how little in my prayer life, especially in my early life, I ever even thought to pray that way. I had all kinds of clear ideas as to what would make me happy. I remember once even thinking, “If everybody loved me, I’d be really happy.” I have to laugh at that, because who wants everybody in love with them? It’s crazy. I want a relationship with 500 people or something? No. “Give me a friend. Give me somebody that loves me. Let me love somebody. Let me learn how to gain a sense of my own value, and then let me be out there in the world, used by you in every way you want that I can bring life to people, and I’ll feel it. I’ll know that this feels right.” That inner, wonderful place of calm called peace, that’s our inheritance, and when you’re living your life and not someone else’s, that’s when you feel it. That’s when you know. It’s that feeling all is well and all will be well, and that’s our inheritance.

Father, your gifts are beyond our imagining. The longing in your heart for us to find fullness and light in this world is crucial for us to know and to experience in order to know who you are and why you’re in our life and what you want from us, not something that takes life away from us but that enables us to find it. So bless us with open hearts, open minds. Let us be good disciples, good learners, good listeners, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Isaiah 22:19-23 | Romans 11:33-36 | Matthew 16:13-20

Oh God, who cause the minds of the faithful to unite in a single purpose, grant your people to love what you command and to desire what you promise that amid the uncertainties of this world our hearts may be fixed on the place where true gladness is found. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The theme of this set of readings is a powerful, powerful message of the value and the dignity and the importance of a man who has authority, a woman who has authority, any person who has authority is the one that one needs to be in touch with in order to know what to do, to make decisions, to solve problems, and the beautiful thing about this God that we believe in so deeply is found in the second reading from St. Paul about – the beauty of this God is the depth of his wisdom and his knowledge. He knows everything. He knows who you are. He knows why you’re here. He knows where you’re going. He knows everything, not in the sense of it’s all predestined but in the sense of he knows the issues. He knows what’s true. He knows what’s false, and the beautiful thing about this God is his glory, and his glory is nothing more than his desire to share this wisdom, this knowledge with everyone. He wants us to know the truth. He put something inside of us that longs for the truth. He can only be satisfied by the truth, yet we live so often in a world filled with lies. And we find ourselves lying, because lies work. They solve problems. They get us out of trouble, but I want to stress one thing. The only person that has any real value in the world, in terms of their influence, is a person who lives in the truth.

So we see in the first reading the problem that often happened to people that were in positions of authority. The problems with positions of authority is that, when you’re in a position of authority and you have a strong ego, the temptation is to engage in using that authority not for the good of people but to control them, to be their master, to be on top, and the ego loves that. We all love that. I want to be effective. I want to be capable of bringing something to you Sunday after Sunday or weekday after weekday. Whenever you listen to these podcasts or these talks, I want so badly to be effective, and I want to do something of value. And sometimes I might think in my ego that there are certain things that I could say that you would like better than perhaps what I should say, and I use it, and that’s where I get in trouble, we all get in trouble. So authority is primarily based in the truth that one is able to share, and it’s interesting that – I don’t know the background enough on Shebna, but he obviously was in a position of authority, as so many people were in the Old Testament. And they couldn’t deal with it. They got caught in it, and they couldn’t surrender nor listen to what was true. And so we see Shebna being taken away from his position. He is stripped of his office, and it’s given to another person, Eliakim, and what he says about Eliakim, what he could have said about Shebna if he had stayed in touch with the truth, but he said, “I will fix you like a peg in a sure spot. I will make sure that whatever you open no one can shut. Whatever you shut no one can open.”

That’s a phrase we’re going to hear again in the gospel, and it’s in the Old Testament and New Testament. It always means the same thing. It’s not that the person who has authority can decide anything he wants. He’s not in charge of what’s real or true, but when he speaks the truth, when he decides something is one way, no one – no one has the power to take that away from him. If he’s telling a lie, yes, somebody can take that away from him, but it’s something about this beautiful quality that we can receive from God to know the truth. No one knows it like God does, but we’re constantly in need of his support, his understanding, his teaching. We need to surrender to the truth over and over again, and when we’re in it, when we’re speaking, we are valuable. We are performing the thing that God longs for us to perform to create in human beings the fullness of life, and the only way we can enter into the fullness of the life that God has called us to. Our authentic self is to live in the truth, but there’s something else we find in the gospel that’s very interesting about the truth.

Jesus is with his disciples. He does the most interesting thing. I love the humanity of Jesus. I go back to it over and over again, and he was like me, like you and all things. And so he must have been so, at so many times, frustrated and disappointed in the response of people. He spent three years with his disciples, and it wasn’t until he died and rose and redeemed the world that they grew enough in consciousness to understand who he was and what he was about and what the truth really is. And that happened after he died. So all the time that Jesus was with these men, they didn’t fully understand, and so he makes it clear that the reason they don’t understand is because they haven’t gone inside themselves to find the answer. They’ve been doing what we all do with people with authority. We do what they say. We follow them. I spent 23 years of my life in school, from the time I entered kindergarten until I finished my seminary training, and I sat there listening to people, or we talked about people who had authority, and I would surrender to whatever they said. And when a professor told me, “This is what the church teaches,” I would say, “Yes, you say it is. You’re the teacher. I’m the student. You’re right. I don’t know.” So we give over to people in authority very quickly, but when I know something and I’ve been told is very different than knowing something, really knowing it inside.

That’s why I love this question. It’s like Jesus says to you and to me, “What do you think the truth of life is, and where did you get that idea?” Most of us might say, “Well, I read this book, and they said it was this. And I think that’s right, or then I read another book, and I think they were right. And so I’m always looking for the person who can tell me what it is.” Then he would look at you and say, “Well, what do you think? Who do you believe the Son of Man is? Who do you think God is?” You’ve been listening to teachers tell you. You’ve read books. You’ve listened to homilies of other priests. You’ve done all this stuff. So what do you really think? And what he’s saying is that there’s a different source for understanding truth than just someone in authority saying it, and yet when someone that’s in the truth says it, there’s an authority in their words that challenge something deep inside of us, tries to awaken something inside of us that is real and true. And it’s like what I’m saying is this mystery that we already know the truth. To be educated is to awaken knowledge that is buried inside of us, not so much facts about things, but I’m talking about the wisdom that human beings come into the world with, the knowledge of who they are and what they’re here for. And the thing I always find so amazing is the vulnerability God has given to every child, every human being that comes into the world. Those first six, seven years, they absorb everything around them as if that’s true. The way my parents act, that’s marriage. The way my brothers and sisters treat me, that’s who I am, and we go, over and over again, through a period of time where, before we have any filter at all, we have a set of beliefs. And depending how close those beliefs are to the truth says a lot of how difficult it’s going to be for us to find the truth, because we have to unlearn everything we’ve learned that wasn’t real, that wasn’t true. And if you think you can do that, then I don’t think you understand the plan of God, because God didn’t come into the world to just say, “You know all this. Just take a few minutes to think about what you believe, and then it’ll come to you.” No, we needed to be redeemed, changed, transformed. That’s what the apostles couldn’t understand who Jesus was until redemption. So what we count on is this gift. Call it wisdom, consciousness, awareness. It’s something that grace creates in us, enables us to see who God is and who we are. Then when he says, “Simon, who do you think I am, or who do you feel I am,” he gives absolutely the correct answer. “You’re the Son of the living God.” That’s not a phrase that was used very much in the Old Testament. Messiah was, but to know he’s God’s son, the Anointed One, the Christ was an insight that he had that he fully didn’t understand, it’s clear, but nevertheless, what Jesus is saying to him is, “Simon, this is it. You have been given this gift. My Father has revealed it to you.”

What does that say to us? Can we sit down and think about God and figure out who he is? Can we read every passage of scripture and study it and come up with who he is? Can we turn to a book and read it and find out who he is? Well, they can be helpful, but to know, to know him is not something that’s in our power. And what do I mean by saying that? Well, the hardest thing for us often is to move from the brain to the heart. The part of us that is the mind is always, at least in my life – it’s probably in yours. Mostly I live in the mind. That’s how I work all day long. I think about things. I remember things. I write things down. I go to places. I fulfill tasks, and that’s important. Without it, we’d be mush. We couldn’t accomplish anything, but what you have to understand is that, beyond our logical thinking processes, there’s another way of our seeing. And it’s the heart, and the difference with the heart – we know the heart is like the brain. It has brain cells. It is connected to the endocrine system, the nervous system. So it actually in many cases overrides the logic of the mind with a knowledge in the heart that knows something that you can’t explain.

I think it’s fascinating, so many conversations I’ve had with people about – they’re in difficulty and struggling, and I say, “Well, what does God say about this? What is he saying to you, or have you asked him to take over in this situation? You don’t know enough. Would he do it for you? Would he step in?” It’s so funny. So often the results of that kind of question, the response rather, “He’s not that close to me. He’s got all these other people to take care of.” What? No, he lives inside of you. He’s your Father. He’s your brother. He’s your advocate, your lawyer, your protector. He’s all these things, 100, 1000 percent. He’s there for you, and unless you know that on some level, not just, “Isn’t that an interesting fact,” no – the knowing of something like that is not able to be proved by the brain, but it is able to be surrendered to by the heart. And when you do that, wow, something shifts. Something major shifts inside of us.

I think in my early years of the priesthood, I spent a tremendous amount of time relying on my role as a sacramental minister. I could forgive sin. I could make Christ present. I could baptize people, free them from sin, all those things. I knew I could do that as a performer of a ritual that was the source of the power of the change, and I think many times I relied upon that more than I should have, because I almost acted as if it was sort of magic. And whether I believed it or not, it didn’t really matter, or if I was not paying attention to what I was doing, it didn’t really matter. But I don't know about that. Certainly as a protection to people, we’re not going to say it’s all up to the priest. No, but the priest does have an influence on the way a sacrament is felt and experienced by people, and the difference is whether he believes or he understands, knows God.

So the gift that God is giving us in this set of readings is a wisdom that is so important. Number one, there’s nothing more valuable, nothing more effective in your life, nothing you should ask for more diligently and work toward more faithfully than being in the truth, who you are, why you’re here, who is God. And when that’s there, and it doesn’t come just from your mind or from what you’ve read or from what they’ve told you, but it comes directly from God, people feel it differently. It’s not information any longer. It’s a resonance of an intention that you be opened to something you can’t see with your mind, but your heart knows it, longs for it and delights in it. And when it takes over, there’s a resonance that comes from a person who works out of the heart that’s so different than comes out of the mind and thoughts and ideas. That’s the gift, to be able to resonate the truth, not as a syllogism or a possibility but simply as a reality.

Father, your gifts are beyond our imagining, and your willingness to share with us the wisdom that is the treasure you hold in your heart and long for it to be in our own hearts. So bless us with an openness to your gifts of teaching and showing us in so many ways every day of our life what is going to be seeds that keep increasing our understanding of what is true, what is wise, what is important. And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

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Oh God, who has prepared for those who love you good things, which no eye can see, fill our hearts, we pray, with the warmth of your love so that loving you and all things and above all things, we may attain your promises, which surpass every human desire. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This is a fascinating set of readings. The overarching truth that we see in them is that God has come into the world to reach all people, to call everyone into his community, into a loving community that understands who he is and why we’re here and who God is and who we are as human beings. It’s clear that, from the first reading, it’s that God has called all men, all women, not just one group, not just the Jews, but everyone is called to be in a relationship with the God who created every one of us.

Then Paul’s reading from Roman’s, he says something so fascinating about his insight into who we are as human beings, and he knows that he has been given this challenge to speak to the Jews and to try to open their hearts to who God is. But he found himself, when he understood who Jesus is and what he wants of him, he went ahead and found himself drawn most especially to the Gentiles. He had pain in his heart over the fact that the Jews were so stubborn and would not accept Jesus, but he was eager to show to the Gentiles the beauty of this God revealed in Jesus. And he was so successful but always carries this pain inside of him that, “I’d give this up,” as he said last week, or, “I wish so much that the Jews would understand this.” But their hearts were closed. Their minds were closed to something so radical and so different as Jesus, but then at the end of it he says the most interesting thing.

The thing that the Jews had such a hard time with was the mercy of God, the mercy, the thing that no one really realized who God was until Jesus entered the world and he reveals himself as a lover, but most shockingly a lover who loves sinners. The broken part of humanity he loves, and in that act of loving that, he shows and proves to all of us what we need to understand about who God has always been, a lover of those he created no matter what they do or who they are. That love is never diminished by any action they have, but in the Old Testament it was always clear, if you didn’t do as God asked, you were left, rejected. You were on your own, and your enemies would overtake you. That idea that God would reject sinners is probably the most serious thing we need to look at. If there’s any shred of that inside of us, we’re going to be caught in one of the most obvious things that most people carry inside of them as they struggle to become who God calls them to be, and that’s shame over their humanity. It’s fascinating to me that the first thing that we have in the story of creation is a story about human beings separating themselves from God, hiding from God. The first words that God spoke to sinful humanity was not, “What have you done,” but, “Where are you? Why aren’t you here with me? Why are you hiding?” “We’re ashamed. We’ve done something that we feel is not your will, and if we’ve done that, we believe, like we believe our experiences, love is conditional. And if you don’t do what the one that you want to love you wants, you lose their love. You find yourself rejected.”

I spent a couple of times at a wonderful treatment center in Wickenburg, Arizona, called the Meadows, and one of the things that we learned there is about conditional love and codependency. And one of the things that was shocking to me, in a sense, was that the hardest thing for a child growing up in a family, the most abusive thing that can happen to a child is rejection, being ignored, being not considered as important at all. That can leave a wound so deep, so wide open that there’s such a difficult time for that person to find their own value. I remember there was a story of one of the young men in our group, and he was saying, when he was a child, he remembers doing something that didn’t make any sense to him as an adult. But every time he left the room – let’s say they were watching television or listening to the radio, and he would leave the room, and he’d say, “Well, I’m going to the bathroom now.” Then he’d come back, and everybody’s still watching television. Nobody noticed. He said, “I’m back now.” He said, “I used to do that all the time, letting people know that I was there.” He was there because his brother had committed suicide, and he struggled with those same thoughts. And it was just such a powerful image for me of neglect, someone important to you looking at you and saying, “You’re not valuable.” And from my own experience, I can remember so vividly whenever I – even today when I sin, I feel like there’s something wrong with me. I’m 80 years old, and what the hell am I doing still going back to these stupid sins, and I know they’re wrong, and I know they don’t work in terms of promising – I don’t get what they promise. They don’t really give me any kind of real joy, but I find myself going back to them. It’s silly to say this, but I just feel there’s something really wrong in my relationship with God. I shouldn’t be human.

So that brings me to the gospel. Jesus’ humanity is all over this gospel, and by that I mean we’re looking at a human being working for God, filled with divinity but a human being with all the weaknesses and struggles of a human being, like impatience, frustration. And he’s working so, so hard to reach the Israelite people, and they were so resistant. And he has these – some of the things he said to the Pharisees, if you were looking at his work as a nonjudgmental observer, you might say, “Well, do you think you should have been calling those main people that ran the temple hypocrites and people twice as fit for hell as their converts and ranted and screamed at them? Was that smart? Maybe you could have worked a little bit more subtly and tried to win them over.” But Jesus, in the face of their hypocrisy as a human being went nuts in a way, crazy. He just said, “I can’t stand it.” His humanity, beautiful humanity, impatient, intolerant at times, not loving all the time, and now in this case you see Jesus being very frustrated over the fact that he’s struggling so hard to open the hearts of the Israelite people. And they’re so resistant, because the system Jesus is inviting them into is so radically different than the system of justice and law. You do this, and you’re guaranteed a place. It doesn’t matter where your heart is or where your intention is. You just do what you’re supposed to do. It was an action-centered kind of spirituality or morality. It’s all about your actions.

And Jesus is so much more evolved than any of the prophets could have ever been. He’s this mysterious connection of humanity and divinity, and it wasn’t until the fifth century, in 451, at the Council of Chalcedon that the church finally figured a way to talk about Jesus’ humanity and divinity. And I love what they came up with, because it’s so perfectly mysterious that it doesn’t give you any kind of clarity as to, “Oh, of course that works,” 100 percent human, 100 percent divine. How can someone be 100 percent perfect, 100 percent imperfect? Well, question is, is imperfection, is that something that God sees as our greatest problem, and whenever we’re caught in it, we cut ourselves off from him? No, it’s the opposite. What this humanity and divinity coming together is, is this mysterious way in which we have to understand that, in our human nature, we find all the tools we need to be able to grow into more and more our own participation in divinity. We’re not divine, but we participate in it. We become a part of it. What a beautiful thing that our humanity is there for a purpose, and the purpose is to learn patience and to learn tolerance and to learn that God looks at us with this strange, mysterious thing I never dreamed existed, because I never experienced it from a human being – unconditional love, that when you fail, there is not one shred of a decision on the part of God to separate himself from you. It’s like a parent with a sick child. The child is sick. Oh well, he’s not functioning as he should, so that really bothers me. So I’ll just dump him and get going with the healthy ones. No. No, his heart goes out most especially to the sinner.

And then we see in St. Paul, in this set of readings, a phrase that seems almost impossible to believe. When he says, “You know what God did? He imprisoned all of us in this thing that we call our weaknesses, our sins, disobedience, and he said we’re subject to that. We’re under the power of a spirit inside of us that’s going to resist God by its very nature. It’s egocentric. It wants to be the heart of everything. It doesn’t want to surrender to ways of thinking that it doesn’t think are correct, that make – the will and the mind is naturally resistant to something different. It makes one have to admit that, “I made a mistake. I’ve been wrong.” And isn’t it interesting how it seems, when you look at the way God responds to our sins with nothing but love and compassion and understanding, then why is it that we as human beings still fall into this trap of shame? “There’s something wrong with me.” You need to feel guilt. If you don’t have guilt, you’re a sociopath. “That was wrong. I see that. Okay, I did something wrong.” That’s a good, healthy description of how we should function but, “There’s something wrong with me if I did something wrong? There’s something intrinsically wrong and negative about me? There’s something in me that makes God look at me with disgust?” When I was a child, I learned from my teachers, and I pray not everyone had those same kind of teachers back in the ‘40s, but they really did ingrain in me that, when God sees me as a young boy sinning, he rejects me. I was even taught that, when I sin, I’m nailing the nails into Jesus’ body. It was a horrible experience. I guess they were trying to make me so afraid of my weaknesses that I would control them with an ego and a will that can do that, which is a frightening thought, that the ego and the will can really repress everything in us that isn’t what we think it should be, and then we end up hating everybody else who is those things.

It’s so clear to me that there’s nothing more essential for you and for me to believe than the mercy of God, and if you see Jesus as perfect, which I always did – if you see him as not a human but some God acting like a human, then there isn’t any way to identify with Jesus. And yet that’s the core of what the New Testament is saying to us. “Here is one like you, and he’s loved by his Father. And he’s got weaknesses.” It’s true he didn’t sin, but when we act on our human weaknesses, when we fall back into an egocentric mode, is that automatically a sin? I don’t think I do it sitting there thinking, “Well, I should do this. I shouldn’t give into my ego, but I’d like to. So I know. I’ll sit here and think for – now I think I’ll give into my ego.” No. I blurt out something to somebody who’s just corrected me or humiliated me or made me feel awkward or funny or different. No, it’s automatic. That’s so true of our nature. When we’re working with our nature, we have to be patient and loving and merciful, just as Jesus is revealing to us that’s the Father’s response to your and my weaknesses, and there’s something about the anger that I was taught that God had over our sins and the way sins can hurt his people and so he goes to punish those people that have done this harm. That’s a very Old Testament image of God, but what it’s really about, today in the way in which I understand my God through Jesus, is there’s a sadness in him when we fail, not an anger so much as sadness. There are quotes in scripture that imply that Jesus is saying, if we don’t do what we’re supposed to do, we’re all going to be condemned. And I don’t know if those are all translated exactly right, but it doesn’t really sound like the God that I have learned to love through the actions of this God/man Jesus. I don’t see him as somebody who’s angry over our sins but sad over the effect sin can have on us and the people we love. It’s like watching people stay in a disposition that harms people, that robs them of their dignity and their value is a sadness in God. The image of weeping over Jerusalem is so powerful to me, God weeping over the fact that something is going on that is causing pain, and it doesn’t have to go on. And if we just understand we are loved in that sin, there’s a much greater chance that we’ll change.

So just consider it. We are caught in sin, caught in disobedience as a human, and when we struggle with it, we learn about how to free ourselves from it and how God frees us from that. But it always depends upon one key piece. You are loved. You are safe. You’re forgiven, and you have a purpose. And the purpose is to evolve and to change and to grow, and God is patient, not in a rush. And he has a deep faith and trust in our nature that ultimately we’ll turn to him and allow him to truly love us.

Father, your goodness, your love, your mercy is so far beyond our expectations that we need your help in grasping the fullness of being loved unconditionally like you so generously do. Bless us with the freedom from shame and from a distance that we create over our weaknesses, knowing that you are there, filled with mercy, filled with understanding, filled with compassion, which brings us great peace and hope and life. And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

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1 Kings 19:9A, 11-13A | Romans 9:1-5 | Matthew 14:22-33

Almighty, everliving God who, taught by the Holy Spirit, we dare to call our Father, bring, we pray, through affection in our hearts the spirit of adoption as your sons and daughters that we may merit to enter into the inheritance, which you have promised, through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This time we’re living in is an amazing, amazing time. The coronavirus, the worldwide pandemic has changed everything, and if there’s one simple thing we can say about the change is that we have stopped our normal routine of doing and being in places and around people to a much more solitude life, a quieter life. For some it’s been a great, great hardship in terms of income, others not so much, but in either case, whether it’s the struggle we’re having to survive or the struggle just to adjust to something that’s so different, we’re all being changed. And I’m convinced in the depths of my heart that this is essential and that it’s about a new awakening. We needed time to stop, be quiet, reflect and hopefully open our eyes to see things that we have not been able to see because of the pace we live or the anxiety that we struggle with all the time. I’m amazed in my own life – and it may be true in yours. At the beginning, it was really, really hard, and somehow it’s gotten easier. I’m kind of surprised, because I thought, “It’s going to get worse and worse. I’ll be more and more crazy, because I can’t spend time with people. I’m not good alone, and I’m great – I’m a very social person.” And it was extremely hard. Somehow now it’s – I’ll tell you what I felt. It’s like there’s a stillness that I discovered in me that likes to be still, that wants to be still, maybe not as intensely as we have to now, but my life was very, very full. I kept it full on purpose so that I wouldn’t have to think about that much, I think, to be honest.

So one of the things it’s made me do, as a priest who is engaged in trying as best I can to interpret the wisdom of this God who has revealed himself to us and has given me a gift, a voice and a mind that can explain things, and so I try my best to use whatever talent I have to try to convey the truth. I think you know this about me, but I can’t talk about something unless I have experienced it. I can’t be convinced, or if I do talk about it, it’s probably not as effective as those things I talk about that I absolutely know in my heart are true. I will have to say to you that I really can say that I have very much doubted my God, and the doubts that I have of my God that cause me anxiety I can fill in with lots of activity. So what have I doubted? His existence? Absolutely not. That he is the only God? No, I’m convinced of that. No, what I think I have not opened my heart to is who he is and what he wants to do, how he can do it for us. Our egos are amazing things in our world. It’s like a part of us that really does like to be isolated, in the sense of I am the cause of who I am and what I do. When it comes to spirituality, nothing could be further from the truth.

So let’s look at this set of readings, because one of the things I think it’s about is about the issue of doubt, doubting that God is who he says he is. So I want to go to Paul’s passage. Paul is feeling great pain in his heart over the fact that something happened to him that has not happened to his friends that are Jewish, that are running the temple. He sees that what he was shown is so important, so valuable, and they refuse to look at it, and he, Paul, had such a profound experience of seeing something that the rest of the Jewish community didn’t see. The Israelites couldn’t believe that God was who he was, that he revealed himself to be something so different than they expected. They were used to a God that had power over people, and now they are being told this God is not interested in running people’s lives, making them do things, frightening them into being better than they are. But no, it’s about some mysterious way of entering into them and saying, “I accept you. I love you exactly as you are, and nothing that you can do can come anywhere near what I can do through you, for you, with you. Please let me do that. Please let me enter into you and be a source of life and strength for you. That’s all I want, and I have a disposition towards your sins. I don’t even see them. I don’t even pay attention to them, because I’m not interested in your past. I’m interested in the present, you living, knowing that you are loved and protected, safe, that you have purpose and meaning. That’s all I want. Let me do that for you.” It happened to Paul on a road that he was walking to Damascus, and what happened was he had this experience of Jesus speaking to him about, “Why are you persecuting me,” because Paul would have had to think that this Jesus was like so many other false prophets. He was just there, and he was saying something about God that couldn’t be true, and now he sees this God, man, Jesus in his resurrected form in some kind of vision. And his response bodily is he goes blind for three days. And Jesus tells him he’s to go to Jerusalem and to preach, and then before he goes on that journey, he spends three years pondering, wondering, reflecting and becoming a different man. It wasn’t an instant conversion by any way, shape or form. It took time. That’s one of the most exciting things about life. It gives us the time to grow and to understand who this God is, and the interesting thing that I want to stress is that the God that reveals himself in Jesus is not a God of power, force, enormous strength and judgmental and angry easily. That’s what everyone thought gods were, and that’s the way God revealed himself at first, because he wanted people to realize he was like the gods they were worshiping, only he was going to reveal slowly that he was quite different. And very slowly, over the whole Old Testament period, he gives sign after sign that there’s something hidden that you will find that has been hidden from the beginning, the mercy, the love, the patience, the care, the presence of God in your life.

So we see in this first reading, Jeremiah, one of the prophets who is speaking often of God, and Jeremiah was one who would often get into major conflicts with followers of other gods. They would have contests to see which god was the greatest, Baal or the God of Israel, and always the God of Israel outdid the fake god. And it’s kind of interesting to see all of that happening. What’s happening is that slowly they’re beginning to realize that all of the gods, there is this God of Yahweh, and to start off your relationship with him, you have to believe that he is not just the strongest God but the only God, the only source of truth. And the truth in that first reading is so beautiful. God had manifest himself for centuries. All gods did, through thunder, lightning, fire bolts, tornadoes, volcanoes, and when they’d see this, they’d know gods were angry, and they would change their life. He would send plagues and drought and all kinds of things as a way of saying, “If you don’t pay attention to me, I will rob you of everything you need for life. You won’t exist.” And that image in this first reading is that he’s not in those powerful symbols, but he’s in a whisper. And what’s a whisper? A private message to the one whose ear you are close to. “I want you to know this.” And that’s who he is. He’s a God who whispers intimately into our ears, lying next to us at night, talking to us, sits with us during the day, talking to us, walks with us when we’re doing the work, talking to us. And he has something so powerful he wants to say. “I’m here. I’m with you, and all I want is for you to allow me to enter into you so I can do the work that I know you long for me to do.” But your ego is such a resistance that you’d rather do it yourself, and you feel like you want to earn it. And that’s the original sin. “I want to be in charge of what I’m doing. I want to be the one that decides things, how I’m going to be saved, how I’m going to do my work. I don’t want somebody else telling me something that doesn’t make sense to my mind,” until you can evolve enough to not depend solely on the mind but on the heart. The mind is a place that understands things that are logical and practical. The heart understands mystery, and the mind has a hard time with mystery. It just doesn’t grasp it, because it can’t prove – it has no proof that this is real. And if your mind has been thinking one way and you have something that happens and you don’t know how it happened, you tend to dismiss it without examining it carefully.

So look at the gospel. When you see Jesus has just spent time with his disciples and performed an incredible, mysterious thing – he fed maybe 15,000 people with a few pieces of fish and a few pieces of bread, and they were still, I’m sure, thinking, “What was that?” And so he sends them away, and he goes up to pray. I’m sure he had a lot to say to his Father. This is one of his most famous miracles, and he knew he’d be remembered for it, I suppose. But anyway, he’s talking to his Father, and then he decides he’ll go out and join his disciples. And he comes walking on the water, and of course their mind sees a human being, glowing, walking on water, and what do they think? They didn’t say, “Oh, look. It’s Jesus. He can do anything.” No, they said, “It’s a ghost.” And then he said, “No, it’s me.” And Peter is just so classic as a character. He just jumps in and says, “I can do it. I can do it. I can do it.” So he said, “Okay, if it’s you, give me the power to walk on water.” And he said, “Okay, I will.” So Peter starts walking on the water, but his mind says, “Wait, wait. You’re walking on water. That doesn’t make sense. The wind is too strong.” And fear enters in, and he cries out – and this is the most beautiful part of this gospel – “Save me.” Immediately Jesus stretches out his hand and says, “Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt?” Now, the God of the Old Testament might have done just the opposite. If a god asked you to do something and wanted you to do it, and that’s all Jesus was asking for is that he would believe, then a false god would have said something like, “You of little faith,” and you drowned. He would just say, “Okay, you don’t believe me? You’re dead.” He’d walk away without any care or interest. That’s not Jesus. It’s not the God that Jesus reveals. His every moment is directed towards saving, and everything that happens – this is the most important thing I want to say. Everything that happens is for us, a pandemic, a setback, a painful situation, having to deal without the things that give you comfort, that give you a sense of security. He’s got to be the security that holds us all together. He is our security, and he promises nothing will destroy us. So we are invited to say the thing that Peter was able to say. Whenever we’re in these situations, we would say, “Truly, truly you are the Son of God. You are the one that saves the world, and you will save me.” And we will somehow, through whatever pain and suffering, which means accepting things that are beyond our understanding – when we accept them, they become 50 times, 1,000 times more insightful. That’s our challenge, to listen and to believe.

Father, you’ve given us an almost impossible task for a human being, and that’s to trust in something that’s so beyond our understanding and logical way of thinking. And it’s difficult for us to surrender to the beauty and the wonder of who you are. So bless us with a kind of humble heart that doesn’t have to be in charge, that isn’t demanding to understand fully but can surrender to things that don’t make any sense to the mind but just feels so life-giving to the heart. Release us from stress and from worry and fear for they destroy the very nature of who we are and keep us from the joy that you have intended us to experience in this life. And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

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Isaiah 55:1-3 | Romans 8:35, 37-39 | Matthew 14:13-21

Draw near to your servants, oh Lord, and answer their prayers with unceasing kindness that, for those who glory in you as their creator and guide, you may restore what you have created and keep safe what you have restored. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Time is such a strange thing. I turned 80 years old this year. It seems strange to be 80. I don’t feel 80. I don’t feel that much different than I felt, maybe, about myself when I was in my 70s, 60s, 50s, but I know I’ve changed a great deal. But when I go back, thinking of when I entered the seminary, actually it was 60 years ago, immediately after – well, before the council, the Vatican Council, which so much changed the focus of the church, and I remember the things that we studied. The core of the curriculum was pretty simple. Toward the end of your theology training, those last four years, you were focusing very much on theology, who is God, and moral theology, what does he ask of us, and what are the rules and laws that are built into our heart, and the history of the church. There wasn’t any course on spirituality, which there probably is today, nor was there a big emphasis on scripture. It was more about church doctrine rather than going to scripture, which was probably typical of the church before the council. The scripture was the work of the church to interpret what it meant, and it would tell us what it meant. And we were not necessarily – certainly if you go back in history not too long ago, we were never encouraged to read the Bible, as Catholics, on our own, because we would be too prone to misunderstanding it. And there’s a little bit of wisdom in that, also not much trust in human nature, but the danger is, what scripture is, it’s such a strange, wonderful piece of literature and truth and wisdom and infused words with Spirit. And one of the things that it reveals is a God who revealed himself slowly over time, and a God who was presented to, let’s say Abraham and to Moses, when he was guiding the people, is not fully who he was, because there’s no way to understand God the Father without understanding Jesus. And Jesus is the final piece, the final keystone that holds it all together, and it’s not until you see God incarnate in a human being that you begin to understand who he is. And who he is, is so radically different than what a story from the Old Testament might imply. In the Old Testament it seems he was more likely to be someone who was angry when we failed, who was judgmental, who had a short fuse, who lost his patience, who often wanted to destroy everybody because he was so frustrated with their hard-heartedness, their egos that wouldn’t change. All of that is in there.

The frightening thing about being a preacher and a teacher of scripture to the people – and that’s what a homily does. The word homily means a reflection on scripture. Sermon is a religious topic in a talk, but we were taught after the council, no, it’s got to be a homily, and the homily has to go to the scripture and dig into it and break it open and make it real in terms of today’s world. And that’s what I struggle to do, and it’s such a strange thing, because if you are not sensitive to trying constantly to stay with the fullness of the message through Jesus, you can come up with a God that is really scary. And many people do, and you know that fear is one of the greatest motivators that human nature has. So it’s easy to see, if I were a religious leader and I wanted to get the people to stop doing something, I would tell them, “If you don’t stop, you die. He’s going to cast you into hell.” And yet in the New Testament, you see Jesus so clearly making it so – making sure that we see who he is, and he is forgiveness, and he is never, ever intending to condemn, never. He is not condemning people to hell. People are condemning themselves by their actions to hell, but his intention always is not to punish the sinner but to save him or her, to transform them. And so you can see so beautifully in the ministry of Jesus his servant heart. He wants more than anything to create for us a world that he has intended us to have, and it is supposed to be good, wonderful, life-giving, not painless, not easy but wonderful.

So I want to start with this set of readings, because it seems that to understand it properly, you need to have one thing onboard, and that is an understanding of who God is in terms of what is he doing with you and with me. What does he long to see change in you and me? It’s not to get us to stop sinning. That’s a byproduct, and what you need to then understand, if you’re going to respond to this intention of God, you need to have some clue or some kind of sense of who you are, what really satisfies you. And then you would hear very differently, I think, this set of readings particularly, because it strikes me that the first reading is saying something very, very clear to the heart. In fact, most all the things that Jesus teaches, when he teaches us about our nature, he’s going to rely upon our heart to know what he’s talking about. The mind has a really hard time accepting someone else’s insight, someone else’s way of seeing when it feels it sees already exactly what is, and it’s patterned this life after all that it thinks. And so when you’re asking somebody to change what they think, you’re really in many ways saying, “I want you to change and be someone you’re not.” And if that person you think you’re supposed to be is your full identity, it’s like someone saying, “Well, I want you to die.” That part of you dies, and that’s why we have as the core of what this transformation is about is a thing called crucifixion. Something has to die, and what Jesus was doing, it seems to me so clearly, when he accepted the plan of the Father, that he would have to give up his whole ministry and his desire to change the world, and as a man and as an ego, he had to have a lot of plans that went way beyond those three years. When he found out that he was going to be asked to leave it, when it was just taking root – it was just like these seeds he planted in the human race were just beginning to germinate, and he felt he had to nurture that. And the Father said, “No, this is all I need from you, and I want you to surrender to this. And I want you to teach them something about the way I work, and the way I work is I need you. I create you, because I need you to be an instrument of saving people, helping people, feeding people, freeing people from shame and guilt and fear. That’s what I need you for. That’s what you’re made for.” So in a way, it was asking Jesus to stop what he was doing, even though he just began, and surrender to a plan that was bigger than he was. And the ego had to resist that, and that’s why he said no two times before he finally said, “Okay, Father. If this is really what you want, then I’ll do it, because I surrender myself to you, because I know the only thing you would ever do would be for me, for my work, for my intention.” And he said yes. So we need to basically understand that what God is intending to do is move us from an ego-centric part of our being that is able to create a world, and when we create it, we’re in it. That’s what’s so scary about the brain. If it’s the world is a frightening place, it is frightening to you. If you see it as a challenging, wonderful catalyst to help you grow and change and develop, then that’s what it is, and one is stressful and frightening and hard on us. The other is natural, and it brings about peace. So we have to get those two things in sync. So it means we have to develop our heart and tame a little bit the mind. They’re both so essential.

So let’s look at this first reading. Because it’s from Isaiah, it’s a long time ago. Isaiah is one of those books in the Bible that probably, if you could only read one part of the Old Testament, it would be the best, because it’s always predicting the things that Jesus is going to bring into the world. And so there’s this image of God the Father that is radically different than, say, the story about Moses and the law and the tablets and God being so frustrated with people that he wanted to kill them all and Moses talks him out of it. That’s one God. Seems very different than this one, because Isaiah is saying, “No, this God is making a promise to you.” But maybe he was implying to the people, “This promise is not yet fulfilled, and it won’t come until the Messiah comes. But what I’m promising you is every single thing you need, everything you want to live your life as fully as it was intended to be and experience the peace and the joy and the enthusiasm that comes into someone’s life when they’re so – their life is effective.” That’s what we want, and he said, “What I want you to do is believe that whatever it takes for you to do that, I’m giving it to you. So don’t think that you have to go out and get the things that you need to be able to live this kind of surrendering to reality and to my will and to my ways. No, I have covered all that you might need to do in order to evolve high enough to be able to see this message.” It’s called redemption. He did it for us. So these images are so beautiful. There’s, “Don’t work for anything. This is all there. It’s all a gift. All you have to do is be thirsty. All you have to do is listen and come to me and listen.” It even says, “To come to me heedfully,” and I think what that means is the part of you that can heed, listen, can hear and understand this relationship that God wants to have with us and the presence of what it brings to us is only through the heart, because the heart can know without figuring it out. The mind has to be able to somehow be able to figure things out. I think you know enough about the difference between the brain and the heart. They’re made as the perfect partnership, but they operate very differently. The mind, as I said, needs proof and needs something that it can say, “Okay, this makes sense to me, so I ‘ll believe it.” And since the mystical world is what God is calling us into, you’ll never understand how it works. It’s angels, saints, miracles. How do you explain that to the mind? You can’t, but the heart? The heart just takes to it like, “Yes, of course. I know this works.” And true, the heart will have experience after experience that affirms what it believes, and so there’s a way it’s sort of giving you proof but not the same, the brain. The brain is different. I think the most interesting thing about the brain is how it resists someone else’s power over them or even with them. God never wants to overpower you, but he wants to empower you. Empowerment means new insights, changes, radical changes. That’s hard for the ego, easy for the heart.

So the first thing, you’ve got to make sure in this journey, this spirituality that I teach and the work that we’re doing together, you have to understand there’s nothing you do to earn it or to work for it. Vatican 2 made a profound statement when it said, “Holiness is the right of everyone who believes in God,” holiness. In the ‘40s, ‘50s, the word holy meant a kind of person that wore a long, black dress if they were a woman, and a black suit and a white, little collar – to us, the only ones that were holy were the hierarchy and the priests and the nuns, because they gave up their life, and they didn’t take – they were pure. They were sort of separate from the world, and that made them holy. And nothing would be further from the truth. They were – could be holy, but it’s not the only way you do it. In fact, it seems more exciting to me, though I don’t take anything away from those kinds of strict ways of life, but just to be engaged in everything with this wisdom inside of you is wonderful. So once you have it, Paul goes on to say, “Look, nothing that’s difficult, nothing that’s hard is going to separate you from this, this gift.” And it’s funny, because you look at Old Testament. If God is taking care of their needs, they believe in him. If he doesn’t make their life comfortable, he loses it. So that’s what this is referring to. Don’t base your faith in God in terms of your comfort level.

But then the gospel, which is so beautiful and so wonderful, so intriguing, what’s Jesus teaching when he’s there? John the Baptist has just died. He must have been extremely reflective, and he goes away to be quiet and be by himself, and of course the crowds come. He needs solitude. He needs to be away from the world, but the world cries for him. “Come. Feed us. Feed us. We’re hungry.” And so he does, but he says something so powerful. “I will feed you. Don’t worry, but I won’t be with you always. So what I’m doing is I am promising you that I will dwell in each of you, and my indwelling presence will be food to everyone around you.” So the story is so powerful when you’re looking at it. When Jesus said, “I can feed all these people with a miracle, 5,000 with another 3,000 women and children, a piece of cake.” “Well, do it.” “Well, no, I’m not going to do it. You’re going to do it.” What does that mean? “You can do anything with me inside of you, and the most important thing you can be – food to your brothers and sisters.” What kind of food? Energy, life, stress lessness, goodness, modeling a way of life that makes so much sense that, when we’re in that way of life, we’re so comfortable and so at ease and so safe. That’s the gift of being who we’re intended to be.

Father, your goodness, your generosity, your mercy are so far beyond our mind to comprehend, but our heart understands. And when we live in that atmosphere, in that environment, in that comfort of that sense of who you are, we find ourselves feeling so much less stress. It is stressful times for us, this virus, how are economy is going. So please bless us with a conviction that all of this somehow has purpose and meaning and is going to bring us to a place of abundant life. And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

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1 Kings 3:5, 7-12 | Romans 8:28-30 | Matthew 13:44-52 or 13:44-46

Oh God, protector of those who hope in you, without whom nothing has firm foundation, nothing is holy, bestow in abundance your mercy upon us, and grant that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may use the good things that pass in such a way as to hold fast even to those that ever endure. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

It’s interesting that there’s a debate among believers of whether God created man as we are or whether we evolved over centuries, but it’s interesting that a very few people in the world believe that this was by accident. So either way it’s God created human beings. That’s the belief. That’s what we believe in, trust in, but the most interesting thing about this idea of evolution is there’s no doubt in the minds of anyone who knows human nature that we have been in a process, whether it started 4,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago or whether it started millions of years ago. We are a species that evolves into who we are called to be. It’s interesting to watch the human race in the history as it discovered things. There was somebody who came along as the first person who discovered fire, and then someone else came on and maybe discovered the wheel. And somebody then – we know how somebody was given some insight, and they figured out that the world wasn’t really flat; it was round. And then you have modern people discovering electricity, radio, television, computers. That wasn’t possible unless there was all the information prior to that moment that they were able to make the leap into something unknown. So we see that there’s an evolution in our nature, and what is it that we’re doing? What is the evolution all about? Well, it’s about moving from a lower level of consciousness, a being that is self-centered and selfish to a being that is other-centered and willing to give their life in service for someone else.

So we look at the second reading from Romans, and it’s beautiful when it describes this evolutionary process so long ago. And basically what Paul is saying is we know that all things work together for the good. This is a God who, in this revelation that Jesus has given to the fullness of who God truly is and what he’s about, that he wants to enter into our lives, be a part of us in a process that we become more and more who God has intended us to be, and who we’re intended to be is more and more like the God who created us. It’s a natural evolution. We grow into what we were created to be, and the insights we get along the way that are about all the things that happen are all there for the very purpose so they can awaken us to this human adventure of being engaged in something I think is exciting. It’s saying, “I’m finding out who I am. I’m finding what I’m made for, what the gifts are that I have and how I can use them.” And if you use any kind of criteria for greatness, you’re really off base, because it’s not about being somehow better than you are. It’s about being who you are, and it’s not about being better than anybody else. It’s just being who you are, and so we listen to Paul saying what he’s discovered. He’s saying what God has revealed to us about the kingdom of God is that he dwells within us. That’s the most exciting thing that we have when Jesus came to announce the good news of the kingdom. And he’s saying we’re the beginning of – the firstborn among many brothers and sisters, and the thing about us is that we have a destiny inside of us. We’re predestined. We’re called, meaning there’s a calling inside of you and me that I want to be who I really am. It’s like a shift from self-survival to another form of survival, that I want to be exactly what God intends me to be. That’s my goal, and so we have this destiny. And then God comes into us, and he said, “All right, what I’m going to do is I’m going to justify you.” And how does he justify us? What does God bring into a relationship when he comes into us? Judgment, criticism, shape up, stop doing that, stop doing this? That’s sometimes what we think God is doing. Sometimes that’s what religion does. Clean yourself up so you can be presentable to God. No, the last thing he wants is for you to feel you have to change in order for him to enter into you. He comes to you as you are, and so that coming into him [sic] brings with him the most surprising, wonderful dimension that God has that we didn’t know he had, to the extent he has it, until Jesus came to tell us. But what he brings into a relationship is forgiveness, and forgiveness is full acceptance no matter who we are or what we’ve done, unconditional love. That’s what he brings. That’s how we’re justified, and if we’re justified, the most interesting thing is then we have, all that we have, God’s presence in us, an affirming, loving presence. And what’s going to happen is we will definitely develop and grow into who we were intended to be.

In the second century there was a famous Greek bishop who made the statement that’s rather famous. What is God’s glory? What is the thing God wants more than anything else? What’s the glory of God? Man fully alive, and alive doesn’t mean existence. That’s what the lower form of consciousness wants so badly to exist. The higher form of consciousness? I want to be who I’m called to be, and when I achieve that goal of being the person that God has asked me to be in order to be the instrument of his grace that dwells inside of me, when I’m engaged in that, no matter how simple it is or how complex, no matter how private it is or how public, it doesn’t matter. All I know is I’m giving glory to God. To give glory to God is to be honest, live in reality, face your shadow. I so often hear myself having said in the past, or I listen to people who keep talking about you’re supposed to make yourself better. And that uses your will and your mind. You say, “Okay, I’m going to stop these bad habits. If I get rid of the bad habits, then I will be better, and if I’m better, that’s what God wants.” Well, yes and no. He wants you to be better, but better is not something you work toward directly. It’s always a side effect. Acceptance of who you are, a belief that God has the grace and the will and the desire to enter into you and to move you into fullness of who that is without any – and you accept it without any sense, “Oh no, I wanted to do this, or I wanted to do that.” People who choose something to do and then force themselves to do it will never be successful. I’ve tried it myself, and I can’t be anything other than what God wants me to be. And so when I try to be better than that or do something different than what I’m naturally drawn to, all I feel is anxiety and worry and failure. So there’s a beautiful, beautiful image of that in that passage from Paul.

We look at the gospel then, and we’ll say, “Okay, what is here?” We have another parable about seeds and treasures and goals and things like that. All these are descriptions of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is God living in you and me, enabling us to become who we are meant to be. So what is this like? Well, it’s a treasure. It’s more valuable than anything, and it’s hidden. Hidden treasure, what would that be? From the time God created human beings, from the story of Adam and Eve, to the time that Jesus entered the world, until the moment he died on the cross, this was hidden. This treasure, this indwelling presence of God would have been considered a blasphemy. It was thought God cannot dwell in something impure, imperfect. God was pure. The earth, human beings are impure. Purity and impurity cannot mix. That was what the thinking was, but the treasure, it’s discovered, it’s not that at all. No, it’s about something quite different. It’s about being accepted as you are and having God enter into you and work patiently daily with you and use every sign and every event in your life to move you in the right direction, and so when you find it, you know it’s valuable. So it’s worth – you sell everything you have. Back then, if you found a treasure buried, and people didn’t have banks or safety deposit boxes, so it wasn’t unusual to own a piece of land that someone else owned and find the treasure that they put all their valuables in. But you had to own it, and so I love that idea. You have to go buy it. It’s like you have to own this plan of God, and when you see it for what it is, you’re willing to pay anything. What would it be? What’s the charge? What is it you have to pay for? Well, it’s not as laborious as people think, but it’s about surrendering to the process. And it’s like a merchant’s search of fine pearls. When they find a pearl of great price, they sell everything. A pearl is an image of something made in nature that’s so beautiful. When you find this image of yourself, when you find this perfect self that has nothing to do with the standards of anybody else about perfection but it’s perfectly you, when you’ve discovered that perfection, that’s worth everything, more than anything else. I love that image, because it’s so beautifully comforting to me.

Let’s go back to the first reading, because I love this story so much that fits into this thing I’m trying to get across today. And that is that we have Solomon, and the thing that God says to Solomon, I think, is so fascinating. He says, “You know what? What you’ve just done is the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen a human being do.” It’s clear that he’s the first one that does it. So let’s just say Solomon is an image of the evolution of human beings where they get to a point where they finally realize this is not all about them. It’s not about their riches. It’s not about they’re conquering their enemies. It’s not about being the greatest leader in the world. No, what he’s asking for is something that has been buried inside of all human beings, but Solomon was aware of it. And he said, “My gosh, you’ve given me this job. It’s so far beyond what I can do to serve these people.” Well, if we’re really called to serve people, Solomon was aware that he had a job that was way over his head, but you know what? Being in a relationship is over our heads sometimes. To be able to put up with someone, to be able to know what to say, to be able to be the person you need to be in the moment, that’s really something that’s beyond our normal pay scale. We don’t have that kind of wisdom. So all Solomon does that gives him the praise that is beyond anything else that I’ve ever seen God praise anyone, any human being, by saying, “You are the most amazing, most wonderful, most successful person in the world, because you’ve asked for the right thing,” and what does he ask for? So simple, all he asks for is, “God, would you give me the ability to do the work that my destiny is calling me to do?” Now, this is so different than the way a normal person would have been thinking that grew up in the temple and in the Old Testament. They would have prayed for God, yes, but mostly they would have prayed for the things that he didn’t pray for, riches, power. People would have thought that’s what a king is, and that’s what they should do, and yet he comes up with this insight. “No, no, the reason I have any kind of authority over anybody else is because I potentially have something that I can do for them that will take care of them.” And there’s two things that he asks for. The truth, reality, “I want to know what’s real and what’s true, and I want to understand human nature. I want to understand divine nature. Give me an understanding heart, a willingness to listen to what it is that people need, and then I can do this service.” And that prayer was answered for him, but the most exciting thing is that that was the beginning of an awareness of who we really are. And now we’re so further ahead and ready to receive this power. We’ve evolved, all of us, and the closer we get to this, the more there is joy and peace in our lives as we go about taking care of those around us without feeling the burden, because we can’t do it on our own. But with him, we can do anything.

Father, your generosity, the abundance of your grace, your desire, your longing is where we need to place our trust whenever it comes to the things you’ve called us to do. It’s you who are the essential ingredient that enables us to do this work, yet we’re so resistant sometimes to receiving a gift as rich, as generously offered as this. So bless us with a kind of humility, a simplicity that trusts in you more than we ever do in our own ability to accomplish our goals, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Wisdom 12:13, 16-19 | Romans 8:26-27 | Matthew 13:24-43 or 13:24-30

Show favor, oh Lord, to your servants and mercifully increase the gifts of your grace that, made fervent in hope, faith and charity, they may be ever watchful in keeping commands. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This parable is fascinating to me, because I worked with it for a long time without reading the final part of this set of readings, which is optional to read or not, which is interesting, why the church would make it optional. But the way it’s interpreted for the people who listened to it at the time was that there were people who are good, and there are people who are bad. God makes the good people, and the evil one makes the bad people. And the problem is that the bad people are — the reason they’re bad is because they are caught in something. It’s called evil, and the best description I can give you for evil is found in the Book of Genesis. I go back to it over and over again. When sin appeared, it appeared in a certain form, and the form was a lie. Adam and Eve were there, and they were told not to do something. And this serpent said, “No, no. The very thing that you’re told not to do is the very thing that you need to do, because it’s going to make you as fully alive and as strong as you could ever be.” It fed the ego and said, “Break this rule. Break this law, because basically, if you do, you’re going to be empowered.” And power always is attractive to the ego, more than almost anything else. “Tell me what to do. Tell me what’s right, what’s wrong. Let me figure things out. If I can figure things out, then I’m in charge. I’m in control.” So the issue of sin is that it is attractive, its very nature, to the mind, to the brain, and it makes sense. If I can choose something that I’ve been told is wrong but it’s there to give me something that I think I need and want, I’m going to go with what I want. And so they disobeyed, and out of that action we know then that somehow, at the heart of what sin is, it is people caught in lies.

So in a way, the simplest way to interpret this, and the way Jesus interpreted it, which is so fascinating to me, is because of his audience. His audience is not yet redeemed. They didn’t have wisdom poured into them. This seed that we talked about last Sunday is this seed of God’s presence coming into a human being, and when it comes in, it comes in like fire, like a tongue of fire and enters into the human being. And where it goes is to the heart, and the heart is the place of knowing. The mind is the place of understanding, figuring things out, but the heart is that part of you and me where belief comes from. Trust in something you can’t understand. You can’t figure it out, but you believe it, because you know somehow it’s right. That knowing comes from somehow some power given to us from outside of us is able to discern what is true and what is not true, and it destroys — it purifies us from all that is a lie. And so we see this gift of the Spirit not yet given to these people.

And so the parable makes clear something that is very basic, and the people that were there needed this kind of information. And it was that, if you choose a lie, it’s never going to produce fruit, and it means you’re going to ultimately not be fully who God wants you to be, which is a form of kind of death. So to be caught in a lie is to be seen, in a sense, in your own mind, I would say, that there’s something so terrible wrong with that that, if you stay in the lie, you’re going to die. You’re going to be burned to death, even though burning has this mysterious image of purification. So in a way, the people that heard this parable the first time would have said, “Okay, I understand. God is saying that there are good people and bad people.” It’s a binary world. That’s so easy for the brain to understand. I understand this, two kinds of people. We hate the ones that are liars, and we want them to be destroyed. And even though they’ll be destroyed at the end, it means certainly we, probably in helping God in our own mind, could say, “Well, we ought to destroy them too.” So whenever we see somebody bad, we want to destroy them. Isn’t that interesting? It’s kind of the way in which sometimes we think about evil people. We think because they did something, they are that, and nothing could be further from the truth. Human nature was created by God. He didn’t create bad people, like the — the parable seems to imply that there’s another person that created life, and there isn’t anybody else that created life. The evil one didn’t create people. He gets into people and destroys who they are and clouds their vision, and so in a way, he’s created them into a being that is locked into a lie. So what is basically being taught in this parable then is evil is destructive, and if it is, then we have a right to destroy it also.

But then you listen to the other two readings. They go in complete contrary to this. The greatest thing, the first reading says, the greatest thing about the God who is is that he shows his greatness through his leniency, his patience, his love for a person even though they are caught in a lie. He’s there to bring them out of that lie into the truth. That’s his intention. So what it says in the second reading, the intention of the Spirit is to enter into you and to transform you into a person who understands reality, God’s plan, and everything that chips away at that is somehow some half truth, some illusion, some lie. And so in a sense, if you listen to those first two readings and understand that this God is absolutely 1,000 percent on our side, even though we are sinners, even though we are far, far from him — I remember as a child growing up in Chicago and getting my first communion instructions, and I was told so clearly that God hated sinners and that he would destroy them. And then I learned in the New Testament, God loves sinners. Jesus said, “I love sinners. I want to be with sinners. My whole reason for coming is to change them.”

So how do you deal with this parable when you understand that it implies that, if you are evil from the beginning, you’re — it’s hopeless. No one’s coming to your rescue in that image, and the only thing I can think of is that what Jesus was doing was using a parable that can be interpreted many different ways. And the first way was interpreted for the audience — for the audience. When you mess around with those images of lies and violence and destruction and harm to other people, it’s going to destroy you. Okay, that is very clear and strong, but it implies that that’s fine with God. “Doesn’t bother me to take these people that are evil and burn them, destroy them. I didn’t create them.” Well, nothing could be further from the truth. So could it be that this parable was used — and it’s a parable, meaning it’s a puzzle, and you have to work with it. The best they could do with the audience at the time was to say, “Okay, I understand that I’ve got to turn away from evil, because it’ll destroy me.” But the truth, who God is and who he really is is that he’s really — the way I would interpret it now, with the understanding that we have and the capacity we have, because we have the Holy Spirit in us, this flame of insight and awareness and this purifying force that’s inside of us clearing our mind of the logic of the brain and moving us into hope and trust that’s in the heart, we can deal with this in its fullness, I believe, meaning that God doesn’t create bad people. The world is filled with people who have been created by God who have a seed inside of them that is about growth and beauty and development and evolving from selfishness to selflessness. It’s in everybody. So if it’s in everybody, that means it has the potential of being awakened, and so in this story — let’s take it this way. Let’s take it not to mean the world, good people, bad people, but there’s a clue that says the kingdom of God he’s talking about is inside of us also. It’s inside of us. So if it’s inside of us, it means it has something to do with the world that we are interiorly existing with, and it’s got good and bad in it. The part of me that is healthy and strong is the part of me that’s been transformed by the Spirit, and I see the truth. There’s still a part of me that’s caught in lies. Those lies that were told to me when I was a child, they’re so hard to get over, and so much of what we can see in people who are evil, so we call them evil, that do evil things, that are caught in a lie, have been damaged by the people around them. They’re victims.

So let’s imagine that this parable is about the inner life of you and me, and in that inner life we have goodness, and we have lies. And so the plan of God is that we move along as we grow, as we change, as we become who God is calling us to do the process of the Spirit entering into you and to me with its enlightenment and its power to radically change us from lies to truth is going to be successful. In other words, at the end, everything in us that’s a lie will be ripped away from us and burned, and we’ll have this insight, this moment of truth. That is an image I have of death. It’s when all of a sudden you’re not there completely, but you’re going to go through this process where all of a sudden this light comes on, and you see everything. I’ve always thought, “What’s the sound people would make when they die?” It would be something like, “Oh, oh my God. Now I see. Now I understand.” What a different way to interpret the parable. So is one right and one wrong? No, they’re both right in a sense. What’s different is the audience, the evolution of the audience. And everything that Jesus said is for the world forever, but the people who heard it the first time did not have the capacity to understand it, take it in. That’s why he said a parable is made for those who can hear, and if you can’t really hear the truth of who God is, you’re going to misinterpret a parable. And many of us do. The challenge is to believe first and foremost in who God reveals himself to be, a lover, one who forgives, one who’s lenient, one who desires more than anything else to save, who will not destroy. The only people who can be destroyed in this world are the people that choose to be separated from God, and destruction is separation from God. So he gives us the freedom to go against him, but he will always, he says, win. He will always win us, save us, enlighten us, awaken us. That’s the hope. And your brain might say, “Well, how do you know that?” Well, the brain can’t figure it out, but does the heart know it? Yes. I know that must be the plan, because it makes so much sense to me, and it gives me so much peace.

Father, you are mysterious, and the beauty of your love for us is that you’ve always met us where we are. You’ve always dealt with us exactly in a way that would reach us. You presented yourself at times in the Old Testament as someone harsh and demanding and willing to destroy those who don’t follow you, and at the same time, you revealed yourself in the New Testament as the most loving, forgiving, patient, kind, desiring nothing but our transformation. Give us wisdom to discern the truth. It’s fundamentally in all the stories, and most especially give us the hope that is our inheritance so that our heart will always be filled with joy and peace. And we ask this through Jesus’ name.

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Isaiah 55:10-11 | Romans 8:18-23 | Matthew 13:1-23 or 13:1-9

Oh God, who shows the light of your truth to those who go astray so that they may return to the right path, give all who, for the faith they profess, are accounted Christians, the grace to reject whatever is contrary to the name of Christ and to strive after all that does it honor. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The set of readings today seem to make a very clear, succinct picture of what it is that we believe, and belief is such a tricky thing, because I can ask so many people, “Do you believe in God?” And they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, absolutely. It doesn’t make any sense that there isn’t a God. How could you explain so many things that are — the pattern of everything, and you see the beauty of how everything works together. And there’s an ecology.” Anyway, it’s pretty clear that it’s hard, I think, to believe that there is no God. Sometimes people reject religion, and they claim that they don’t really accept God, but they probably do. They accept some kind of goodness in the world, but what it is that we’re asked to believe in is a particular way of understanding who this God is. It’s not just that he created the world. That’s a very mystical experience. How do you explain it? But the real thing is what is he up to? What is he doing? Does he have any kind of real influence on the way the world evolves? You’ve heard me say this over and over again. We are in this place, where we live now, in order to participate in the overarching work of the human race as we evolve closer and closer into who God intends us to be. And if you don’t think it’s working, just go back in history, and you’ll be shocked at times how far we’ve come, from a very independent, sort of isolated, self-centered view to something much more communal and life-giving and selfless.

So we’re engaged in this process, and so is God then giving us a process to do where he said, “Now you go. You’re here on this earth. Now you do it. It’s up to you”? No, he doesn’t. He says, “There is a plan that I have.” And the plan came in the form of a word. The word is the truth that God has longed to reveal to people, and it’s necessary that they evolve to a certain higher level in order for them to receive the truth of why they’re here, who they are, what this whole world is about. So we look at the evolution over time of what God has revealed. In the beginning, it was obvious that God had to say, “There is one source of everything, good and evil, and it’s God.” We’ve moved from that kind of broad image of a powerful force to a more personal God, a more intimate God, a God who reveals something shocking when it comes to the fullness of his revelation, and that came through the person of Jesus. And the person of Jesus is called the word made flesh. And what is that word, that truth? Well, if Jesus is the word made flesh, then it seems to me that the image that we should focus on, in terms of what God wants us to understand about him, is that he’s a God that wants to enter into our life. He wants to partner with us in our work. He wants to dwell within us.

So this first reading gives us an image of something that is an integral part of that mystical experience of knowing God dwells in me and partners with me, and together we continue to work through this process of growing and changing and evolving. The image in this first reading is beautiful. It’s about rain, snow, moisture coming down from the heavens, and he uses an image, it seems, in this passage where it is this image of God’s moisture coming down is part of his will. And so whatever the moisture is able to accomplish, it is clear that it has a purpose. It’s to make fertile and fruitful and giving seed, and the seed grows into bread, and the bread is food. And it’s a beautiful image of saying this moisture that comes down is — I want you to imagine it this way. “It’s my intention, my longing, my desire.” God’s desire is that we be fruitful, and what is so encouraging to me is he said, “I’m doing this. It’s my will, and you know what? I always get what I want. I achieve the end that I have in mind.” Now think about that. That is, to me, one of the core issues that we should have in our heart as an understanding of who God is. He is moving, changing, working with, enabling the world to become more and more a loving, healthy environment in which to flourish. That’s his will. If you think it’s up to us to do it, then it’s going to lead to a lot of despair at times when things look like we’re going in the opposite direction, but nothing is further from the truth. No, this is God’s will, that we grow, and we evolve, and it will happen. And if you participate in it fully, that is a wonderful thing. If you don’t, you might just end up getting some of the benefit anyway, but the point is he wants people to understand the role that he’s asking us to take on. And he’s looking for people, maybe not everyone, but he’s looking for the ones that have the capacity, the gifts that he has given them potentially, and he wants to develop them so that they can be truly instruments of God working in the world.

Now what is this process of God entering into people and helping them to lift an entire generation or an entire group of people? It’s painful. It’s difficult, and he calls it — I love the way he says, “It’s like all of creation is longing for growth and change, and when it’s up against that which is not yet transformed, it is like pushing against a major boulder.” It’s like pushing against something that we don’t have the strength to do it, but we have with God the ability to do it. But when we’re on our own, it’s groaning. It is so difficult, but he said there’s something in the whole world God has created that is working toward this goal of evolution, moving toward a greater understanding of why we’re here. He said that these labor pains, they are there, and we must understand that we are waiting. We’re waiting as we work, and working, knowing that you’re going to achieve the thing that you set out to do is everything, in terms of success. So we have a God who is giving us his will, his promise of his will that we will grow and develop, and he’s saying to us that there’s a difficult process, and you’re not in it alone. There are hearts everywhere struggling against things that rob us of our dignity and our freedom. We see it more and more now than ever before. We see movements, protests. Those are kind of like, when we become aware of something that is causing pain, robbing somebody of what they want, we don’t stand back and act as if, “Well, that’s just the way life is.” No, there’s something inside of us that says, “There’s something wrong here, and something needs to change.” And that’s God’s grace working, God’s presence working in you and me, evolving toward this fullness.

So let’s look at an image then of how we would imagine this is working, and it’s a beautiful image in the wonderful, well-known parable of the sower and the seed. Parables are so fascinating, because they’re puzzles, and you have to work with them. It reminds me of the promise that God said. “The truth is already in you. So I’ll give you an exercise that will help you find what I’m trying to say by using the images I’m giving you. And you’ll take those in, and you’ll ponder them and turn them around until all of a sudden something becomes clear.” So I’ve been doing that all week. I’ve been looking at this reading, and what I loved about it is — I was trying to say, “What’s the best way of understanding what the soil is? What does that represent, and what does the seed represent?” In a way it’s clear that the seed is the part that comes from God to the earth. We are humans. The word humanity comes from the same word as the earth. So the ground is human nature, and the seed is the truth, God’s light, God’s life. And the best way to describe it is it’s the potential of you growing into an awareness of God’s presence in your life. So that seed comes in, not as God’s presence initially but as a potential gift from God, a wisdom that you’re given, that the disciples had that no one else had, that you would be able to see and understand. So this gift of God’s presence enters into us, and there’s a process we need to be paying attention to as to how it works. And we have three, four images of what it takes for a human being to receive it, and the first is we know that there can be a kind of hardness of heart, a closed-down mind, an unwilling mind to change and receive anything new. It’s like the earth that’s hard and packed. It’s a path, and a seed hits that and can’t penetrate it at all. And so along comes — one translation was birds from the air. This evil one comes along and takes away the seed. So there’s a way to be a human being that is so closed and not open to any image coming into us that is not solely about us. Then there’s the sort of adolescent way of hearing the truth, where we hear it, and it’s exciting, and we say, “Wow, I can do all kinds of things if God’s presence is in me, and I’ll be effective.” Then it doesn’t work right away, or it doesn’t seem to be working most of the time, and they just lose hope and say, “It’s not working.” There’s the one who’s mature, and he is open to this mystery of God living inside of him, and yet at times they are also lured to other forms of power, other forms of giving them a sense of value. So instead of being a healer, a life-giver, maybe it would be great to be wealthy or to be powerful and have power over people, and they get lost. But then there are those who do open their heart, and the difference between all these degrees is not so much just the person’s ability to be open to receive something mysterious like God’s presence, but it also has to do with grace, moisture, God’s life-giving Spirit that comes into us, that softens our hearts and opens us to an awareness of these things that are so hidden.

So the image that we’re getting so clearly in this parable is Jesus is using the path as the image of the scribes and Pharisees, and they’re notorious for not opening their eyes and seeing what’s going on, and they’re not really listening to the needs of people. Does that sound strange? It doesn’t. It sounds like so many organizations, so many institutions, so many things. Once they stop listening to what’s really happening, once they don’t see what’s going on, once they don’t feel the pain of people, they’re not going to be open to the gift they need to be able to do a healing, transforming work. So this promise of God is that he’ll open your eyes so you will see. He will open your ears so you will hear. He will make you the rich, fertile soil that, when this mysterious process that God has planned for us enters into us as an idea first, we can receive it, and it takes root in us, and we hold it, and we savor it as it grows slowly into a realization that we can become co-workers with God in saving the world. It’s not just a case of being in the world and doing the right thing and getting a reward. No, we’re called to be co-workers. We’re called to be healers. It’s an amazing, exciting way to understand life, and the most beautiful thing is it’s based not on our effort but on our ability to receive something that does the work with us.

Father, your promise to place within us the gifts that you so beautifully manifested while you walked this earth is beyond our imagining. You do this without having us to become perfect or become sinless, but you work with our humanity. And the more you work with us, the more we understand and have patience with others, and we are patient with ourselves. So bless us with this great, mysterious promise. Let us believe in it, open our hearts to it and live it, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Zechariah 9:9-10 | Romans 8:9, 11-13 | Matthew 11:25-30

Oh God, who in the abasement of your Son, who raised up a fallen world, fill your faithful with holy joy, for on those you have rescued from slavery to sin you bestowed eternal gladness. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The opening prayer is always a fascinating way to begin to work on the scriptures that I have before me. This opening prayer is really interesting, because it says, “For those who I have rescued.” Jesus’ role is to rescue us from the slavery to sin and bestow on us gladness. What does it mean to be rescued from the slavery to sin? In my earliest years of learning about the God who I have grown, over these last many years, to begin to really know personally — the way he was presented to me was so much of a caricature of who he is, because one of the motives, it would seem to me as I look back on my early days in the church with my family, what seemed to be the challenge of a young boy or girl was to be obedient, obedient to their parents, obedient to God. Obedience was the big thing, and any time you were not obedient, that was called a sin. So what happened when you sinned is — and this is the part that is, in a way, very sad for a lot of us that grew up in that kind of environment where we were told then we lost God’s favor, and he was angry and even so angry that, if we didn’t go to confession and get the help of a church person, a priest, to talk God into forgiving us, we would go to hell if we died. So it was a really interesting way to begin this relationship with God, to whom I have a very, I think, wonderful, wonderful relationship with him, because to me he is the antithesis of that. He is an absolute, unconditional lover. Nothing, nothing can change his desire to bring life to you and to me. He is so deeply connected, personally involved, engaged in our life. That’s the whole message of scripture. The God who is in the law, the God who is in these systems is finally revealing himself in the New Testament as a God of intimacy, a God who enters into us, a God whose Spirit dwells in us.

So when I was in that old system, the biggest mistake I made was I had to get rid of sin. I’ve got to get rid of sin. That was my seven-year-old brain saying, “Okay, this is not that hard,” because to be honest, you make your bed, keep your room clean, say thank you. It wasn’t hard. So I took it on as, “Okay, this doesn’t seem to be difficult. I’ll do it. I’ll be the best little boy.” That lasted for a little while, until I began to have all these other feelings inside where there was something in me that seemed to be not in sync with what God wanted, and it was mostly around my, as you grow into this, it’s around your sexuality. It’s around your drive. It’s called sometimes the flesh, and we see Paul warning us in the second reading about beware of the flesh, the flesh, the flesh. What’s interesting about that image of the flesh in scripture is it’s often almost directly related to sexual sins, and that makes sense, because flesh — come on, that’s what — we’re attracted to someone else’s flesh. What’s interesting about what Jesus is trying to say is that, “I have come into the world to invite you into a world that is not,” what he would call living in the flesh but living in the spirit. So what does that mean? Well, living in the flesh means living solely out of the most basic human drive we have, self-preservation. It’s a tremendous power inside of us, this thing we call our ego, our will. When it sees something it wants, it goes after it. It really wants that and can disregard all kinds of rules and laws and disobey rules and laws in order to satisfy the flesh. All right, so it’s the self-centered part of every human being, and that is, yes, partly exposed, I guess you’d say, by our sexual drive, but it’s much bigger than that. It’s more about the fundamental, human dilemma of feeling we’re supposed to be in charge. We’re supposed to be the source of everything. We’re supposed to be the one who accomplishes things.

It was the sin of Adam and Eve. I’m always irritated when I listen to people talk about the sin of Adam and Eve, and they made it sound like, well, God sat there and thought about, “Well, here are the laws of God.” And they really didn’t know — they only had one. It’s almost like, “Don’t eat the cookie that’s on the counter.” But their human nature was such that they were in innocence, and they were, in a way, primitive when it comes to evolution of their understanding of who they are. But what they really wanted more than anything else, which seems very normal for a human being, like an adolescent who said, “I want to make my mark on the world. I want to accomplish something. I want to do something.” And so what the devil was doing was just awakening in them this natural drive in human beings called the flesh, where they would like to be basically the source of most everything. So you look at that, and you say, “Okay, well, that’s then. Somehow that’s the nature of sin, to be wanting to be in charge.” And another thing about the sin of Adam and Eve is they were really looking at the world with a kind of primitive consciousness, a lot of ego, and basically what they were looking at is they wanted somehow to be the ones that could determine what was right and what was wrong, a binary world. That’s what I was taught. There’s a binary world out there. “Little Donny, there’s a bad thing, and there’s a good thing you can do. They’re two different things. Now, what you’ve got to do is never do the bad thing and always do the good thing.” Well, how are you going to do that? Well, you’ve got to be in charge. You’ve got to control.

Now, if you’re given a job that you can’t accomplish, or at least if you do try to accomplish it, it’s never going to be successful, I would call that slavery. You can work yourself into a relationship with sin, which the opening prayer say, “Please God, free us from this,” where your work all through your life is, “How can I stop sinning?” Now, one of the easiest ways to stop sinning is to attack the part of you that wants to sin. So you can be violent toward your human nature, your body, your natural inclinations, and you can do tremendous violence to yourself and self-hatred and shame and anger that I can’t get past this. Think of it. That is being a slave to something, because you’ll never accomplish it. You’re just caught in this constant work of trying to do something that you can’t do, and there’s a master there saying, “It doesn’t matter whether you can do it or not. Keep trying.”

I want you to listen to these readings as a way of trying to answer that — how would I call it — that really unhealthy way of trying to figure out what God wants us to do in this world. He doesn’t want us to stop sinning as a direct thing that we work for. He wants us to do something else, and it’s so radically different. The one is a lot of effort, a lot of energy. It’s giving in to it. You’ve got to push, push, push, force, force, force, and it’s a burden. It’s really a burden, and you just run out of energy. So when you hear in the gospel Jesus saying, “Look, if you just come to me and understand who I am and just know me and know what I’m there to teach you, this thing I’m asking you to do is not really difficult. It’s easy, and the burden is light.” So how can you say fighting sin is going to be easy, or it’s not going to be something heavy? Well, it would have to mean that you’re not the one in charge of getting rid of the sin. It’s got to be done for you. In other words, what you’re invited to do is not change yourself but invite into you, or better word, receive from God this gift of his Spirit. It’s the whole thing of the New Testament. Jesus entered into the world to show us what it means to be human, to struggle with all the things he struggled with, to have an ego that didn’t want to surrender to the way the ministry was unfolding. He resisted God’s plan initially in the Garden of Gethsemane. All those things, those are all parts of his flesh, but somehow he was able to witness for us the fact that the Father did live inside of him. He would give — Jesus would always give the credit for anything he was able to do that was beyond human nature in its more basic form, he would always give the credit to God. So what he’s trying to say is, “Look, you have to understand that the whole thing that I’ve come to teach is not about you being in control of the weaknesses of your flesh and demanding and forcing yourself to do what’s right. No, I’m saying you can’t do that. You’re not going to be successful in that. What you’ve got to do is allow something to happen to you. Let me come into you, and something is going to radically change.” Well, how would it change? Well, it’s because, as Paul says, there is a spirit that’s given to your mortal bodies, and it dwells inside of you, and we’re no longer going to be under the power of the flesh and be slaves to the flesh. We’re going to live according to something else. It’s the Spirit of God living inside of us.

So when Jesus is talking in the gospel and he’s saying, “Father,” and it’s rarely we have a quote in scripture of Jesus talking to the Father, but this is interesting. All right, he’s come to change everything for us. He’s come to change the whole way in which we focus on ourselves and God. He took away from us the burden of a law that we have to follow and the punishment that is due to that law if we fail. He took that all away and gave us something else, a gift, Spirit dwelling in us, God living in us, and the most interesting thing about that dynamic, when God comes into us, it doesn’t change us radically. It doesn’t all of a sudden; we don’t have any more sin. No, the sin remains, and we still find ourselves overcoming it, and the way we overcome it is not through our own effort but through the gift of the Spirit. But here’s the genius of God. Does he take away the sin? Does he take away the flesh, the desires of the flesh when he heals us of its power over us? No. No, he leaves it. We deal with it constantly. It just — it evolves. At one time my flesh was demanding attention from people. Now my flesh demands something else that’s a little more sophisticated maybe. Like I’d really like to be good at what I do, and I’d really like to be effective and not so much because I want people’s attention, which was the beginning, but I just want to know that I’m really, really spectacular. That’s ego. So what he’s saying is, “If you’ll let me enter in you and let your humanity remain there, you will always be patient and kind to other people that are struggling.” You don’t get rid of the struggle. You get rid of the failure of giving in over and over and over again. Being slave to a sin means sin is more powerful than you are. Yes, that’s true, but not any longer, not since redemption. No, the Spirit enters into you, and the Spirit can see through sin in ten seconds. It never produces what it promises. It never ever is what we really think it will be, and that’s called wisdom. And Jesus says so clearly to his Father, “The only people that can get this are the people that are teachable, the people that don’t have a focused interest in their ego being the thing that makes them into who you want them to be. They’re open. They’re receptive. They’re needy.”

Children are the easiest people to teach, because they don’t have any sense of their own autonomy on their own. They need someone outside of them to help them. Unfortunately we grow out of that, but spiritually we never grow out of it. Spiritually we’re always in this disposition of needing and longing for someone inside of us who gives us the strength and the wisdom and the ability to make the right decision. We change, but we never become perfect. I think perfection was the greatest mistake that, no, the greatest lie that I was given, that I am supposed to get rid of my humanity. No, I’m supposed to welcome it, accept it, forgive it for what it is, be patient with it, but know there’s something given to me that enables me to transform it in the moment and be a life-giving force to someone around me.

Father, our faith has been formed by those around us, and so often they haven’t given us the full picture. They haven’t really opened us to the fullness of who you are and what you plan on doing within us and how close you are to us. Bless all of us with trusting in the direction you can give to each of us if we open our heart to who you are, just listen, meditate on who you revealed yourself to be so we can feel the joy and the freedom and the peace that is our inheritance. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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2 Kings 4:8-11, 14-16A | Romans 6:3-4, 8-11 | Matthew 10:37-42

Oh God, who through the grace of adoption chose us to be children of light, grant, we pray, that we may not be wrapped in darkness of error but always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

In ordinary time, we’re going to relive the experience of one of the evangelists, one of the writers of the gospel, their experience of this moment that they had with God in history, these three years and then beginning their work as moving from disciples to apostles. A disciple is a learner, someone who’s listening and learning and spending time with someone. An apostle is the one who’s sent forth to do it, and so you’ll notice in this particular gospel of Matthew, it’s the first chapter that we’re — this tenth chapter, rather, is when Jesus is calling his disciples to do their work, and he calls them apostles. “I’m sending you forth.” So what I’m asking you to imagine with me is here is Jesus sending his disciples into the world to do their work. He is no longer with them physically, will not be with them physically when they begin. He is, in this particular passage, with them, but what he wants them to understand is the essence of what it is they’re going to be doing. And if you go back to that earlier part in the gospel, you see what God is asking the disciples to do seems like an impossible thing. “Gentlemen, I want you to go into the world, and I want you to heal the sick, raise the dead and bring life to people and somehow heal leprosy.” Now, leprosy is a beautiful, not a beautiful, but an effective way of describing sin, leprosy, something that distorts us. It deforms us. So when Jesus is giving that responsibility to the disciples, I don't know what it would be like, but if you would hear somebody say that to you — but in a way, Jesus does say it to all. “I want you to go into the world, and I want you to heal people and lift them out of darkness, lift them out of a place that we might call death.” So the main thrust, it seems, the ministry that Jesus has given to his disciples and he’s giving to us, sending us out into the world, has everything to do with this set of readings. So let me see if I can describe it for you, give you a sense of what it is you’re empowered to do.

The first story is about a prophet who comes to a woman’s house. He comes often. This woman was obviously very impressed with this prophet Elisha, not Elijah. It’s close. I tend to mispronounce Elisha a little more just to separate him from Elijah, but anyway, she loves this man’s truth. She loves spending time with him, and so she says to her husband, “Let’s create a space for him in our house.” Well, just think of the image that is. Here’s a woman touched by the truth. She wants to create a space in her home, in her very soul, in her essence for this truth to take root, and so she creates a room for him. And when that room is there, she has been longing for something in her life, and it’s to create new life. And so she is like the symbol of all of us, longing to make a difference, longing to create life in the world, and so she has no son. So he said, “I will give you a son.” So here’s the prophet, who represents the truth, coming into a person who opens their heart to him, and when he dwells with them, he has a reward for their hospitality. You will welcome a prophet. You receive a prophet’s reward, and the reward is truth. And the truth is something in her that produces life. So the symbol is she has a son.

Now, if you follow this passage from Kings, it’s interesting, because one of the next things that happens is that, as he returns again and again, he comes back, and the son is born. But then she sends word to him one day, and she said, “My son is dead. He’s died. Come and heal him. Bring him back to life,” another aspect of what the truth is able to do. And so he sends his servant. “This is my rod, my authority. I’ll send it through somebody else.” That didn’t work. So he goes, and he does this miraculous — bringing this man back to life, and what he does is he lies on top of him, his lips to his lips, his eyes to his eyes, his hands to his hands, his feet to his feet. It’s a powerful image of someone containing some energy, some life force, and he’s giving it to another person. He just doesn’t put his hand toward him, or he just doesn’t say the words, “Be healed,” really fascinating image. So let’s take this image of this figure, a prophet, as the image of the truth — the truth. What does it do? Opens eyes to see what is real, what is true. Produces life, because it overcomes darkness, and what is darkness? Sin — sin.

So the second reading then focuses on the opposite of this great gift of light and truth, and that is sin and darkness. And it’s interesting. St. Paul is talking about this. What he’s saying is that Christ went through something that we have to go through, and it’s a death. And the death we have is the death that is — we all it change, being reborn, being remade. What is it that this change involves? Well, it’s a moving away from darkness. So what is darkness? Well, darkness is the absence of truth. What is the absence of truth? A lie. How did sin enter into the world? It was a lie. A serpent is there, and he’s seducing Adam and Eve into believing something that’s not true. “If you rely upon yourself and you rely upon your own decision-making qualities, if you want to know what’s right and what’s wrong and be the center of your life, well, eat of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” It’s so interesting in that story, the minute you buy into a lie, something in you feels odd, feels strange. You feel estranged from some source somewhere, and that’s exactly the effect of sin entering into the human race, was a sense of distance from God. And the distance was, “I’m not worthy. I’m not good enough.” The minute you say, in your relationship with God, “I am going to earn his affection. I’m going to earn his reward of eternal life. I’m going to work for it, and I’m going to get it. It’s going to be my task, and I can feel really good about having accomplished it,” that is the greatest of lies. It’s not something we are called to do by a command from God to become holy and to do all these good things. That’s probably the most insidious lie that’s out there, and it’s more about our human nature than it is about religion. But religion buys into it.

So what is it? What is it that God wants us to understand about this truth that you and I are called to engage ourselves with? And when we see it for what it is, it reveals something that has been hidden, and then we have this new life. So how do we imagine that happening? Well, it took redemption for it to happen. All through the Old Testament people have been listening to prophets trying to tell the truth, and they try to live it, and they never do succeed. And they’re punished, and then they straighten up. And then they forget about the punishment, and they fall back into sin. So the Old Testament is filled with people who are seemingly unable to deal with this thing called sin, darkness, another word, again, illusion, half-truths, lies. So what was needed? A Savior, a Messiah, someone who comes that makes a big difference. What is the difference? Well, without going into exactly how redemption takes place, I want to talk about how it impacts us and how and how we’re to participate in it. And it’s the most important thing to understand. By the second paragraph of this gospel, it’s so beautiful. When Jesus sends his disciples into the world to do work that seems way beyond human nature’s possibility, that’s the first piece of truth I want you to ponder. When God is asking you to love, to forgive, to give life to people around you, to be a source of wisdom for them, he is not asking you to produce that wisdom or to produce that capacity to be a healer. It’s not something you do. It’s something you receive. So listen to Jesus when he’s just given his disciples this incredible challenge to go out into the world and to heal it of darkness and illusion and lies. He said, “If you receive me, whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.” So Jesus is saying, “You watched me make Eucharist. You watched me make my body and blood into something that I’m asking you to take in and dwell inside of you.” It’s so clear that the thing that was not possible in the Old Testament that is possible in the New Testament is a life force that’s been given to you and to me, and that life force is the truth, life, enlightenment. And when it comes into us, if we receive it, then we become a prophet, and we receive a prophet’s reward. What’s a prophet’s reward? Well, when you give life to someone, when you are a source of life for someone, when you feel the dignity and the value of being a person participating in this life force, you’re going to feel good. You’re going to feel full. You’re going to feel like there’s meaning and purpose, and the reward of the truth is light, enlightenment and life.

Whenever religion or anyone tells you that you’re no good and that you have to work harder and that you have to clean your act up and you have to do everything you can to make sure that you are pleasing to God, they’ve missed the point completely, because the main issue is how do you humbly receive the wisdom, the tree of life, light, truth? How do you receive it, and then when you receive it, how do you allow it to flow through you? And when it flows through you, you’re going to have everything you’ve ever wanted — everything. So what I’m trying to say is, when Jesus is saying to his disciples, “If you love Mother or Father more than me, if you love son or daughter more than me, you’re not worthy of me. Unless you take up your cross, you can’t be worthy of me. Whoever finds life will lose it. Whoever loses life —” This whole — the word in there that I want you to pay attention to is worthiness. It sounds like merit, doesn’t it? “If you take up your cross, if you go through some really difficult, horrible experience of pain and suffering and humiliation, then I might consider taking care of you.” No. Taking up your cross is going through a radical transformation. It feels like death. We’re not asked to go through a crucifixion like Jesus went through and be humiliated by everyone. That’s not the goal of Christianity. The goal of Christianity is to go through an experience that is so transforming that at the other end of it you are somebody really different. You are resurrected. You have new life. So the image is that we are engaged in work that is revealing the truth to us. Our eyes are opened, and we change. But the process of being changed by the truth is not just simply like being told — you know something you think you know, and you’re told, “No, that’s not it, and it’s something else.” You go, “Oh, okay. Now I’ve got it.” No. No, every time you’re living in a lie, you have a pattern of behavior in your life, a way of living, a way of seeing, a way of judging people, a way — whatever. And when the truth comes in and you find out, “Wait a minute. I’m not here to become the best believer. I’m not here to become better than somebody else. I’m not here to impress people with what I can do and who I am. I’m here as a servant, and that kind of change, if your pattern of life has been to produce something beautiful for someone else in your life and to win affection and attention, that’s a radical shift. If it doesn’t command death, I don't know what I can call it. You need to die to all those patterns. It’s really difficult, but it doesn’t demand that you do it. It demands that you allow it to happen. You allow God’s truth and light to come into your life, and it has its own strength and power. It will change you. It will change you.

So the image of being worthy is more like God is saying, “If you go through this, you’ll be worthy of me,” meaning, “You’ll be of worth to me. You’ll be valuable to me.” You’re already valuable in the term of God sees you, sees me, loves us as we are, unconditionally. We can’t imagine what it’s like to be loved that way, but that’s what God wants us to feel when he says, “Receive me. Receive my love.” We have this sense of our dignity, our value. When someone loves us, it’s an amazing experience, and in turn, we’re willing then to become whatever that transforming love creates. And what it will create is someone who is there to be an instrument of bringing this same mysterious, new life to another person, and so if you can feel it with me in saying Jesus comes into our life and says, “I want to dwell inside of you. If I’m inside of you, my Father is inside of you. If we’re inside of you, then we are the source of the wisdom and the ability and the capacity you have to change the people around you. And you are so — it is so important you do that, because then you are really valuable to me.” It’s almost like God is saying, “I need you to take care of the people around you. I want to take care of them, but I need you to receive me to be able to do that for them.” Does that sound more exciting, more wonderful, more life-giving than being a person who turns out to be the best person in the room and has everybody’s admiration and everybody says, “You’re so great. You’re so wonderful. You’re beyond anybody I’ve ever seen”? The ego loves that. The heart can’t even fathom it. What the heart wants is to be of value, and to know that you are a source of bringing light and life and healing and lifting someone out of the darkness of depression and fear, you can do that if you receive. Whoever receives is the key. That’s the work. The lie is perform. The truth is receive, and what an amazing difference that makes. So we are all apostles. We are all called to be instruments of God’s grace to the world, and it’s not about work. It’s about a gift and receiving it.

Father, open our eyes to see you as you are, to know your intention, your plan, your desire to use us, fill us with all the gifts that those around us are in longing for and to give us the enthusiasm and the excitement about being a channel for you. And let us feel the joy that comes from watching those around us that we love enter into a place of greater wholeness and light and peace. And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

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Jeremiah 20:10-13 | Romans 5:12-15 | Matthew 10:26-33

Father, guide and protector of your people, grant us an unfailing respect for your name. Keep us always in your love. Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We’re entering the ordinary time of the year, and this is cycle A, which means that we’re going to be focusing for the next many weeks, until Advent in November, on the gospel of St. Matthew. We have four stories, four eyewitness reports of this experience of Jesus in the world, and Matthew, Mark and Luke are most similar, called synoptic, and then there’s this very mystical work called the Gospel of John. But it’s so interesting to me that we wouldn’t count on just one story, one person’s view of this experience of God entering into the world, becoming one of us and inviting us into a relationship with him that none of us could ever have imagined was going to be possible. No one figure could do that, and what I find in these readings is a historical account, and obviously that’s important, because we need to know what happened back then. But the whole invitation of these stories is not to listen to them and learn what Jesus said then. That’s important, helpful, but it’s a story about something that’s going to happen to you and to me, just that happened to the disciples, that God is going to enter into us, call us by name and want us to enter into a relationship with him. And it’s an intimate relationship, and what it does is it opens us to a wisdom that we’re here in the world to bring into the world.

We’re to be disciples, every one of us, and I think it’s interesting to realize that in this call that we have we need to make sure we see it in the light of the New Testament, the light of redemption, because in the Old Testament God also called on people to be his disciples. They were patriarchs, and they were prophets. And we have one in the first reading, Jeremiah, and the interesting thing about the prophets is God did speak to them. It’s true. He gave them the word, but they hadn’t been transformed into what we potentially are in this world. So what we look at are people that were listening to the word of God. God would speak to them in their hearts. They would have studied the other prophets perhaps, maybe, but mostly they would just have a relationship with God where God would be telling them, “This is what I need for you to say.” And what’s so fascinating, when you look at the life of the prophets — and I’m going to focus on two, Jeremiah in this story and also Jonah, but both Jeremiah and Jonah have a kind of reputation as a kind of ushered kind of prophet. Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet. Another way to describe it would be the complaining, the whining prophet, because as a very young man, maybe at 17, he was called to be a prophet, and he was told that he could build up and tear down and build up and tear down. And I think he — my guess is he might have really liked the building up part, like most of us do. We like encouraging people, seeing them grow and change and develop. We don’t necessarily like the job of criticizing and condemning and confronting those who are resistant for two reasons. One is it’s a difficult job to convince someone that you’re telling they’re doing something wrong, and if they’re powerful, it’s dangerous. And so most of the prophets lived in tremendous fear, I think, of receiving retaliation. You go up to somebody powerful and strong and tell them they’re wrong, and they have the power to destroy you, and more likely, rather than negotiate your thoughts with theirs, they’ll say, “Stop saying that, or I’ll kill you.” And so Jeremiah found himself so often in positions where he was being rejected and punished. In the famous scene where he’s sinking into a well, into mud, saying, “Thanks, God. You really duped me. This is really great. This is what you do to your prophets.” I’m saying all that just to say these men were very human.

They had their struggles, and they were trying their best to confront evil. And one of the ways they tended to do it was head-on, straight attack, and there’s something in that that is not necessarily what happens when we, as his prophets, so to speak, are in the world trying to lead people out of darkness into light. It’s a different kind of model of confrontation with evil, and who do we learn it from? We learn it from Jesus, Jesus the teacher, the transforming teacher. He didn’t just information, but there was something about him, about the way he approached people, about the way he would attack their errors but not attacking them. And so I’d like you to imagine that the prophets of the Old Testament are a model, in a way, for bringing people into light, into truth, because what you’re trying to show people, as the prophets did — if you don’t change your ways, you’re going to self-destruct. And they often asked God to — I mean, they’d use God as their weapon and say, “Now God is going to destroy you.” God isn’t in the business of destroying people. What he’s trying to do is, if you’re choosing a way of life that’s going to lead to destruction, he’s going to tell you that, and he’s going to tell you, “You will be destroyed.” You do something unhealthy on your body, and God says, “You have to stop.” And you say, “No, I’m not.” And he says, “Well, it’s going to destroy you.” Well, that sounds like, “God’s going to destroy me.” No, the issue is God saves, God redeems, God calls into wholeness. He doesn’t destroy, but he had to make people aware that what they were doing — and so often you find something in prophets that’s dangerous, to any today prophet, meaning us. It’s a desire for revenge, a desire to see people suffer. “Okay, you’re not going to do what’s right? Well, I can’t wait to see how God is going to get you.” That’s what Jeremiah would often say. “I can’t wait to see you just destroy these people.” The same way with Jonah. Jonah didn’t want the Ninevites to change. He wanted God to send down and just destroy the heck out of them. I bring that up, because it’s sort of a shadow you see in the Old Testament prophets, and it’s not necessarily condemned. But in this world, when you and I have been called to be prophets, we have a different model than the prophets of the Old Testament.

We have the prophet, the prophet Jesus, and what’s the difference? Well, the difference, it seems to me, is the image the prophets had of those who were doing the wrong thing. They needed to be stopped, and they should be destroyed, and I’d love to see them destroyed. Jesus looks at a sinner, looks at somebody in a self-destructive mode. His motive, yes, is to change them but not by threats, not by even any simple desire that would say, “You deserve, if you’re not going to do what I say, you deserve what you’re getting.” That was never the intention of Jesus the prophet, and it can never be our intention.

Sin is, as we hear in the second reading — sin is destructive. It separates people. It isolates people, and they end up living in darkness — darkness. And so when you think of this darkness that is self-destructive and you see prophets came to point it out and then, when they didn’t respond, would love to see them wallow in pain, Jesus comes and said, “I have the same intention of opening people’s hearts and minds to what is real, what is true, called the light.” But he doesn’t have that side of the Old Testament prophets that seemed to be vengeful, and why not? Because of something he understood about who we are, and he points it out in that description when he’s talking to the 12 and he’s telling them, “I’m going to be sending into the world to open the world to what is real, to what is true. That means you’re going to have to expose darkness.” And I love this image that Jesus gives of all the work that we share together as prophets, as ministers, as people calling others to wholeness. Our work is going to mean that we are called to expose that which has been hidden that needs to be exposed so that those engaged in it know what they’re dealing with is destructive, not constructive.

I have an advantage over almost all of you that are listening, not everybody, but most of my listeners are much younger than I am. So you live 80 years, as I have, and I remember the 40s, when I was growing up, from zero to ten, and I saw the world for the first time. And in 1940, it was after the war. It was a time of great prosperity in the United States, but I had one simple image that I had of the world that I lived in. Number one, it was safe. It was truthful. It was honest. It was never, in my mind, conceivable that a doctor would harm a patient, that a police officer would not be there to protect and guide a person into a safer environment. I never thought a priest could ever abuse some child somewhere. All those things, they were there. It wasn’t a perfect world. It seems perfect compared to the world we live in, but it was a world where things were hidden. And over these years, I’ve learned so much about the darker side of the world, and sometimes, when you see it exposed, you get depressed, thinking the world has gotten so much worse, but there’s something else that you should look at that comforts me. And that is these things have always been present, but the beauty of the revelation of God, the beauty of his incarnate life in us, in the world is engaged in this work of exposing evil. And sometimes it’s too much. It seems like there’s more polarization today between people involved in almost every industry, every institution, be it religion, be it medicine, be it politics. This polarization — all of a sudden, we’re hearing things that I think are filled with light, and we’re listening to things filled with darkness. And what do we do? How do we discern that? How do we deal with all these messages and all this information? Can you imagine that — when I was the age of most of you, we had a radio and a television and four channels and a phone and our local neighborhood and a newspaper. That was it. And now I’m just blown away by spending time on the Internet and going into some of these news services or whatever, and you’re listening to every conceivable concept of what’s going on in the world, every opinion. It’s not truth exactly that you can count on that you’re finding on this forum imploding us or filling us with information. It’s mostly opinions, and the opinions are now more than ever, it seems to me, so diverse, almost one against the other. And so I feel like, “Well, all right. We’re in this time of everything being exposed, which seems to me healthy, but then where do you go for the truth? Where do you go to say, ‘That opinion is correct. That opinion isn’t’?”

And that’s what gets me to the heart of what I’m trying to say in this homily today, that we have got to be prophets. We have got to be those who look and see and listen to opinions and thoughts and images and situations, and we have to be somehow gifted to be able to pursue the truth that is in them and to believe we can find it. And you can’t find it by going to the Internet. What you can do is go inside and go to your heart and go to this promise that God is making in the gospel to his disciples, and you are one, and I am one of those. And what is he saying? “All right, you’re in the world, and what I’ve given you is a chance to be an instrument of the same work that I did. I want you to awaken people to life, to goodness, to joy, to peace, to unity, to all of it. You’re here to do that.” And so in a world like today, it seems more important than ever that we would recognize two things, that we should not be afraid of the way the world is going, because it’s going in the direction that God intends it to go, and it’s going to ultimately bring us all to a better place. That’s one thing. So fear has got to go. You’ve got to get away from that and to realize that nothing can destroy you. No situation in the world can harm you, harm me. So we’re fearless in facing all of this, but at the same time, we’re hopeful, because he’s going to give us a gift, going to give us this truth. And I think the most interesting truth he’s giving us, one thing I can focus on that is a key ingredient in you and me being open to the truth of God and knowing that, if he fills us with it, we will resonate it in the world and we’ll have an impact, and that is how valuable every single person is. Every single person is known by God, loved by God, intended by God to flourish and grow and become. So don’t be afraid that any situation is going to destroy that promise of God to care for each and every one of us.

So if we know that God is in us and God is going to give us wisdom, and the wisdom of God is a loving participation in our life that brings life to everyone engaged in the way he wants us to live this life — you think about it. That’s the promise, and that should give us enormous confidence in two things. All of this that goes on is going to bring about something good, and everyone involved is valuable. The ones who are in the darkness, the ones who are in light are equally valuable. We need to honor them, respect them, love them, want them not to be punished, as sometimes the Old Testament prophets were so thrilled about saying, “Let me see them squirm. I want to see them vanquished.” No. No, now we don’t have that spirit. We have a spirit only of wanting to see conversion, transformation. Transformation rather than information is the key, and we carry that in our essence, in our being. It’s not necessarily what we say. It’s everything that we are. It’s our intention and the way we see the world. That’s what’s essential, to be engaged in the world today.

Father, there’s so much in the world today that is confusing and hard for us to grasp. Between not knowing where we are with our pandemic, not knowing where we are politically, conflict in your church and leaders, it’s all a time that we need more than ever the conviction of who you are in us. So bless us with this anchor, this rock that is you so that, as we discern and look at things, we will look for the truth only, and you will show it to us, and you’ll let us, by our very understanding of it, bring others into the light, out of darkness, out of fear. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14b-16a | 1 Corinthians 10:16-17 | John 6:51-58

Oh God who in this wonderful sacrament have left us a memorial of your passion, grant us, we pray, so to revere the sacred mysteries of your body and blood that we may always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption who lives and reigns with you, with God the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This is the last of our special feasts for a while. We start next week with ordinary time. I always like to mention there’s nothing ordinary about ordinary time other than instead of focusing on one or two very special teachings of the church in a homily, in a liturgy, we’re focusing on a particular gospel and the story of Jesus as revealed in that gospel. So this ends, in a way, what I would consider to be the kind of checking out for everyone. When we look at all these feasts we’ve been celebrating since Ash Wednesday to this one, what we’re looking at is the essential teachings of our religion, and nothing is more important than, as members of a particular religion, we understand the heart of that religion, the thing in it that gives life and gives success, in a way, to what we long for as human beings.

And I think this is interesting to end this whole section, from Easter to Pentecost and Holy Trinity and now the Body and Blood of Christ, because in a way, it’s almost like we get closer and closer to the heart of what it is that we as, particularly, Catholics gather around. But it’s essential to, I think, the Christian message, the message of Jesus giving to his disciples a promise that he would live inside of them, that he would be the source of everything they were going to do, that he was giving himself to you and to me in a way that goes beyond logic. And without that, he’s saying, we can’t do this thing that we’re called to do; we can’t live the life that God has intended us to live, in terms of participating with him in the salvation of the world. Now, one of the things that has struck me often in these last — I don't know, this last year, I guess. It was 2,000 years between God’s call of Abraham and the coming of Jesus. So in a way, it was 2,000 years when we were focusing on the heart of the Old Testament, and the heart of the Old Testament is a story about God entering into a people. He was going to lead them through a process, and the process was going to bring them to a place of freedom, a place of wholeness. And the overarching metaphor for the whole journey was he wants to take us out of a way of life that feels like slavery into one that feels like the fullness of life. And what is the heart of that image of slavery? Well, it’s the fact that, in the beginning, religion was, to a great extent, a way of God entering into our lives and telling us how to behave, how to work, how to do the things that he called us to do. In the process, he said, “If you do these things, you’ll have life, and if you don’t, I will punish you, or I will pull away from you.” That was the way it began. So in a way, there’s something in the Old Testament that was necessary to be what it was at the time, but it was something that was temporary, because it was going to evolve into something much more according to our nature. We have the capacity to be told what to do and to follow that because of the threat of punishment. That’s an easy way for people to be motivated, and that’s perhaps, maybe all we could basically muster up 4,000 years ago. But we’ve evolved well past that.

So this first reading that we’re listening to in this set of readings is about this promise that God made in the beginning. He said, “I will be with you. I’ll be your God, and I want you to follow me. And I’m going to test you to see if your heart is in the right place. I’m going to put all kinds of obstacles there for you.” And really, when you look at the obstacles, they really weren’t anything other than the obstacles that are in life. The image of scorpions and plagues and all that kind of stuff — scorpions, is that a virus that poisons? It’s always been a part of life that there are things in it that challenge us to see whether or not we’re going to get past these things and realize these things are there for us to grow and to evolve, and that evolution is what that Old Testament story is all about, God entering into a person, saying, “I’ll take you on a journey. I’m going to take you out of a world of laws and regulations, and I’m going to get you into a place of incredible freedom. And you’re going to find that place with me, and when you find it, you’re going to enter into the world that I’ve always intended for you to be in.” And that’s the world that Jesus came to teach us about and to show us what it would look like. The ultimate freedom was not just to get to a place of milk and honey, a place where life was easier. No, it was all leading us to this amazing promise of God to do something that’s so extraordinary that it took 2,000 years of evolution before he was able to say, “All right, I’m going to show it to you.” And now we’ve had 2,000 years of Christ, and we’ve really focused on this figure, Christ. And who is he? He is us, incarnate God in a human being. So what we see in this person Jesus is the fullness of what was at the heart of the freedom that God planned from the beginning for us to experience. We are invited to be in participation with God dwelling inside of us, and that belief and that trust and that miracle of God’s indwelling presence radically changes religion from a religion of control with punishment as its motivation to something so much more mysterious, so much more exciting and so much more attuned to our nature. We have been told that we will live with a power called God, and that God living in us will do two things. It will transform us and enable us to transform other people. What an incredible gift. We will be able to participate in the same life that Jesus participated in, and just as he realized the power that he had to do that was not from him but from his Father who dwelt in him, so we’re being told, “Believe that you have that same destiny that Jesus had, and you are there enabling others to receive this great gift through your intention and then through your action.”

So the heart of that teaching was conveyed to the disciples by the theme of this set of readings, this feast. Jesus said, “Unless you eat my body and drink my blood, unless I am in you, and you remain in me, and you participate in that mysterious indwelling presence that I’m modeling for you, unless you do that, you’re not going to have what I planned for you. You’re not going to have life.” And I love — when you think about — the image of eating somebody’s body and drinking blood is very, very bizarre, but when you think about what it’s pointing to — it’s pointing to, I think, something all of us basically know. You know what it’s like when, say, you love someone, and you know they’re a part of your life. You know that, if you have someone who believes in you and really trusts in your goodness, it enables you to be more who you want to be, the goodness that you long for. We know what it’s like to have somebody’s presence in us as a positive and also as a negative. We know, if we have people criticizing us and judging us and putting us in a bad place, it affects us. So is it that hard to imagine that the God who created you and created me would like to have a relationship with you where you feel him inside of you? And what you feel is his passion to transform and change the world into a place that it was always intended to be by God, and what he’s saying to you and to me, “Would you like to join me in this? Would you like to help me do this?” Yeah, yeah, I would. I really would, because I both want what you promise, and I want to share it with people.

So how is he going to convince us of this great mystery? Well, he created something that’s at the heart of, I think, most people’s religious life that believe in the Eucharist. It’s communion. It’s this ability to gather in a ritual and to reenact this moment in Christ’s life when he announces to his disciples a mystery that is so difficult for us to engage in. Last year the Pew Trust — it’s a research fact tank. It’s nonpartisan, and you can hire them to go and say, “What are people thinking about this issue? What are people thinking about that issue?” And last year they did an evaluation of Catholics as to whether or not they believed in the real presence, meaning that the Eucharist really is — the bread is the body of Christ, and the blood is the blood of Christ. So what do you think the results were? 30 percent, only 30 percent of Catholics believe that this is more than a symbol. I find that amazing on one level, since the church is so clear in its teaching, but at the same time, I understand it human nature wise, because how do you explain it? This piece of bread is now the body of Jesus? This blood is really his blood? But if you can’t go into that world of the mystical, of the unimaginable of — that’s something you can’t explain. Unless you’re willing to get into that, you can’t really engage in this thing called redemption. Redemption is the promise that this miracle happens, and the ritual empowers it and strengthens it.

Ritual is so interesting. We have it everywhere. Usually rituals, whenever anything is beginning or ending or anything really significant is happening — we have funerals for when people die. We have weddings when people start a relationship. We have baptisms for a new child entering into the world. We have birthdays, anniversaries. I think we all know the effectiveness of that. I had a birthday party last night for my sister. We took time and prepared the nice meal, and then we had gifts, and we had a little toast and told her how much we love her. And is that powerful? Yeah, I think so. I think rituals are enormously powerful in engaging us in something that is ethereal and not easy to describe, and that’s certainly at the heart of what the Eucharist is.

I love the second reading because of the word that is used. It said — Paul is talking about this mystery, and it’s brand new to him and brand new to everybody. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to believe this in the very beginning because — I’ve known about it all my life. I took it for granted. I don't know if I really sat down and thought, as a child, what it really means, but when I read Paul, he said, “This miracle of redemption is a participation in the blood of Christ and a participation in the body of Christ,” not just thinking about him, that he existed, and not just a memorial service, but it goes way, way beyond that. And it means that — let’s use the images. First of all, the gift of God’s presence inside of us is a kind of connecting with his passion, his love, his desire to see the world become all that he intended it to be, to see people flourishing, becoming who they are, free, self-aware, authentic, all of that. And so when you see that that’s his passion, then you say, “Okay, I want to participate. I want to receive it, but in receiving it, I also want to give it.” That’s what’s so beautiful about the Eucharist. It’s for us, but it’s also for everyone else. We receive its gifts, but then it empowers us to send those gifts into other people. So what does it mean to participate in blood? Well, blood is this mysterious thing in our bodies that the minute it stops doing its thing, we die, because it carries everything to every cell, life, oxygen, immunity, everything. So there’s a beautiful image of what it means to have this force inside of us, in terms of its effect on our body. Without it, the body dies. Without it, it’s not nurtured. It’s not healthy. So this is Spirit. This is God’s Spirit in us that does this incredible, life-force work. It animates everything, and then his body — participating in his body is participating in his work and what he did, how he walked the earth and through his intention, through his touch, he would heal people, transform people, awaken them. His preaching was so effective and his miraculous power so beyond imagining, and I don’t think I still don’t fully understand and believe that that’s possible for human beings. But it is. I know it is, and I’ve experienced it. But still, it seems I’m more prone, like most of us, to take religion on the most superficial level, which is the church telling us what we’re supposed to do, and if we don’t do it, we’re punished. But how different it is in the New Testament to see something so radically different than following rules and regulations in order not to be punished but to be participating in an action of a loving God who said, “I am the source of everything you’re able to do. Unless you remain in me and I remain in you, unless you drink — unless you feel my blood coursing through your veins, unless you feel the energy that you have in your body to do the things I do, you haven’t really entered into what we call the church or spirituality. It’s an amazing teaching, and I long for more and more and more people to really feel it and believe in it. Yet if you make it into a nice, easy, “Explain this for me, please, Father, how this bread is the body of Christ and this wine is his blood,” you can’t. It’s not something you explain. It’s something you participate in.

Father, the gift of your presence within us is difficult to comprehend, to understand and to feel sometimes. What we pray for on this feast is that you would awaken us to this incredible gift and let us feel it as we surrender to this work of participating in the same work that you were given by your Father. Open us to our dignity, our worth, our value, in terms of this work, and let us be effective by our trust and our belief and our confidence in this great promise. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Exodus 34:4b-6, 8-9 | 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 | John 3:16-18

Grant, we pray, almighty God, that we who have come to know the grace of the Lord’s resurrection may, through the love of the Spirit, ourselves rise to newness of life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We’re about to begin what we call the ordinary time of the year, and so during these last many, many weeks, we’ve been focusing on the heart of the message that we find in this mysterious book called scripture, the story of God’s relationship with his people, an invitation for us to enter into that experience in our own life, a relationship with God that is real, powerful, effective and transforming. And so it seems appropriate that, as we end this, we’re looking at, okay, here’s a feast that’s focused on simply who is God. How do you describe him? What’s his name? And the interesting thing about the God that we believe in is that he’s a Trinitarian God. That’s a really interesting thing, and I want to focus on it, because it’s a way for us to understand that the essence of this figure is so far beyond our full understanding that we have to at least approach it from three different sides. Yet we know that somehow the ultimate goal of every human being is to know this God, not just by information but through, first, experience. And then ultimately, the goal is that one day we will be with him, and we will see him face-to-face. We will see his face, which is so interesting to me, because it implies that we’ll see the way that he sees us, and the way he sees us is confusing at times.

When you look at the story of salvation history, it is the most amazing compilation of book after book, chapter after chapter that gives experience after experience of this God with his people, and it’s in time, meaning it started close to 4,000 years ago. And who we were 4,000 years ago is not who we are today, so there’s a part of this whole thing that demands a certain way of reading it, a certain way of understanding it. We can’t take it literally, as if every phrase in the scriptures is what God would say to the people today if the situation were somewhat similar. I love this first reading from the book of Exodus, because God is telling us who he is. He’s using words, and he said, “I’m a gracious God. I’m a loving God. I’m a forgiving God. I’m there for you.” And Moses’ response is, “Well, if you are that and you’d like to join us, we can certainly use some help, but we’re pretty stiff-necked, and we’re pretty difficult to deal with. But if you would like to, we would like you to help us. We’d like you to come with us on this journey.” And the book of Exodus has this image of a God joining a people who are longing for something they do not have, and what they don’t have is freedom. They want to be freed from slavery, from that which keeps them from being who they really are, free, open receptive, the gifts that are around them and to use those gifts as a form of developing who they are and then using their evolution of higher consciousness to help other people. That’s the plan, but at the same time, you go back to the book of Exodus — I was reading the same chapter that this is from, and there was a phrase in there, and God was telling them that they needed to do certain things if he was going to walk with them. And one of the things they had to do was keep the Sabbath, and that was not to do things on the Sabbath that would distract them from concentrating on who God is and spending time with him. And he simply said, “Anyone who doesn’t keep the Sabbath, I will kill them.” I thought, “Wait a minute. That doesn’t really sound very gracious or loving or kind.”

It’s so easy, in a way, to take anything in this story out of context to give you an image of a God who isn’t really who he is, and I would say that everything in scripture is pointing to who God is and recalling how he’s worked with us over centuries. But it’s not the source, the primary source that we go to to find out who he is. The only way you can really know who God is is to experience him, to have him — allow him to somehow reveal himself to you personally, and he does that. He does that over time, and if you look at salvation history as an image of the way God works with human beings over a long period of time, it’s easy to see that it’s exactly the way God works with every individual over time. In the beginning, he’s the discipline of your parents. He’s the one who tells you, when you’re two years old and you can’t do it, “You’re going to have to do, and if you don’t, you’re going to be punished,” or something like that. You can see the kind of simplicity of people back then. They were like children, in a sense, compared to us today, and then you see them moving away from rules and laws and regulations into something much more intimate, much more personal. Then you see the New Testament. Imagine the Old Testament is God working with people when they’re really, really limited, in terms of their ability to understand much beyond justice.

So let’s look at the role of God the Father in the beginning, and the role of God the Father in the beginning was to enter into people’s lives and help guide them on a journey toward freedom. And one of the things that would make them free and enable them to grow was to live in community, and one of the things that was necessary for them to live in community was to be just, to be fair — an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, not an eye for ten eyes or a tooth for ten teeth. No, it made sense in the beginning, as they worked together in a community that, if someone did something wrong, you could do it back to them but only in the same proportion they to you, and that was a real step forward. That was a real movement toward understanding the way in which God intends us to live together — in justice. And he tried to lead us into a place of freedom by finding people who could guide us and show us the way. There were patriarchs. There were prophets. There were priests. There were kings, but whenever God works through the authority of another, the human nature of that other gets in the way, because nothing is harder on people than giving them power, in terms of helping them to really be there for other people. It’s such a temptation. We know it. Anyone with authority can so easily use that authority over another and rob them of their dignity and their worth. We see it everywhere, especially today in race relationships. So that’s a stage we went through, but then you realize there had to be another stage.

That was God the Father, and now we’re going to look at God the Son. God the Son enters into the world to do something more than the Father could ever do. He has to model for them something that goes beyond justice, and what he’s modeling is a thing called love. And the word in the New Testament is forgiveness. Another word for forgiveness is full, radical acceptance of what is, what is true, to see goodness for what it can accomplish, to see evil for what it destroys, and the more we see both of those things, the more we’re imbued with an experience of one living in the world, manifesting this thing called mercy, called love, called no judgment. It opens us up to a whole other way of interacting with each other. It’s so interesting when God says, “One thing I want you to do —” he said this through his son. “Stop judging each other,” and I think to myself — I’ve said that to people. “God does not want us to judge.” And then they’ll quote the creed that we say on Sunday. “And God is the judge of the living and the dead.” It’s so interesting. You’ve got to understand judgment in this way. Judgment is not discernment as to whether something is live-giving or death-dealing. That’s called discernment, but judgment has to do with value, people’s value. And to judge someone is not valuable, not worth saving, not worth working with, not worth being saved, that’s what we can’t ever, ever fall into, and yet that’s what justice tends to lead to. Sort of like the people who harm us, they should not only be dealt with justly, if they cause pain, they should be in pain, and the mindset is there’s something ugly and horrible and bad about these people, like bad people don’t deserve love, affection, forgiveness. That’s judgment, and the most amazing thing that Jesus came to do — it’s another dimension of who God is, because we have God the Father, then God the Son, then God the Spirit. So I’m trying to make a distinction between each of their roles in our lives, particularly in time now. I’m talking about the way they’ve been revealed to us, because it’s one God. It’s one person, but when the time was right, we had God the Son, God the brother of humanity, the one who came into the world to reveal the fullness of what justice leads — what justice began, and that is mercy, understanding, compassion, empathy. And when that’s engaged, something moves from people living together in a fair, just way to people interacting with each other where there’s a flow of something, a life-giving flow. It’s called mercy. It’s called forgiveness. There’s another word. It’s love. When you move from justice to love, you’re into a whole new category, and that’s the evolution of what God is trying to be in our life. He went from a God of justice to a God of mercy, but being a God of mercy wasn’t enough either. There needed to be another stage, and so that’s the stage we’ve just gone through in celebration of Pentecost.

And what I realized in that feast is what we’re saying is that this God who is both just and now merciful is also this mysterious thing called light, life, and that light and life is truth. And so what God is ultimately designing his relationship with us to be is one that moves into this mysterious place where his indwelling presence enters into us and changes us. We’re transformed, and that transformation leads us to be not just aware and conscious of what is true and what is real and what is life-giving, but we become the source. We’re actually resonating those gifts. It’s not that we’re doing them necessarily. That’s one thing, but you can have people doing good things for bad motives. So doing it is part of it, but there’s something much deeper. And that’s this mysterious world of the Spirit, the transforming power of God, and where does that lead us? It leads us to the place we are now, where we’re living in the age of the Spirit. And it seems to me that that’s where we should be focusing on who God is. It’s one thing to say, “My God is good and gracious, and he’s there for me. He’s willing to support me.” Okay, that’s God the Father, the creator, the artist. He sees what he made, and he sees it as beautiful and valuable. And then he says, “I want you to understand how it is that you’re going to live together, and you’ve got to start with justice. But then you move to this wonderful thing called mercy.” And mercy is so much more than letting your brother off the hook, of not condemning him. No, it’s being aware of who God has empowered you to be in this world that we live in, and this is the place we’re living now. This is the age of the Spirit. This is the fullness of God. It’s like you hold all three of these together, but the Holy Spirit sometimes is the one that is not dealt with as much as God the judge or Jesus the brother who is forgiving. But the Spirit is the fullness of who we are and the destiny that we’re here to fulfill, and I wish I could describe it to you in a way to say, “Do this, and you’ll feel it.” No, it demands you are open to the reality of this figure God as a person, as not an idea, not as a historical figure, but it’s somehow saying, “I know you’re here. I know you’re alive. I know you live in me. I know you’ve taught me all these things, but I want you to be a part of my life. I want it, and I say yes to it, and I’ll accept all the confusion, all the craziness of the world. It’s darkness. I’ll live in that with you, and I will know that somehow in all of it, in every single thing that goes on, you will use that as a catalyst so that I, each of us individually, when we respond to things that are happening in the world, have the ability to respond in the Spirit.” And the Spirit is the thing that gives us this enormous, transformative power.

It’s interesting. We call the first person in the Trinity God the Father. Jesus is our brother, and the Spirit is our advocate — our advocate, our lawyer. Isn’t that interesting, that the fullness of the relationship that God wants with us is that he’s created us, he now loves us in mercy and forgiveness, and he’s there to protect us. From what? What does a lawyer protect you from? A misuse of the law. The law, if you break it, you’re condemned, but the law is also something that Jesus came to say, “I’ve come to destroy its power over you.” So we break the law. Jesus broke the law all the time, not the law of love or the law of forgiveness but the legal law, and so it’s so interesting to also see this dimension of this resonance in us of God working through us to save the world, also, free of the limitations of so many of the rules and laws. It doesn’t mean that we can get away with doing anything negative. It just means that we are here to be such a mysterious instrument that no set of rules, no set of organized ways of dealing with life is going to fit. We need wisdom, and wisdom goes beyond law. And that’s the beauty of this incredible gift of the Trinity, but nothing is more important than finding and sensing and realizing its fullness and live ultimately in the Spirit.

Father, your greatness is too much for us. All that you’ve planned, all that you have invited us into seems beyond our comprehension and beyond our abilities, and yet you continue to call us into places where your power works through us beyond anything we could ever do on our own. Open us all to this great gift of your presence in our life. Help us to be encouraged and enlightened and empowered so that we can accomplish all that you ask us to do, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Genesis 11:1-9 | Romans 8:22-27 | John 7:37-39

Almighty, everliving God, who willed the Pascal mystery to be encompassed as a sign in 50 days, granted from out of the scattered nations the confusion of many tongues may be gathered by heavenly grace into one great confession of your name. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

As a Catholic, I was obviously very much formed by the liturgy, by mass on Sunday, and as a priest, I’ve celebrated mass after mass after mass every day. I’ll be saying this thing that is a celebration of what has happened to the human race because of this figure Jesus, and one of the things that I love about the liturgy in the renewal is that we brought back at the very beginning of the liturgy a more public form of the request from the congregation to God to forgive us of our sins. It’s interesting. We start every liturgy with simply a request. “Please Father, forgive me. Have mercy on me.” The reason that seems so important is because of the effect of sin. Sin is the enemy. Sin is the thing that Jesus came to conquer, to take away its power. He taught us this mysterious thing about giving in to evil, giving in to sin, and that seems so strange when you think about it. But it has an incredible element of wisdom, and it’s this: sin is what separates people. If there’s anything that’s clear about the message of Jesus, it’s we are all called to be one body, one spirit, one reflection, a multitude of different kinds of reflection, but we’re all called to be in some way a reflection of this incredible loving figure that is God the Father made manifest to us through a God/man, Jesus, who implies so clearly in his ministry what he’s doing is empowering us to be who he was, who he is. And what it is that God always wants of his people is that we become one in union, communion. Oneness, that’s the core. Nothing creates more difficulty and problems for the evolution of a human being from the time they’re young till the time they’re old as the relationships they have with people, and if there’s a healthy flow of life between parent and child, between friends, partners, there’s life.

So the first thing I want to start with is this image that God has come into the world to effect a change, and the change is to draw people more and more consciously into one unit, one communion of intention. And the intention is always there for the good of the other. We’re called to be one body manifesting the gifts of the Spirit in different ways. So we look at our first reading, and the first line that strikes me so much is it says that everyone — well, the opening prayer says everyone is gathered together in one great confession of who God is. And this oneness is expressed by this experience of the disciples when they were gathered together. They had 50 days since the time that Jesus died, and once Jesus died, as you know, the disciples were terrified, frightened. They were in a locked room. They were filled with confusion and doubt, and I’d say the 11 that were left ran the gamut from John, who understood everything, to doubting Thomas. If there’s anything clear about the work that Jesus did before the Spirit entered into the world in this new way that he enabled through his death to bring to us, you see that the work before that wasn’t that effective, or at least it was very frightening to the disciples when it took the turn it did when Jesus died. And so you have this sense that there was this lack of cohesion and union, and so what happened in 50 days is you had these men that were so diverse in their response to Jesus all one. And they’re in this room, and suddenly there’s this overwhelming presence of divinity, which is in the form of one of the ways in which God, through Jesus and through the Old Testament, has provided us an image of how this God works in our life, and it’s like breath. It’s like wind. It’s like this mysterious thing. You don’t know where it comes from. You don’t know where it goes, but you know it can effect great changes from a gentle breeze to a hurricane or tornado.

So they’re in this room. It’s filled with this wind, and all of a sudden, there’s these tongues of fire. And fire is the most interesting element throughout scripture, but it’s a combination of light, which enlightens, wisdom, and a fire that purifies, burns out everything that isn’t really what it’s intended to be. So just imagine what’s happening is, in this union they feel with each other, the presence of God, that presence awakens in them this awareness. Two things: you’re being purified, transformed, and you’re being enlightened to be a source of wisdom and light for other people. And what was happening when this Spirit came is that they wanted — and this is the dynamic that God has created in our hearts. When we’re given a truth and we’re given life, the instinct, the purest instinct of human nature is to share it with other people, to receive it in gratitude and in thanksgiving and then say, “God, this has given me so much. I want to give it to other people. I do. I want to give it to them.” And so you see all these other people from around them. They’re from all over. They’re in Jerusalem. They’re from every country in a sense, and they’re watching this thing happen. And what they’re hearing is a manifestation of the feeling that each of these men had, knowing that they were being touched by a transforming Spirit, an enlightening Spirit, and that gave them the ability to share the wisdom and the life that they had. And they started talking about it in their own language, and all these other people heard it. Now, why would that be the image that we’re asked to ponder about this new thing called the church? It’s about individuals being infused with life and light and having this not just power but this inner desire to share it with other people, to give it to them, and the interesting thing is it isn’t being communicated in the normal way. In other words, if I’m English-speaking and I’ve got a group of Germans and French people and all these other people and they don’t understand at all my language and I start talking about this thing that I know is in me that I want to be in them and it’s life-giving, they get it. So how’s that working? It’s not through words? It’s through this mysterious thing called presence. This presence that’s in them is so vital and alive that, when one has it and intends to give it to another person, they receive it. It says a lot about the organ that we know that’s in the middle of our chest where God says he dwells. We know that that organ has the capacity — the heart we’re talking about — has the capacity to resonate and share whatever its disposition is, its feeling with another person without using words. It’s called an electromagnetic field. It goes out eight, ten feet. So we have within us this capacity to communicate something without words, and that’s the mystery that I think we’re asked to ponder, this Spirit being given to human beings. When they have it and they feel it and they know what it creates within them and they have a desire to share it, it flows between us. And words, yes, can help, but it’s not the words that work. It’s something else, and I want to talk about that something else. It’s the presence of God and your human presence, and they’re together in terms of their intention of wanting to give life, and it flows. It works. It goes out.

So let’s look at, then, the image of the gospel. The gospel is that moment when Jesus came to the disciples after his death. It’s interesting. The gospel is the beginning of Jesus working with the disciples, and his post-resurrection disposition, power, presence in the opening reading was the effectiveness of it. But let’s go back to that moment when Jesus appeared to his disciples for the first time, and they’re locked in a place, and they’re full of fear and confusion and doubt. And he’s just there, and he just says, “Peace be with you. Peace be with you.” And he said, “I want you. I want so much for you to be the person that I’ve called you to be, and I want you to have this great gift that I want to give you. It’s an amazing gift. It’s the gift that you can do something for your brothers and sisters that gives life, but one of the things that’s so important that you have to do in order to do this is both receive the Spirit I’ve given you, but then understand this Spirit has a gift for you. And the gift is your ability to forgive, to forgive sin.” Now, what would the disciples feel overwhelmingly when they first saw Jesus after they had doubted and ran away and denied him and all of that? They would have been feeling that he would have been angry and demanding maybe retaliation or whatever. No, he was just filled with love. That love took the form of forgiveness. So if you can understand with me that this moment, when Jesus is first appearing to his disciples, he sets them on a journey of being an agent in the world that unifies the world, reconnects the world by forgiving all the sins that we’ve done to each other and to God. It’s amazing how unifying this element of forgiveness is, and without it, there remains division. I think it’s so interesting that, when Jesus says these words to his disciples — he said, “If you forgive someone, they’re forgiven. If you don’t forgive them, their sin remains.” And what is the impact of sin? Separation. So think of it. When you hold a grudge, when you refuse to accept someone for who they are, when you judge people, when you find yourself only comfortable with a certain set of people and the rest you have some kind of resistance to, all that resistance to union and communion and oneness is somehow connected to this thing called sin.

Sin is a hard thing to describe. It’s easy to describe, but if you say, “Well, it’s breaking a rule, breaking a law. God said, ‘Do this,’ and I didn’t do it, so I sinned. So now I need his forgiveness.” No, it’s more that you as a human being have something deep inside of you that, when left unchecked, creates this distance between people, and it’s weird, because we do it for the strangest reason. We don’t know them. We don’t understand them. We feel offended by them. We feel threatened by them. We think they’re better than we are. We think we’re better than they are. All of that, if you imagine all of that is somehow connected to this thing called sin, in order to be the Spirit of God in the world, if we don’t have this thing flowing out of our heart that I want to call compassion and empathy, if we don’t feel something for others and don’t know that what others are needing more than anything else from us, if they’ve offended us, what we need from them, if we’ve offended them, what is the call to be in union with one another, if we don’t understand that that has, at the core, this requirement that we be filled with this virtue of forgiveness — and a virtue is not something that you are told to do and you have to figure out how to do it. A virtue is the power to have this gift of forgiveness as just an integral part of who you are. It always begins — I find this so fascinating. It always begins with self. You’ve got to know how to forgive yourself. You’ve got to know how to have patience and love and compassion and empathy for your selfishness, your stupidity, your shallowness, whatever.

All I’m trying to say is, if I can say one thing to you on this Feast of Pentecost about the power that’s been poured into you by the God who wants you to be like him, it’s the power to forgive, the power to not hold something against someone and the desire that everyone become one and all the gifts that each one has become gifts to the other. And that flow of gift to another is blocked so often by a negative experience that we call being hurt or being somehow damaged by someone else. The thing that I’m saying is God said, “I’ve given you a power to be one, and the oneness is essential because of the communication that you need to have. And let the Spirit flow from one to the other, because I’m in everyone, and I know that I’ve chosen to work through human beings. I want to reach others through your friends, and so if you have any block with them, it’s not going to work very well.” So please understand. There’s one primary gift. The primary gift is to be like Jesus, who is the essence of understanding, compassion and forgiveness.

Father, before we listen to your word, when we worship you, before we receive you in Eucharist, we are told by you that we are forgiven. There has to be some key way in which we are able to receive and give things to one another without the block, the damaging role that sin often has in our life. So bless us with the greater awareness of this importance of focusing on the heart of your ministry. The love, the acceptance, the empowerment that you give to each of us through your presence in one another is so precious that we should do nothing that blocks it, nothing that gets in its way. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Acts 1:1-11 | Ephesians 1:17-23 | Matthew 28:16-20

Almighty, everliving God who willed the Pascal mystery to be encompassed as a sign in 50 days, grant that from out of the scattered nations, the confusion of many tongues may be gathered by heavenly grace into one great confession of your name through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We’re coming to the conclusion of the story of salvation history. We began at the beginning of this Easter season, this Lenten season, with the story of the creation of Adam and Eve, and now we end with Jesus returning to his Father and setting up the church as we know it, as we’re living it. It’s really important for us to understand the radical change that this New Testament has ushered in, because it is so different than the way it was before Jesus returned to his Father and empowered human beings to continue his work. So let’s take a minute to look at the Old Testament to see where its power was, how effective it was. It’s clear that human beings at the time of the Old Testament were not in the same place they were at the time of the New Testament, meaning that the message they received in the Old Testament was essential for them to grasp first before they grew into it and understood it and then became ready and evolved enough to receive the most mystical, mysterious fullness of the story of how God plans for the world to continue to flourish, to become all he wants it to be.

So if you go back to the Old Testament, you can see that the two things that the Old Testament worked with in terms of human beings was their intelligence, their mind, and their wills. So what we see is the information that came into the mind was something that they needed to understand about their nature and who God is, and we know that the wisdom of the Old Testament, in a sense, is found in the law, the Ten Commandments. Let’s imagine that God begins his work with human beings, and at some point in their history, when he’s formed them into a community and they realize that they have to live together in community, they realize that they have to give up some of their selfish wants and needs in order to share life with people. And so God said, “Here’s what I want your mind to grasp hold of.” It’s this. It’s some information. The information is you are human beings living in a world where you are dependent on and need to know a God who created you and who is guiding you. So the first thing, the first law, in a sense, is to worship, to honor this God who is at the heart of everything. And he says you should take his power, and it’s amazing power, and don’t ever use it in a way that God didn’t intend it. So any gift he’s giving you, any power he’s giving you, be careful. Use it only as he would intend it to be used for the good of others, and then spend time with him. Those first three rules of the Ten Commandments, worship the Father, don’t take his name in vain, keep holy the Sabbath Day, that just means be in union with this God, know his power. And then it goes on to describe how human beings should relate to each other, and it’s honor those that give you life, everything that gives you life. Honor God. Honor the people who gave you life, who took care of you when you weren’t able to care for yourself as a child, and also don’t lie, and don’t steal, and don’t kill, and don’t break promises. All this is just good, solid information into the mind and gives a person an understanding of how important it is to take on these qualities if you’re going to live in community, because these are the things that you want from others. So why wouldn’t you then first begin that kind of relationship with people by giving them? And most every time you give something to someone, you get it back. The last two commandments are be satisfied with who you are. Don’t try to be more than you are. Don’t try to have more possessions than someone else. Don’t envy another person’s life, their relationships. Surrender to who you are and accept that. So connection with God, a way of being with people, a kind of surrender to reality, those are all informational pieces that are given to the mind, and the mind understands it. So the Old Testament is fundamentally working with information, giving it to people. Then it also worked with the will, and it needed to give you motivation. Information, motivation, one to the mind, one to the will, and the motivation was simple. “Do this, and I’ll be your God. Don’t do this, and I’m not your God anymore.” That’s the way it started. That’s pretty dramatic. “I demand this of you if you want to be in a relationship with me.”

It was so hard for them to do that that God, over the centuries he worked with human beings in the Old Testament, he changed it to something like — well, first he said, “I can’t really dump you, because I just can’t be unfaithful to myself. So even though you don’t do what I ask, I’m still faithful to you.” And then finally he said, “I keep trying to convince you in your head of these things and their value, and I expect your motivation to be active, because I tell you it’s not going to go well for you if you don’t do these things.” But at the same time he said, “I guess I have to do something more for you. I have to take these rules and these laws, and I have to write them on your heart.” What? “Instead of information in your head, I want to put these things in your heart.” Now, what’s the heart? The heart’s the center of our being. What do we learn about the heart from scripture? Well, not only is it the center of our being, but it’s also the place in which God intends and tells his people, “I want to dwell with you. I want to be inside of you. I want to live in your hearts.” Then the idea is —well, what is the heart able to do? What can it do? It goes beyond just simply understanding, and it goes beyond simply motivation. But the heart is the part of human beings that is designed as the place from which comes something from one human being to another that is very mysterious. It’s called transformation. Information informs the mind. Motivation stimulates the will, but the heart has this power to effect change in another person’s heart, in another person’s existence. And so we see the seeds of all that in the Old Testament, and then comes Christ, and then Christ comes into the world, and he’s about to describe to everyone the fullness of his teaching. And the fullness of his teaching is so simple, so basic. He’s come into the world to awaken people to the reality that God’s plan from the beginning was that he would enter into your heart and, through connection with you there, would resonate with you for other people, a transforming power that changes them, frees them from two very major problems. One is the fear of being who they are, so being imprisoned. The other is not understanding the whole issue, not understanding what life is for, what it’s about. So that would be called the truth. So opens eyes to the truth and opens hearts to who they are, and then his basic motivation for all that is so that we can become the instruments of life that Jesus witnessed when he came into the world.

So what we have here is a radical surprise to the disciples, and I’m thinking of them a lot in this set of readings, because we have two experiences of Jesus in these two readings, in the gospel and the second reading. One is at the end of his life when he’s returning to his Father. The other is right after he dies. In both cases, they’re gathered together, and Jesus speaks to them. You have to imagine that the idea that human beings had of who Jesus was and what he was doing, what the disciples had, was an image of a person who would give them information about who God is and would stimulate them to be motivated to teach that to people. And this kingdom that Jesus was going to establish was going to be established by the authority that was in charge of the world, and they would do the work. And so it was like they were looking for an earthly kingdom, and they were going to be players in that. They were really excited about the power, worldly power they were going to have, and so they gave themselves over to this mysterious figure, Jesus, and lived with him for three years, hoping for something that would be good for them. And all of a sudden, they find out he’s leaving, he’s dying, and nothing’s accomplished. Nothing’s been changed in the world. The temple was still the seat of power, and it was still ruling and owning everybody by telling them what they had to do and threatening them with practically extinction, spiritual extinction if they didn’t do what the temple required. So they must have been extremely confused, and the first thing I love about the second reading is the fact that, when Jesus first appeared to his disciples — and there are many accounts of it in the different gospels, but in this case, what we see — it’s talked about in the Acts of the Apostles, and it’s remembered that Jesus appears to them, and they’re frightened, and they’re confused. And then — he’s dead, and now he’s talking to them. And the first thing it says is that they doubted. I guess they doubted their senses. This just shows you the resistance that they naturally would have had as human beings. They never expected this as the end, that he would come back after death and then talk about something that they could not fully fathom.

And what did he talk about? Well, it’s very clearly in this set of readings that he talked about a mystery, that he was going to enter into their hearts. The experience is called baptism, which is an interesting thing, because a lot of religions have taken this final commission of Jesus telling them, “Go baptize everyone in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” as a call to missionary work. Go everywhere where someone’s not baptized and baptize them. Well, that’s — there’s nothing wrong necessarily with that, but I don’t think it’s as literal as that. No, what is baptism? It’s a power given to someone that opens them to the mystery of God’s Spirit dwelling within them, and through that power dwelling within them, they’re able to do the same things that Jesus did. And what Jesus did went beyond giving information and motivation. What he was doing is transforming people by his amazing affirmation of who they were and then empowering them to use who they are for the good of another person. That’s the mystery. That’s the awesome thing that he came to give them, and baptism is a ritual that celebrates that. You give it to a child or someone unconscious. We do in the Catholic Church, and we see that as a potential that’s given to them. But if you look at the nature of baptism, it’s a kind of death, a surrender of your human capacities, let’s say, to teach, tell somebody something, motivate them to do it versus surrendering to a power that’s been given to you that is a combination of being affirmed for who you are and then the invitation to use that unique thing you are, to let God use it, enter into it. And somehow, in some mystery, it’s God doing his work, but it’s you participating in that work. And when that’s your intention, when that’s what you’re doing, you’re a baptized person. So the call to ministry is to awaken people to the fullness of the teaching of this God/man Jesus, and what he asks of us is beyond — I’ve been working for him for so long, and still it’s hard for me to grasp, but that’s literally what he’s doing. He is entering into you and me. He is affirming us, and then he’s saying, “With you affirmed and you and I working together, we can change anyone into anything that they’re called to be. That’s your gift that I share with you, and the joy that I have in doing it I want to share with you. And so together we change the world.”

Father, your gift of your Spirit within us enabling us to be so much more than we could ever be on our own is so difficult at times for us to believe in and to trust in, but only you can give us the grace to be the instruments that you call us to be. Only you can be the source of the faith that we need to have. So we pray that you grant us these great gifts so that we truly can become the witness in the world to everything you want people to know about you and see about you and love you for. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Acts 8:5-8, 14-17 | 1 Peter 3:15-18 | John 14:15-21

Grant, almighty God, that we may celebrate with heartfelt devotion these days of joy, which we keep in honor of the risen Lord and that what we live in remembrance we may always hold to in what we do through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We’re in that period of time in the church when we’re thinking mostly about looking back at what has happened to the world through this mysterious and death and resurrection of a Savior, and when we understand it, when we fully grasp it, there is no other real reaction than to be joyous, to be rejoicing because of what has been given to us. So I’d like to see if I can capture what is in this set of readings, because there’s something here about the establishment of this new kingdom, this different kingdom that has been potentially there within us for so long but has not been actualized, because something had to happen through someone else’s actions that opened us to a world that we could only dream of before. It’s a world of peace, a world of wholeness, a world of unity and oneness. It’s called redemption. It’s called salvation.

I want to take us back to the beginning of this season, because we’re getting very close to this core season that started with Ash Wednesday and ends with Pentecost Sunday, another two weeks, and what we have in this set of readings throughout this season are some fabulous season are some fabulously insights into what this whole Christian, mysterious thing is about, about a God who enters into our lives to change everything. And so if we look back at that first reading from the Old Testament — the one I’m talking about at the very beginning of the season is the story of Adam and Eve, and you and I both know now, since we’ve looked at these scriptures so much, that these stories are basically the story of a relationship between humans and the divine, relationship between a divine God and the humans that he created, the crown of his creation, those that are most like him. And we see in this relationship an evolution that is not just something that happened to the race beginning 4,000 years ago, but it’s the same exact thing that happens to ever human being that encounters this mysterious thing we call life, this life. And I’m beginning to understand who they are and who God is and why they’re here and the beautiful thing about that first experience of God with his people that tells us so much about who each of us, who each of them are, and God is the God who is this benevolent, loving figure who wants nothing more than that which he creates to flourish in a beautiful place, a garden. And so we have a dimension of maybe the purest, simplest way that people think about God. Here is a God that exists that is there for me. He will take care of all of my needs. Everything I ever want, he will provide for me, the right weather for my crops, the safety of my children so they grow into adults. It’s that kind of naïve image of a relationship with a divine figure, like a super-, super-rich uncle or something who’s going to get you out of all trouble. And so the story begins with that image of a God who creates a garden, and it’s so beautiful, and he just sets it up that way and said, “Here, this is wonderful. This is for you to enjoy, no work, no effort, just — oh, by the way, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that there’s something here that you have to achieve, which is going to be very tempting for human beings, and that is that you would like to be like me. You would like to do the same thing I do.”

Now, when you think about that it makes sense that what we’re seeing is a story evolving where a God has created creatures that are like him, and so if they’re like him, they want to do what God does. And what God does is create, and so there’s something in human beings that doesn’t want to sit back and simply have somebody take care of them the rest of their life. They want to create. They want to be a part of the process. They want to be like God, but in an oversimplified way, Adam and Eve revealed a dimension of human nature, but in the process, they set up a kind of relationship problem with the divine, which has been going on for creation, and that’s what we live in, that tension. And what’s our role, and what’s God’s role? What’s our part in this, and what’s God’s part in this? And is it possible that we’re there to work together? The whole story of salvation history is from a God who is taking care of all the needs of his people. It shifts to a God who is now working with his people to take care of his people. Does that make sense? In other words, what the story reveals is a God who not only creates us but invites us to be co-creators, co-sustainers, co-lovers of creation. So the temptation of Adam and Eve, in a way, was a revelation that human beings want to be engaged in the work, not just receive it, and so we have something that has to shift within human beings. Something has to change for them to be partners with God, and the change is they have to learn about intimacy, how God has always intended us to be his co-workers. And the only way he can describe that kind of work is to say, “I’ll show you the power that I have,” and that comes about when Jesus enters into a human form, Jesus, and walks this earth. We see there finally the model of who human beings are supposed to be, and we see something so exciting after Jesus spends the time that he spent with his disciples and then is ready to leave them in his physical presence, but he’s setting up a relationship with them that is the model that we have to understand is our relationship with God, every human being’s relationship with God. He empowers us to do the work that he did, that he longs to see accomplished on the earth. So if there’s anything you can learn about salvation history from the beginning until the end of it, those 2,000 years from the call of Abraham until Jesus rose and returned to his Father, we see this slow transition between a God who is supplying everything for us to a relationship with God where we’re sharing in his work.

So let’s look at that first reading, because it’s a beautiful image of how God empowered human beings to be like his Son. So here’s Philip. Philip is one of the disciples. He is now empowered to be like Christ, like we all are, and so what he does is he goes to do this work of sharing the life of God that is in him, that effects great change in people. So he comes, and he starts accomplishing that which only a human can do in and with the power of God. So what does he do? He drives out unclean spirits, and everybody that’s paralyzed or crippled is cured, and there’s great joy in the city. Okay, that means that here’s the impact of this resonating power that’s inside of Philip, that’s inside of you, inside of me, that God has placed there by living within us, resonating through us his power. And what I love is these two images really cover the basic struggle human beings have. There is this thing that gets in us that possesses us. It’s basically a lie, and it’s all the things that the world might teach us that we would say that, if we do these things, we’ll find joy. But none of them produce what they promise, so we’re possessed by some addiction, some kind of negative spirit that we think that is going to lead us somewhere, and it can’t. And he comes, and he just destroys the power of that image. And the other thing he does is he looks at someone, and he knows that their body is supposed to function in a certain way, use that as a symbol of their very essence. It’s supposed to function in a certain way, and there is this thing that gets in the way of being who we’re called to be. It’s called evil, but it tends to limit us, and so a crippled person is a person who has a gift that he or she is called to share with the world, but something keeps them. They’re crippled. They’re blocked, and he comes to destroy that. So think about it. Here’s the Spirit of God in Philip that comes into a community and frees people from all the negative things that go on, particularly that judgmental voice that constantly tells us we’re no good, all the limitations that we place on ourselves. “I can’t do it. It’s too difficult. I’ll fail.” All those things are obliterated by this Spirit that comes in, and so — I don't know what Philip must have felt like, but he knew somehow this thing that he had in his experience of this God/man is now in him. And he had great joy, great enthusiasm for what he was doing, and so what happened is, when Philip goes back to headquarters, in a sense, and sees Peter and John, and they realize, “Okay, these people, we want them to have the same thing you have, Philip, so they can do the same work you do, and so we’re going to come down, and we’re going to do something that seems strange. But we’re going to lay our hands on someone so that the presence of God in us will move, through our hands, into that body of that person.”

Now, think of the image of that. God’s Spirit dwells in Jesus. Jesus gives it to his disciples. His disciples then, in turn, give it to those that he serves. They, in turn, give it to one another. That’s the mystery that we have to embrace. We have this Spirit within us, and the interesting thing is you would think this Spirit would be so well-received. We would see that, if we could just tell people, “If you’d turn to this power inside of you, it will empower you to do this,” why would there be people resisting that? Well, there were people resisting it, and they were the people running a kind of operation called the temple. And when they saw the freedom that was in these people, a source that they weren’t the cause of the source, being able to achieve the things that they made people do certain things in order to receive that shadow of religion, they were angry at the fact that they were no longer needed, in a sense, no longer required and no longer had power. It’s so interesting that at the beginning of this incredibly exciting and enthusiastic response to the Spirit of God within human beings ministering to each other, when they saw that, they were so threatened by it. The only thing they could do was kill him. So think about it. The first 300 years of Christianity, 300 years, people that were living this life risked their life by living it. It’s incredible. There’s that much resistance in the world to nothing more than a God who’s willing to enter into us and to accomplish the things that we long to receive, allowing human beings to be the conduit through which they receive it. It seems so attractive and so beautiful. No matter how much you thought you were losing your control, you’d surrender to it eventually. That’s what’s happening as we move closer and closer to the fullness of people understanding who they are and the gift of the Spirit within them.

And so we go to the gospel now, and the gospel is making this kind of clear statement to his disciples of what’s really happened. He came into the world to show people who they can become. Now he said, “I am leaving you, but I’m not leaving you in any sense of making you somehow less effective because my physical presence is not here. No, just the opposite, I’m going to make you even more effective and more empowered by returning to my Father, and when I return to my Father, then there’s this Advocate, this Holy Spirit, this power, this creative force that’s going to enter into you, that’s going to enable you to become the healer I was in your life.” And I don't know how the disciples responded to that, but it’s so clear that this is the statements that we have from Jesus as he’s ready to leave and set this up, this thing we call church, religion, the kingdom. He’s trying to make it so clear what it essentially is. It’s about you being so appreciative and so thankful for what God has given to the world through Jesus, his presence, and it’s all couched in the most mysterious way in saying it’s not about here’s the powerful person. You get to be powerful when you get his energy, and then you become him. I don't know. It’s not about something that’s personal to us. It’s something communal with God, and so we don’t really own it. We don’t possess it, and if you are given a gift constantly like that, on a moment by moment kind of way, the natural thing in a human being is to be filled with awe and with thanksgiving and with reverence. And that’s the final message of Jesus to his disciples. “I give you me. I give you me, because I love you, and I want you to experience the joy that I have when I heal people. I want you to know that you are essential to my work, every one of you, and if you understand that, you’ll know, you’ll feel what I’m giving you. You’ll be appreciative. You’ll love me, and that’s it. If you love me, then I can come to you. I can’t come to you as some kind of objective force like a pill that you take in and all of a sudden you become strong.” No, this is a personal relationship that goes on moment by moment, and it’s a sign that the God who is using you to be a co-creator, to be an instrument of his artistic gift of desiring that everything he creates find fulfillment — when you’re in that world, it’s so attractive and addictive if you grasp it, and that’s my longing always, to help you to see the mystery of what this whole salvation history is about, a God living in you, a Spirit flowing through you that he is that radically heals and transforms everything it touches.

Father, the depth and the awesomeness of your message is hard for us to fathom. It’s hard for us to hold it consciously in our hearts and live it as fully as you’ve invited us to. Please bless us with this Advocate, this Holy Spirit, this force that is you. Let us surrender to it so that it can use us as a free conduit, generously offering ourselves and our talents to accomplish the goal that is in your heart, the fullness of your creation coming to all that you intended it to be. And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

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Acts 6:1-7 | 1 Peter 2:4-9 | John 14:1-12

Almighty, everliving God, you constantly accomplish the Pascal mystery within us that those you are pleased to make new in holy baptism may, under your protective care, bear much fruit and come to the joys of life eternal through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

There’s an image that’s very strong in the beginning of this set of readings that I’d like to begin with, and it’s the idea that, when God revealed fully who he is and who he longs to be for his people, when he’d fully shared his revelation through this God/man Jesus, there was an impact that happened to the people that believed it. The first thing that was clear is that they grew in a need for one another. They came together. There was a community, and the community grew. And one of the things about the community at the beginning was it was a very different kind of gathering, and people took all that they had and put it together. And they lived off of a common source of food. It was obviously small, but still what is clear is that this message of Jesus creates this need for and this desire and this longing for a community, a dwelling place of likeminded people who feed each other, nurture each other. And there’s something about their work, that it was there to awaken in each other this thing that is so often described as the gift that came to the world through Jesus, and that is light and life. In other words, he came to explain something, show us something that we knew deep inside of us that we still are trying to find. It’s part of who we are, but it’s our nature that he’s revealing to us. And when we say light, we mean awakening, enlightenment to see who we really are and why we’re here and what we need and what we long for and then also who God is and what his plan is for us. And it’s so clear that his plan includes two things: a community of people, and the other thing about these people is they have a dedication, a desire to take care of each other. That was the thing that they always said about the Christians. “Look at them. They’re so different. Look at how they care for each other, how they love each other.”

Another thing that struck me as I was preparing for this homily was the fact that, for the first 300 years of Christianity, these people were outcasts. They were risking their lives and living this way of life, and it’s so fascinating that the rootedness of this message got into these people, because they had to risk their life to be in this work, engaged in this new life. So there had to be something so attractive about it, so natural to them that they say, “We’re willing to risk our life to do this.” And that really does create a dedicated group of people. So we have this image of dwelling together, a community bound by a kind of awareness of each other’s needs and wants so they were there for each other. It’s a beautiful image. It’s being a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people who are called out of darkness into light. That’s one of the images of the scriptures today.

The gospel in this set of readings is a treasure of insight into the things that I think we’re longing to know and to understand about ourselves, because it’s clear in the first two readings that, when the message of Jesus enters into a person, they’re called into a community of people who serve one another. So there’s something about community and service that is core, and you would think that would be something natural to human beings. And in a sense it is, but we’re a complex people. We have this three-fold thing about us. We have needs. We have wants. We have desires. You’ve heard me use these three images before, and they’re important, but it might be a good thing to go over them again now. And that is that needs are the things that are just essential, like air, water, food and shelter. We don’t have to figure out what those are. They come naturally to us. It’s not a difficult thing to realize that these are things we have to have in order to live. Then we have wants, and the wants seem to come primarily from our mind, and the mind is susceptible to a lot of influences that are not always truthful. But the mind comes up with ideas that make sense to the mind that work for the needs of the human being that the mind is in. So it has a kind of self-centered part of it, which is not necessarily bad. It means that the mind will figure out things that we want, that make our life better and richer, but the danger is that it can really turn dark, because sometimes the mind can come up with ideas that are filling needs that are not necessarily healthy within us. So we get caught in addictions and all kinds of problems, but then there’s this other thing: our desires, our longings, and that’s the place where God enters.

When I think about — the second reading talks about a building, a place where we can dwell with God, and the thing that I’ve always used in my homilies and also learned from my work with Dr. Robert Sardello in his wonderful workshops is the heart. The heart is the place that I want you to think of as the dwelling that God has created for us, and it’s the place where we dwell with him. And in that place of the heart, the heart works out of a different motive, in a sense, than, I would say, the mind. It works not so much from figuring out what is best to do. It’s going inward and trying to find the wisdom of who we are and what we really need, and it’s not something that we could say is just something that is easy or practical. But it’s wisdom. It’s like the mind comes up with ideas, and the heart surrenders to truth, truth of who we are. Let’s imagine church then as the formation of this space, this room inside of us where God is there with us, and if we are understanding the role of membership in this community of God, we are naturally drawn to other people, and we draw them into our space to dwell with us. I love the fact that in — I think we’re all so sensitive to it today, is that we can’t meet in churches anymore as groups, and it’s painful. It’s hard. As a priest, I don’t have a community around me to celebrate every Sunday, and what is interesting to me about that is there was something about coming together in a place where God dwells, which is a symbol of coming together in each other’s space where God dwells inside of us. The image of church has had to shift from the building and the more literal sense of the way we celebrate it to something much more internal. Maybe that’s what’s so hard about this time of separation. We’re being challenged to ask ourselves, “What is this longing inside of us that feels so undernourished right now?” Yeah, it is that we can’t be in groups together, but it might also underscore the fact that there is a way for us to be together that isn’t necessarily always in a physical way, but it’s a way of imagining what life is. It’s a strange, mysterious process of we being a space, a dwelling in which God lives, and when we invite people into that, and people sometimes come into it when they’re not invited, but they’re just part of it, and it’s in that dwelling place that so much happens. And what happens is we understand what God intends life to be.

That’s the essence of this set of readings, I think. God in Jesus is ministering to these disciples who are going to form the community called the church, and at this moment, they have just been told that Jesus is going to die. He’s going to leave. It’s the Last Supper. He said, “I’m going to — I have to leave, and I’m not going to leave you alone. Don’t worry. I’ll be there with you.” And they’re completely confused, and so when Jesus tries to explain the mystery of what he’s really doing by saving them, by freeing them from all their illusions and half-truths, by bringing the truth into them, the Spirit of God opening their eyes to see who they really are. What they’re looking at is this plan of God. He said, “There’s no way I’m leaving you. I’m dying, and I’m not going to be physically with you. But after I die, I’m going to come back,” which is the mindblower. There’s no spiritual leader I know of that died and came back to life and spent a long period of time talking to groups of as large as 500 people at a time. Imagine the affirmation that might come to a person who realizes, “Wait. This person was dead, and now he’s back. I think I should pay attention to him.” But what he’s really saying to these men before he leaves, he’s saying, “There’s this mystery of intimacy with you and me and the people that are in your life. That intimacy is the place I need you to be, the space inside of you.”

And what is intimacy? Intimacy is a relationship with someone where there are no secrets, where there is nothing hidden, where there is an openness to who we are and a connection to who we are and a willingness to connect to another person as they are. There’s no judgment there. There’s no condemnation. There’s nothing but radical openness to who one truly is and acceptance of that and the recognition that, in accepting it and being in an authentic relationship with God and another person, is the essence of what it means to be alive. Imagine: to be alive is to be in this space that, yes, is celebrated in churches, in synagogues, in temples, but it’s also celebrated in a very intimate, personal way with people. And maybe that’s what we’re asked to examine and look at more carefully during this time of separation, isolation where we can’t do it as literally as we always do it, but now we have to recognize our longing for it and realize what it is that we’re longing for. It’s some kind of ability to be in a relationship with another where this self-disclosure, this longing that we have to be completely transparent with someone, even though that’s terrifying for most of us in many ways, but it’s what we’re made for. And when there is that kind of honest openness, it’s like we show each other who we are, just like Jesus is saying, “Look, I’m showing you who I am.” Then what he’s saying is, “I don’t do these things that you see me do. You think I’m a great miracle worker, but I’m just like you in a sense. I’m a human being, fully human, and that’s what I want people to see me as, and yet I’m filled with this power. And I want you to know you’re filled with it too.” That last line of the gospel is the one that I think so many people are touched by. For Jesus to look at his disciples and say, “You know the things I’ve done, given sight to people that are blind, enabling people to walk who are lame, enabling people to hear that couldn’t hear, to do things with their hands that are withered —“ Everything about his presence in the lives of others is a symbol of his making them more who they are, enabling them to function fully as they were intended to function. And he’s saying to his disciples, “If you let me dwell with you and then you invite other people to come into this dwelling that is us, they’re going to be ministered to.” It means two things. There’s two things human beings long for. They really long to be who they are, and you know when you’re faking it, and you know when you’re under pressure to be somebody because that’s what other people expect. You know that feeling, and you know what it’s like to be completely transparent and be honest and be loved and be accepted. That’s what we’re made for, the latter, and when that happens, when there’s that sense of well-being, that everything is as it should be, that I’m exactly who I’m supposed to be, and there’s nothing that I have to work on to make me better, and then you realize, “I want to give that to somebody else. I want them to see it. I want them to feel it,” that’s the dynamic. That’s church. That’s religion at its best: a human being affirmed, knowing that they’re loved and then turning and offering that same gift to another person.

We’re here to serve each other. That’s it. The mind can come up with a million ideas of how we can serve ourselves. Our instincts make sure we serve our body to keep it alive, but boy, the heart, that place, God in you, you in God, you open to another person, that person open to you, that’s where it all happens. That’s the place, the dwelling that God is trying to describe to his disciples through his Son. “Don’t be afraid. I’m always there with you. You’re never going to be alone, and you’re always going to be successful.”

Father, your gift is yourself. It’s hard to fathom that. It’s hard for us to imagine that you are that concerned about each of us individually, that you want an intimate relationship with us. It goes contrary to most everything our minds tell us about our weaknesses, our shortcomings, but it’s your will. It’s your plan, and so it awakens in us our own sharing in the work of Jesus, the priest, and we are all priests to one another, servants to one another. Bless us with an awareness of this gift. Let us first generously receive it and then know we are empowered to give it, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Acts 2:14a, 36-41 | 1 Peter 2:20b-25 | John 10:1-10

Almighty and everliving God, lead us to share in the joys of heaven so that the humble flock may reach where the brave shepherd has gone before, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We continue with the theme of the impact that this figure Jesus Christ has had on the world and on each of us, and it’s the task that I take on when I accepted the call to be a priest, that I would preach and teach this mysterious thing that happened in history that changed everything. I think it’s interesting that we’ve had basically 2,000 years of Old Testament and 2,000 years of New Testament. That’s where we are right now in 2020. It’s an interesting time. We’ve had a long history of pondering the Old Testament, a long history of pondering the New Testament, trying to put them together and realized they’re one message, and the message is so peculiar and mysterious.

I don't know if you think about how a priest would be affected by these readings and everyone who has a role of ministry but priests in particular, ministers, pastors everywhere. There’s a challenge put before us, and it’s in a way frightening, because it’s saying that there’s a temptation in every human being to step outside of the role that we really has a people who put other people in touch with the mystery that they’re invited to experience, the intention of that compared to telling people what they need to do and controlling their lives through rules and regulations. The latter is so human. I’m in charge of a group of people. I should tell them what they need to do. I should make sure they’re not doing the wrong thing, and I never got into that that seriously, but there was always a sense that I might have been maybe too easy on people. Maybe I should have been more tough over these last 52 years of ministry, and other times I says, “No, no. You’re just beginning to understand the freedom that God is inviting you to give to people through this gift of forgiveness and love and acceptance, that we should have courage to take risks and make mistakes and be accepted if we’re intending always to grow.” That’s just the tension that I think all of us as ministers feel in this particular set of readings, pretty much nails us in terms of inviting us to get to the heart of what it is a minister is called to do, because Jesus said, “I am the model that you need to follow in order to minister this mysterious, wonderful thing called redemption, called new life, called truth.”

So let me see if I can go through these readings and see if I can draw for you and for myself some wisdom and some understanding for this place that I have in your life, because we all share in it. I’m a minister to a large group of people when I was in parishes, and yet now my audience is the radio and video and things like that. But it’s still the same. I still have a sense of responsibility for these open hearts that listen to me. In fact at times I feel so — I don't know — humbled by the fact that people listen and pay attention, and when they tell me it works, it’s so life-giving for me. But at the same time, I worry am I doing a good enough job. That’s just part of me. It’s part of what, I guess, all ministers feel, because the one thing I have to be careful of, and the one thing I think Jesus is inviting his disciples to be careful of, is to look at the Pharisees and recognize that they went off-track. They were pretty bad, but they didn’t realize they were as far off as they were, which frightens me a little bit in terms of anybody like me who’s in charge of other people, whether you’re a minister or a parent or a friend. You’ve got to be careful of how you do this work. It is not up to us to tell other people what to do and to say, “If you do it, I accept you. If you don’t, I reject you.” That’s the shadow. It seems to me that that’s the biggest sin of the Pharisees. They didn’t know the heart of the message that God always wanted his people to hear and to listen to and to be transformed by. They fell into the trap that the mind and the ego — we just get drawn to it. There’s something about being in charge of people that’s a rush. It feels good. It feels like you’re powerful, and without even realizing it, you can sort of begin this little dance where you’re telling people, “This is what I expect of you in this relationship, and if you don’t do it, I pull away,” which is another way of saying I reject you. “And if you do what I say, then I’m drawing in, and I accept you.” That’s the shadow of all relationships. The parent who gives life to their child affirms who they are and encourages them to find out who they are by making mistakes and taking risks, and that’s not easy for a sensitive, caring parent who worries so much about children when they’re younger making mistakes that they’ll have to live with their whole life. But they tend to forget that this process that God has called us to is one of constantly making mistakes, misjudgments and never, ever receiving anything but acceptance and love and patience on the part of God.

So what I want to try to do in this homily is to open you to something that I believe God has shared with me as I ponder these readings, and that is that I am never, as a priest, nor is anyone in a relationship, in charge of somehow managing the relationship so the other person ends up doing a certain thing that we think they should be doing. It’s much more difficult than giving direction, rules and laws. The heart of every relationship and the heart of God’s relationship with you and me is not to give us rules and laws but to open us to an experience of who he is and to know what it feels like to have somebody absolutely, 100 percent on your side. No matter what you do, they’re there. With patience and with understanding and with compassion, they lead you through whatever you’re going through without any resistance to your struggle. Think of the trust that God has in us in giving us this kind of freedom, and one of the things I realized in this set of readings, for example, in the first reading we see that Peter comes along and says the most — it’s a pretty frightening thought. He looks at these people and said, “Jesus came. You’ve all waited for him, and well, he came, and you killed him.” And they say, “Now what are we going to do?” It would seem like, “Now we should be condemned. We should be cut out. We should be destroyed. We should be punished.” He said, “No. Repent.” Repent means look at what you did, not with shame and guilt but with the desire to change. Repent is a kind of recognition that you’ve done something wrong and you want to change. It’s not shame and guilt It’s a desire to choose what is true and what is right, and then when you are in that disposition of saying, “I want only what is true. I want only what is really healthy for me,” then you are in the process of being baptized. And baptism is the moment in Christ’s life when his humanity was infused fully with divinity, and that’s exactly what he’s inviting us into, a relationship when our humanity is infused with his divinity. That’s the goal.

That’s the thing I want more than anything else to teach people to believe in and to trust in and to open themselves to that. That’s so different than the generation in which we live, according to Peter, when he says, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” Well, corrupt is a pretty strong word, but basically the world as it is doesn’t work so much out of some power coming into us and making the difference. It works on the power that’s in us already. So for me to say to you the only way I can be a valuable minister to you is to open you to an experience of a God who said, “I will dwell in you, and I will be your guide, and the thing I want you to know more than anything else is how much I’m on your side.” That’s the most amazing thing about Jesus. Listen to Peter describing this. He said, “This Christ has come into your life, and he wants you to understand he is there for you. And his commitment to you is not just that he wants to give you direction and encourage you to follow it. No. He’s going to do something for you that enables you to cross over a line that is resistance, resistance to something greater than yourself.” And I don’t know how to describe this. The more I try to describe it, the more I lose it, but let me see if I can do this. What he was doing is he took upon himself all of the stuff that our sins create in the world. When we aren’t living the life we’re called to, we are caught in a way of living where we are at odds with people who are not who they should be. We condemn them. We criticize them. We insult them, and then the pattern continues, and they do the same back to us. So he said, “I want to change that. I want to change it.” And the way he did it is so mysterious. I can’t describe how it worked, but he said,” All right, I’m going to give you an example of what you need to be, but I’m going to do it first. And when I do it, I will empower you to do it.” Now, I don’t understand how to describe that, but all I know is, when he said, “I am rejected, and I refuse to take that personally, and I refuse to return insult for insult, pain for pain. I absorb it. I take it in, and I refuse to return evil for evil. And when I take it on, when I accept it, I destroy its power.” Now, I can’t describe how that works literally, but all I’m telling you is what it feels like to me is, when someone that I’ve offended or done something wrong to, they consistently turn back to me and tell me, “I do not feel alienated from you or separated from you because of what you’ve done to me. I accept it. I’ll endure it, and I’ll return to you nothing but love and acceptance and belief that you have a potential to get past that, to be loved like that.” Somehow Christ took on the sins of everyone and didn’t respond with sinful reaction, and by that, he destroyed the power of sin. I’m saying that in a way, and I can’t fully understand it. So I can’t describe it. I can’t explain it. It’s just something that you need to believe in, that this love of this God is so different than human love, and when you feel it and sense it, it’s so transformative that you not only want it, want to receive it and are thankful for it, but you want to give it. And that’s the greatest mystery, that this God gives us an example in a person that he filled with divinity, a human like us, and he showed us what love really could be like and how it affects people. He’s saying, “When you are affected by that love, when you are touched by it, when you’re freed by it, when you’re affirmed by it, just know that, when you feel that life flowing in you, you can give that to somebody else.” But you can’t do it unless you’ve received it. You can’t do it unless it’s happened to you.

So that’s why Jesus decides he’s going to tell everyone about how to minister to one another, and he said, “The only way you can minister to one another is to minister like I’ve ministered to you. I’m the gate.” If you want to minister, if you want to come in to a group of people, the flock that God has given you, the community of people you’re in charge of, whether it’s your — if you’re a priest or a minister, it’s your congregation. If you’re an individual, it’s your circle of friends, but all he’s saying is, “I want you to feel that you have within you the capacity to do something for these people that goes so far beyond what normal interaction is.” What do we try to do for each other? We try to be nice. We try to stay in touch. We return favor for favor. We can be nice to each other, but being nice is not following the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd said, “No, what you have the potential to be is like me. If you enter into this world of caring for others, you enter through the gate. You enter through me. You have to be like me to others, and you have to understand that this thing that you can be for others is something that I will give you. It’s not something you have. It’s something I give you. I give it to you when you realize what it means to be fully loved, accepted, affirmed.” We don’t have it from other human beings. It has to be, I think, something that comes through us through the divine. It’s like Jesus is saying, “The only way you can minister to those that you love is to be filled like I am filled with divinity, and the divinity is what does the work.” And how does that work? I don't know. I’m not capable of loving that way. I don’t love anybody that deeply, but I know that I want to. And I know that God can do that through me, and so what I believe in is that there’s some power given to every human being. It’s a force. It’s an energy. It’s a grace. It’s an experience of being loved, unconditionally loved. No matter what you do, it never changes the commitment of the person that’s there to serve you. That is something that can only come through us from God to another person, and that’s our destiny. That’s our work, to be the Good Shepherd, and how it works, I wish I knew. If it worked all the time, we’d be egocentric, crazy people, I guess, but I struggle to do it, and yet I know somehow it works through me. And that gives me joy, but I don’t claim it. And the more I try to claim it, the worse it is. So I guess I’m just saying surrender, submit to a mystery of God working through you, loving in a way that no human being can love, and you are instruments of that. That’s your inheritance. Everybody has it, and it’s not us. It’s not on our shoulders to change people. It’s God’s shoulders, and he will use us with our imperfection, with our sinfulness, with our selfishness, yet something can come through that so powerful and so healing that it should bring us enormous amounts of peace, because it’s his gift to us, and then it’s our gift to one another.

Father, your presence is everything. Your love for us is so foreign from our human nature. It’s hard for us to grasp the amount of love that you care for us and the amount of intention within you that we grow and become all that we’re intended to be. Bless us with faith in this and trust in this more than in ourselves and in our discipline and our desire to form a conscious that is always doing what’s right. Let us be used by you, trusting in you, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Acts 2:14, 22-33 | 1 Peter 1:17-21 | Luke 24:13-35

May your people exalt forever, oh God, a renewed youthfulness of spirit so that rejoicing now in the restored glory of our adoption we may look forward in confident hope to the rejoicing of the day of resurrection through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

There’s something consistent about the message that God has placed before the human race, and nothing seems more important than for those of us who call ourselves Christians to follow the story as it is written. And for me as a Catholic priest, the story was in the New Testament, and until recently, I looked to that place for my fullness of understanding of who God is. I learned more about who Christ is than I did learn about who God is in the New Testament, and so it was my beginning, after my retirement, of really studying the Old Testament — not that it wasn’t there in the readings ever since I was ordained. After the council, we added an Old Testament reading, but to really get into it took time and reflection. And what I see now is a much richer, much more beautiful picture of this journey that we’re on with God in Christ and in one another. And so if I look back to the Old Testament, I realize, when Abraham was called, he was told he was going to take on a role with God, and he was going to do something for God. He was going to form a people, and so the first thing he was asked to do was to take a journey. He was going to start this journey with his people, and so he had to leave what he knew. And he had to go on this path, and he would get finally to Jerusalem. And then finally what happened there is — well, before they got to Jerusalem, I should say, they got as far as, let’s say, to the Egyptians, where they got into slavery. So think of it. On the journey people get sidetracked and get caught in things that rob them of continuing on the path, and so then Abraham led them. And then it was time for Moses to lead them, and they also went on a journey, on a long, 40-day journey toward the Promised Land, Jerusalem.

And then we have this beautiful, beautiful story of Christ coming into the world, and then he uses the same kind of metaphor. He uses the same kind of thing. He said, “I want you to come with me on the path, the path of life.” That’s the main theme of this third Sunday of Easter. What is this path of life that we’re on that our ancestors have been on? If we look at a path, what is it? It’s different than a road. A road is constructed. It’s perhaps done by engineers and people who have all kinds of technology and ability to know where the destination is and the easiest and most efficient way to build a highway there, and then you just get on it, and you don’t have to think. You just follow the road, but the journey that God is calling on us to engage in is not that kind of a highway. It’s a path, and a path is made by human beings walking. It meanders, and it flows, and it follows the terrain. And the beautiful thing about it is there’s a kind of sense that, when you’re on it, someone has gone on this journey before, and the first ones that went, it must have been very difficult to figure out which way was the right way until more and more people understood it. And the more people walked it, the more it became a distinct path, in a sense, in the forest or wherever they were walking. Beautiful image about the reverence we need to have that’s mentioned in the second reading of today’s liturgy of the word, the reverence we have for those who have gone on this path, our ancestors. They have grown slowly in their understanding of this great, great mystery that God longs to reveal to each and every person, the path in which God invites them to follow him, to find him, and the beautiful thing about this gospel passage, the beautiful thing about this story, the road to Emmaus, is it’s one of the many stories that revealed to the early church the process that they are invited to engage in. It’s new. It’s different. And the difference between the Old Testament journeys is, number one, they weren’t as successful as these people hoped they would be, but now something had shifted, something we call redemption. It’s something that we — think about it this way: the whole story of a God entering into the world to teach you and me how to live in this life with hope and with direction and with success and finding what we ultimately, deeply need — that’s the best description I can give you of what it means that we are a redeemed people.

What does redemption mean? What did it earn for us? I should say what did it gift us with. Two things: the promise of enlightenment, of understanding, of knowing, of discovering a truth that we call wisdom, and forgiveness. We are promised, as a redeemed people, that God has done something through Christ that broke a barrier that kept us from the fullness of understanding of who we are and who he is and where we’re supposed to go. And for every misstep, for every time we get off the path, there is nothing, nothing but forgiveness, understanding, compassion. Can you imagine making a journey where, the minute you get off the path, you’re told that you don’t deserve to find what’s at the end of this path. One of the shadows of religion or any religious person is, when somebody deviates, they say, “Well, they’re lost. They’re gone. They’re cut out.” That’s not true religion, but it’s the way religion can sometimes develop, we, the saved, on the path and the others lost and forgotten. No, this path is something much, much more certain. We’re promised that we will find this path, and one of the primary promises is that we’re not making it alone.

That’s what I love about these men who represent all of us. The road to Emmaus is the path of life they’re on, and we’re going to be on that — we are on that same path. And they’re like so many of us. They’re sitting there discussing things, things that make sense in one way, that there is this promise of a figure that’s in the world that’s going to change things and that is going to be a vehicle through which we have this new insight and new freedom and promised that we will reach this goal, whatever the path represents for us. It’s a way to find the thing that we’re made for, our destiny, the things that satisfy us. So the promise of redemption is we don’t go on this journey alone, and we don’t go on it with just rules and regulations given by an authority outside of us that, if we don’t do this, we’re going to be left behind. No, that motivation is over, but we are given, in place of that kind of pressure to perform or be excluded, we’re given this mysterious presence of a God who is with us, whose very presence is a manifestation of hope. Believe, trust that this is working, that this is going to produce what I know it has been promised to produce, and so the biggest change in the Old Testament and New Testament is there’s another path, but this path we walk with God.

His presence is interesting, because if you think of Jesus as the presence of God, particularly after his resurrection, we see that this image for these men is that there’s this figure, this God in their midst who is there to explain things, to do what Peter said in that first reading, to make it clear to them that — there are over 300 references to the Messiah in the Old Testament, and every one of them is spot-on. They all talk about exactly who he is, where he’s going to be born, what’s going to happen to him, how he’s going to save the world. It’s all there written ahead of time, which is enough to convince a lot of skeptics, but we don’t pay that close attention to what’s in the Old Testament. But what God is saying through the prophets and what he’s saying now in the person of Jesus on this road with these men as they’re putting all the pieces together — they have the story, and you don’t get any sense about their understanding and debating about it that they’ve received it, that they’ve received what it offers. They’re just saying, “Isn’t this interesting? This guy was there, and he died. Then he’s not there anymore.” They say this, and they say that. I love Jesus’ response to it. “Are you just that dense and that slow to understand? Look at this. It’s so clear that everything that was foretold took place, and you see that.” And if you understand with even just your mind, you’re going to say, “Wow, this is really important to pay attention to.” But then if you go one step further and embrace it with your heart, then something really radically changes, and that’s the burning heart of this story as these men begin to believe, not in just a story but the story — the story that is written in us, the same story. And when we see it unfolding in the way that it was unfolded is not just that it happened and gave us this gift, but it’s an invitation with this gift of redemption that we can do this thing. We can walk this path. We can find this gift, but then he disappears. As soon as they find it, he’s gone. Then they go back and meet the others, and they’re all enthusiastic, and they all support one another.

And this is the key thing I want to try to get across in this homily, and that is, when we walk the path, we never walk it without our ancestors. We never walk it without God, but the most interesting people we walk it with are the people in our life, the people that enter our life, the people we fall in love with, family members, the family that we choose on our own, the influential people, the teachers, the artists that create something that move us. All these people we walk with, and when we’re walking with them, we’re walking with the God that’s in them. That’s one of my strongest things I long to teach you is that we have a God who is present to us, not directly as he was, say, to Jesus but as he is through Jesus to the world. Jesus manifests God’s power, God’s strength, God’s wisdom, God’s forgiveness, and we have that same gift to manifest that same presence to each other. So what I’m thinking of, what I want you to think about is this path you’re on, your life, my life, our path, how interconnected it is and how important it is to know there’s a power overseeing it so we’re not going to get very far off before he draws us back. And then when we’re walking with people, we’re going to lean on them when we’re weak, and they’ll lean on us. It’s a beautiful way of describing this world, and never before with this sort of craziness in our world of separation do we need that presence of one another on this path as we’re so separated because of this pandemic. But believe with me in the path and the goal and the beauty of the way in which God is manifesting to us the hope that we should have that this journey is going to produce everything it promises.

Father, always you’re drawing your people from what they know to something more, something deeper, something more life-giving. Bless all of us as we struggle to make the transition move through change after change, path twist after path twist and move closer and closer into the light of everything you’ve prepared for us, particularly the peace and the hope that is such an integral part of how we’re called to live in this world for ourselves and for each other. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Acts 2:42-47 | 1 Peter 1:3-9 | John 20:19-31

Oh God, who through your Son raised up your eternal life for all the nations, grant that your people may come to acknowledge the full splendor of their Redeemer that bathed even more in their radiance they may reach everlasting glory through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

It was just last week that we celebrated the mysterious end of the life of this figure, this Christ figure, this Anointed One that had come onto the earth to accomplish a task, and he accomplished it in the way that the Father intended him to accomplish it. And if I take us back to that moment on Good Friday, when he died on the cross — you remember the story is that the sky was darkened, and there was an earthquake, and it was like the whole universe understood something had just taken place. And it was the horror and the reality of the human race rejecting — rejecting the Christ, the Anointed One, and in John’s words, he was truth. It was like this dark moment that, for a moment, it looked as if the truth had come into the world, and the world simply refused to look at it. The disciples themselves were hiding as soon as Jesus was arrested. They were hiding, because they were terrified something like what happened to him would happen to them, and so they hid, except for one. There was only one who didn’t go into a locked place, and that was John. He followed Jesus through the whole Passion and then stayed with Mary and stayed with them and pondered and wondered on that Saturday. What they must have thought and what their mind must have come up with, it’s just fascinating. Then Easter Sunday morning is when this new light dawned on the world, and this figure Christ appeared first to women and then eventually to his disciples.

So I want to talk about that moment when he appeared to his disciples, because it’s the main theme of this first celebration after we celebrated the entire mystery of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus and are now pondering its impact on us. How did it change things? Well, we look at the disciples as a representation. I never thought of this before, but it struck me, in preparing for the thoughts I want to share with you today, that they ran the gamut of all human reactions to this coming of the truth. One, absolutely almost no resistance to not accepting it, embraced it and became one with it, and that was John. And then at the opposite extreme, where there was Judas who completely rejected him and condemned him and even had a part of his destruction, and everyone in between — and the one closest to the bottom, I might say, just from the standpoint of the way I’m playing with the image, was Thomas, the doubter. So human beings have the potential to surrender completely to this mystery and embrace it and live it and be transformed by it, and then through all different degrees of that, we get to the bottom where it’s simply, “I don’t believe unless I can be convinced by my mind and my experience. I’ve got to know it’s true.” So that’s what the church is focusing on today, these twelve.

When Jesus entered into the room that was locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus entered with no judgment, no condemnation. He just simply said, “I want you to be at ease. Be at peace. Relax. I’m here with no judgment.” He might have even implied in his comments with them that what all of them needed, except perhaps for John, was copious amounts of the very gift that he came into the world to give through this action of his surrender to his Passion, and that is the potential, the ability, the capacity in human beings to forgive. What he gave to the world, to the human race was the power to move from justice to mercy — justice to mercy. We have no idea how essential that is in the whole process of the Judeo/Christian tradition of revealing the fullness of God’s will for us. He wanted us ultimately to come to the place where he could bless us with his power, the power to believe in forgiveness, as the essential key to living the life he’s called us here to live.

So what is this thing called mercy? What is it that every one of the disciples finally became so infused with as a power that they preached it everywhere? And we look at the effects of their preaching in that first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. We see people being radically transformed, and how are they transformed? They became communities, not just friendly groups of people but people who were deeply dedicated to one another. They were like — this gift of forgiveness created for them this ability to be in an intimate relationship with people without any resistance because of how we performed or what had happened in the past. It was like everything is forgotten, and when you understand what forgiveness actually does, what it is given to the world for, it’s for union and communion. Without forgiveness, there can be no intimacy between human beings. Why not? Because as high as human beings can go in the realm of being evolved into who God intends us to be on our own — our humanity on its own can get to a point we might call justice — justice, an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. It doesn’t seem to be complete, in a sense, for most of us now that understand the value of forgiveness, but in truth, it lifted human beings out of these self-centered, dangerous creatures who could destroy and turn on one another anytime to a realization. If we’re going to live in community, we ought to have some kind of regulations and rules. So we need some kind of device that keeps us from destroying one another, and that was the Ten Commandments and the whole notice of justice. Justice has to do with fairness. When Jesus talks about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and justice, he means that the justice is, if somebody takes one thing from you, you have a right to get it back. If somebody does one thing to you that’s a certain intensity, you have the right to give it back to him in the same intensity. It’s fair. It solves a need inside of us for a kind of retaliation, a revenge. It feeds a certain part of our lower nature, which is our humanity, and our humanity stays with us. The beautiful thing about the union that God came to create between ourselves and his divinity is not a thing that overshadow — one never overshadows the other. Our humanity remains always. Our understanding of justice is as far as our humanity basically can take us, but it’s always there. And then this partner to humanity, this thing that Jesus breathed into his disciples — he was breathing it into the human race, and at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was breathed into the world in a sense, this power of mercy and forgiveness was infused in a part of us called our participation in divinity.

And one of the things I love about my humanity and divinity is I’ve embraced both of them as fully as I think I can to this point. I realize that I can be very much motivated by the divinity in me. I can feel myself going way beyond my self-centered needs, and then I can find myself the same day falling back into my full humanity like Jesus did. He lost his patience. He begged his Father, “I don’t want to do it this way.” That was his humanity. He didn’t lose his humanity. He was always the Son of Man and the Son of God. It’s a great mystery, but when this fullness of awareness of what redemption really means, what it is really offering us, how it empowers us to achieve the goal that ultimately we’re here to achieve while we’re together as humans is some kind of intimacy, which opens up a flow of Christ’s spirit in all of us, one to the other. That’s where we have to get. That place of giving and receiving this breath of God demands that we be a forgiving person, because otherwise, if we allow justice to take over mercy, then there’s always a kind of — I don't know — just an intentional separation. If you demand constant punishment for who you are, meaning that’s what justice does — it legitimates, gives a legitimate way of punishing someone. If you live in a relationship where it’s constantly performance, punishment, performance, punishment, performance, acceptance, performance — it’ll never become intimate, and that’s what he wants, intimacy, divinity intimately a part of us because it never, ever judges us as unworthy. And once we know we’re never judged as unworthy, we have this power to never judge a brother or sister as unworthy of this gift that I carry within me. And to be honest, we’re not so conscious of the two being separate, and that’s good, because there’s a way in which I don’t think I’m saying, “Okay, now I’m acting as God’s puppet, and then I go back to running my own life, and then he runs it for me.” No, it’s much more mysterious. It’s like we become one with that divinity, and when we do, we have this amazing capacity. So you have to believe this. You have to believe it, and justice works out of the mind, and it’s logical. But this world of forgiveness demands that we move away from logic into our hearts where we have this power to intuit what is right without proof, and that’s the example we have in the gospel. That’s, in a sense, where the human race actually was. I don’t think they were ready to condemn the truth that Jesus brought. They were open to it, but they really had a hard — we still have a hard time believing in it. We still go back to running the world on justice.

And so what do we see in this story with Thomas? What’s he really doing? He’s representing the lower form of our humanity, which needs absolute proof, and what is that part of us? I don’t know that I can explain it. I think I want you to join me in pondering it. Is it that we feel like we’re losing control when we surrender to something we can’t figure out? When we believe we understand something, do we then kind of — I don't know — own it and use it anyway we want? You can tell I don’t have an answer, but I do know this: it has to move from that kind of conviction in an experience that proves something to this surrender to something that is like a seed inside of us that just needs the nourishment of our acceptance, our belief, our trust. And once we start that process, as small and as feeble as it may be, once we begin to say, “You know what? It really does make sense that this gift of redemption, this capacity to be a lover instead of a simple judge — instead of a just judge, we become lovers, and lovers are irrational in the way that they deal with those who offend them. Jesus said it in such a dramatic way as he was working with his disciples. He would say, “If somebody slaps you on the cheek, just offer them the other cheek. If somebody steals your car, offer them your boat along with it.” It’s so ridiculous, so irrational, but to the heart, to some deep part of us, we know it’s hope. It’s union. It’s communion. It’s oneness. It’s the thing we long for more than anything else, and that oneness that we long for is the fertile ground of the way in which God works today, in hearts, in the humanity, infused humanity of another person. And when we love, that’s when it flows. When we condemn and judge, that’s when it’s blocked. So this breath that is poured into the disciples is the breath that we have inside of us that the world longs to receive from us. That’s discipleship.

Father, your promise of life is the heart of your message. You know us. You know exactly what fulfills us. You know exactly what satisfies our deepest longing, and our humanity, in a sense, doesn’t know it. It can’t come up with what you’re offering in its place, meaning we can understand justice, but mercy still remains mysterious. And that’s what we pray to believe in and to trust in and to experience its effectiveness and the way it satisfies a kind of need that is so basic. We do need each other. We do need you in us. We need you flowing between us. We need life, and we praise and thank you for giving it to us. Amen.

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Acts 10:34a, 37-43 | Colossians 3:1-4 | John 20:1-9

Oh God, who wonderfully created the dignity of human nature and still more wonderfully restored it, grant, we pray, that we who share in this divinity may share it with those that we are called to serve, and we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

Every time I proclaim the liturgy of the word for you and pick a song that I think amplifies what I want to say, I get to this moment where I feel a kind of intimacy with you, and what I want, and where I think that intimacy comes from, is an inner desire we all share, we all have, of wanting to place something in another person, to awaken something there that would bear fruit. The word for that is compassion, love, understanding, and it’s at the heart of this thing we call our Christian faith, the ability to be a source of life to one another. And so what I want to talk about is the elephant in the room, in a sense.

I know that we’re all dealing with the same thing, a pandemic. It’s a kind of darkness that’s descended on everything. The world as we know has just simply stopped. There’s no action out there. I’ve been home alone many times but never with the same recognition that there’s nothing going on out there that is drawing my attention. I’m left with just me, and what I’ve noticed awakening in me, as well as I realize I’m not able to be with the people I love, there’s been something awakened in me that is a kind of weird compassion and connection with the people I haven’t seen for years. I start looking at old photos. I start sending photos to friends. “Remember the time in 19-blah-blah? We were doing this.” And it’s like I find myself, in this weird time of no physical connection, connecting in a way that is often not the way I think I primarily connect, connecting through some kind of — I don't know — intention, something that feels like being present with someone, but it’s even deeper. It’s like it’s not limited by the mood we’re in or how we look. It’s like something that’s part of our nature, part of our humanity. We are naturally connected, and so there’s a part of me that’s just pondering over and over again, “What is this pandemic about? Why this pandemic now?” It’s fascinating to me that, in our country, the area — the time, rather, that we’re getting to, that feels like the peak of the impact, negative impact of the disease, in terms of cases being recognized and people dying, is during Holy Week, the week that we as Christians call holy, which means that it’s the week that we know, if we ponder what it’s about and what it celebrates, we’re going to grow in wholeness. So there must be a connection between this pandemic and the desire that God has in his heart that would allow something like that to happen. That desire is being manifested. Just look for it. Listen for it. Wait for it. Then I realize that, when we look at what we do during this Holy Week, what we have to remember, there’s three major events. There’s Holy Thursday. There’s Good Friday. There’s Easter. I want to go to each one for a moment, and see if I can awaken in you an awareness of what it is that we are all being immersed in.

Let’s start with the supper. There’s three things about that evening. The first is the fact that they had this archetypal experience of union, communion, a meal together. That’s what we all do when we really feel we want to be with people. Drinking is fun, but drinking and eating is even better, especially when somebody takes their time to prepare something for us, something special. What Jesus was doing was preparing food for people that they never dreamt was ever even possible. His disciples must have watched this unfold with a kind of strange disbelief. He simply said, “Look, see this bread that I break and share with you? It’s me. It’s my body. It’s my flesh, and when you eat it, it’s a celebration of a reality that is going to happen in a matter of days when I’m going to redeem the world. And I’m going to enter, in a special way, into the hearts of people, and from there, I’m going to resonate the kind of love that I want everyone to feel from each other.” And then he took wine, this intoxicating liquid, and said, “See this? This is my blood. This is what courses through my veins. This is what feeds every cell of my body, and I want to pour it into you, because it’s going to do the same thing for you. And what it is basically is forgiveness. Just to let you know that, when I come into you, my reason for being there is for giving you life, not for judging you, whether you’re worth of life, not for making decisions about whether I want to accept you, because you’ve maybe failed, and do I want to write you off. You think this way,” he’s saying to his disciples, “But don’t think this way anymore. You know how you look at the religious leaders of the time. You know how you complain that they lord it over you. They lay burdens on you. I don’t want to lay any burden on you. I want to free you from burden, from stress, from shame, from fear, from anger.” And then he gave an example. He took off his robe and put on an apron and went around and washed the feet of his disciples. Why? Because of what I just said about the way they saw the temple. There was nothing coming from the temple that felt like service. It felt like obligation, regulation, something robbing them of the fullness of life. And he said, “No, what I want you to understand is that I’m welcoming you, and this is the sign of welcome to a great meal. The host has someone washing the feet of those who will recline at table. What I’m getting you ready for is the banquet, and what it is that you need to understand, that you need to long for, when you go to this banquet, is the gift that is there, my presence in you, my forgiveness flowing through you to the people around you. That’s my gift, and give it away freely. That’s your destiny. You’ll find a unique gift that you have that will interpret it in a certain way, whether you’re an artist, whether you’re — whatever you excel at, you’re going to be able to do that in a field or in an area that’s uniquely yours.” And that’s the celebration that night.

Then after the dinner, there was the garden, so important in this whole story of this Holy Week, and that is where he sat there, knelt there, sweat there, prayed, and as a human being, he makes absolute sense. His humanity is, in a way, overwhelming him, and he’s saying to his God, “God, I know I will do whatever you ask.” He said that three times, but before he said it, he said, “But if there’s any way you could change this plan for me, this darkness that’s going to descend on me — I wanted to accomplish this for you and for my disciples, and I’m not through. I’m not finished. I’ve given all I can, and they don’t really believe enough in you or in me. Don’t end it here,” he said. “But if it has to be this way, I’ll do it.” And then he did what the crucifixion’s all about. He surrendered. Surrender, what a word. Surrender isn’t a passive act of just sitting there and letting whatever happens to you happen. No, it’s much more connected to no resistance to what must be, no resistance to the reality that God is inviting you into out of compassion and love for you and for everyone that will be transformed by what you go through. That’s what surrender is, and that’s what the crucifix statement is to everybody, the conflict of humanity and divinity, in a sense, which is ruling, which is in charge. And they’re both there, right together. The desire to be freed of everything painful and the longing to be transformed are absolutely inseparable with each other, and until we accept and allow and believe that the darkness has its absolute essential place, we can’t deal with things that we’re having to deal with right now. How do you deal with a God that allows pain and suffering and separation and death to accomplish something that is for our good? “God, isn’t there any other way you can help us to grow in consciousness? Isn’t there any other way you can help us to become who we need to be without this kind of painful situation?” You know the answer. It’s no. We don’t go through radical change when everything is the way it’s supposed to be. It’s only when we’re up against something that we absolutely are terrified of, in a way, and feel like it will destroy us, and yet when we surrender that believing that is an illusion, the destructive thing, and that it’s going to bring life, something radically shifts.

Then we get to resurrection, a new life. The thing I find fascinating about the resurrection is that we always focus on the fact now Jesus is alive. He didn’t die. He’s alive. He’s able to talk to his disciples. He announced to the women, who trusted in him and believed in him more than any male, other than perhaps John, and he said, “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid.” Remember the words he said to his disciples when he entered the locked room. “Peace be with you.” He’s saying that to all of us. Don’t be afraid of this darkness. Don’t let it take your peace away from you, but the other thing I want to talk about is what happened after Jesus rose from the dead? We saw an immediate change in his disciples. We have that wonderful story of Pentecost when these frightened, separated people were all in the same room, intoxicated by their sense of oneness and unity. They all spoke different languages. It’s a symbol of the entire globe together, and they are understanding each other. I have an app on my phone that’s a weather app, and it shows the planet. I was looking at it the other day, and it’s interesting to see where the storms are, wherever it is. But I just was staring at it for a while, and I realized I felt something I’ve never felt before looking at it, and that was some kind of awareness. I was connected to everybody on it. I watched it roll into — the different parts of it rolled into my attention. There was China. There was Italy. There was France. There was the United States. There was — it was like, “I know I’m connected.” I felt oneness with all that. I’ve never felt that before. So what is that? I think it’s the gift of — one of the gifts of this pandemic is a sense and connection with friends we haven’t seen, with a world we’ve never met. And that’s what we celebrate at Pentecost, all these people from different lands everywhere understanding each other, being connected with each other. It’s a beautiful image of what the goal of religion is all about, what the goal and gift of redemption is all about. We are empowered to be a different kind of people, and that’s what I think is fascinating about Easter. It celebrates redemption, not just the resurrection of Jesus but the redemption of the world, and what is that? An amazing shift in consciousness brought about by a gift. The gift is God’s indwelling presence, his love filling us with a healthy response to all the needs of our flesh, meaning the blood brings oxygen. The kind of forgiveness, compassion he’s teaching us brings life to every facet of life. What a gift. And if we don’t focus on that, we’re missing something, because it’s one thing to say how wonderful it is that Christ rose, but more wonderful than that is that we have risen. The human race has risen, and every time we need to grow in a very dramatic way, he knows that moment, and he creates a passion for us to go through. That’s what we’re in, a passion, transformation demanding our resources of our humanity surrendering to the most extraordinary gift of his divinity, his love, his capacity to heal flowing through us.

Father, your Son was the most powerful witness of who you are, what you long to bring to us, what your intention is, and this Holy Week brings all of that to our attention. I ask you to bless all of us with a greater understanding of the fullness of what has been revealed, what we’re called to remember over and over again and to live the new life that has been promised, a life of miracles and transformation and new life. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Matthew 21:1-11 | Philippians 2:6-11 | Matthew 26:14—27:66

Dearly Beloved, since the beginning of Lent until now, we have prepared our hearts by penance and charitable works. Today we gather together to herald with the whole church the beginning of the celebration of the Lord’s Pascal mystery, that is to say, of his passion and his resurrection, for it was to accomplish this mystery that he entered his own city of Jerusalem. Therefore, with all faith and devotion, let us commemorate the Lord’s entry into his Holy City for our salvation, following in his footsteps so that, being made by his grace partakers of the cross, we may have a share also in the resurrection and the life. Amen.

This celebration day marks the beginning of the most important liturgical week in the church year. It’s the time we review, look at as deeply as possible, the fullness of the mystery of God in man made manifest in Jesus. You hear me talking all the time about this union that we are destined to have with God, our humanity and divinity made for each other. They’re not at odds with each other. If there’s anything I could free you with, at least something I got stuck with in my own background of training in my faith, it was that God looked down on my humanity instead of seeing it as I really do believe he now sees it. I see it as that thing that is the greatest gift I have, that unique thing that I am, that you are, that we need to be in order to be the vehicle of making the abundance of God clear to people. When we love like he loves, that’s when we are at our peak, at our best, and so this Sunday that goes through the passion and death of Jesus has so many beautiful images in it about this mystery of divinity and humanity, and I want to focus on just a few.

Number one, I love the way, in the Book of Isaiah, that we hear this whole notion of God is the God who comes into our life, that wants to open the ears of those who can’t hear, to make people who didn’t know exactly where to go where their help is, because this God comes to the weary. It’s like, “Listen to him, the God that comes to save. He’s there. He’s the one you trust in. He’s the one you believe in. He’s your help,” that wonderful name, Jesus, God Saves, God Heals, God Loves. So the first reading sets on the path of recognition of a mystery that we must believe in. We must have it somehow in our DNA that we fall back on it when we fall into all the traps that we have in our human nature of regression and keeping things unconscious when they need to become conscious. And then Paul in the next reading, he’s so filled with an awareness of this wonderful thing that God has brought into the world through this man Jesus, and he’s trying to say something. “Remember, remember,” he said, “That he looks just like us. Do you see? He’s God, and he looks like us. That means God looks like us. It means that unity that we’ve always felt was strained by our humanity is not as far apart as we think.” Think about his life. Think about how he rejected this God/man, and now he finds him as the source of life. He went through a transformation that he longs for people to go through, and what he wants everyone to be so aware of is that name again, that name Jesus. He saves us, not only his name but his life. He was like us. He struggled like us. He had weaknesses like us, yet he was still divine.

And one of the things that I want to focus on most primarily from this gospel of Matthew — you’ll notice I took a little leeway in picking different parts — but thing the that I want you to focus with me on is the night — the night before this nightmare started for Jesus. He had just spent time with his disciples, giving them the greatest gift that I believe he’s ever given to any believing community, his presence, his body, his likeness in us, his spirit in us, his blood. He’s saying, “I want you to eat my body, drink my blood, because you have to do something in this world that is so hard for human beings to do, to surrender to things that you can’t accept and to believe in things you can’t understand. And you can’t do that on your own. I know what humanity is like,” Jesus is saying to us over and over again. “I am the Son of Man.” That phrase that he uses over and over again is so interesting. It means human being. Did you know that Jesus is made reference to in the gospels, the synoptics and all, all the gospels 83 times? Son of Man, Son of Man, Son of Man — why would he stress so much his humanity unless he was trying to say, “Don’t you see? A miracle is happening to me. I am surrendering to a world that I didn’t necessarily choose, certainly one that I’m not necessarily pleased with every part of it, but I surrendered. I surrendered. I gave in. I give in.” And look what it did. Look at the explosion that you see in the gospel, that explosion. There were earthquakes and thunder and a curtain that separated divinity from humanity in the temple ripped apart. It’s explosive what happens when someone surrenders.

So I love looking at the garden, because it’s so much about Jesus’ humanity. He knows what’s happening. It’s too late. He knows what’s happening. He knows what’s coming. So what does he do? He turns to God, and he said, “Father, I need to talk to you one more time. Please, listen to me.” But he didn’t do it alone. So he took Peter, James and John. You remember they were the three that he took on the second Sunday of Lent up on a mountain to say, “You are going to see something that affirms your faith that Jesus is not just another prophet.” Did it last? Did it penetrate? Did they have the capacity to understand what it meant, and did they believe in it completely? No, but there they were. Jesus had them there, because he thought, “These are the ones who will understand. These are the ones that will be there with me.” It shows Jesus’ humanity of being in need of others when he’s facing his ultimate thing. He’s not going to do it alone. He wants his three best friends with him. It makes so much human sense to me. And then what happens? He has this dialogue with him, and he goes into deep prayer each time. And in this gospel of Matthew, we see it three times when he has these words that he said. It’s not like he’s screaming at his Father as a human being saying, “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this. I can’t do this. Please, please, I say no. I say no. I say no.” He doesn’t. He says it so gently and so interestingly. “Father, if there’s any other way — I know this is what you planned. I know I’m going to surrender to whatever you want, but is there any way we could change it? You could change it for me. Postpone it. Do something.” Not now, that’s all that I hear in his humanity crying out, and immediately he said, “I’m there for you though, God. I’m not going to not do what you ask, but is there any way it could not be this?” I love that. I used to think he was like, “Bring it on. I know in three days I’m going to rise, and it’s all going to be great.” He wasn’t super-human. He was fully human, and he did that three times.

In other gospels, it’s more detailed about the panic and the stress he was under. One of the synoptic makes it clear he was sweating. He was sweating blood, and angels came to comfort him. His disciples weren’t there, but we trust in our friends. We trust in the people around us, but do we trust enough in those other spiritual beings that are so powerful that are there when we have to face something that we can’t stand the thought of it happening to ourselves or someone else? And maybe there isn’t any person there. People are not always good at comforting people who are going through some horrible thing. They often use phrases like, “Oh, it’s all going to better. Don’t worry. You’ll adjust later,” trying to get us out of the pain. His disciples weren’t there to get Jesus out of his pain, but angels came and administered to him.

The other thing I love about the whole notion of this incredible, incredible feast is the way in which it seems so clearly to me to underscore the fact that there is this ability humans have to be so far beyond themselves, and what it takes is something I keep going back to you and saying over and over again. It’s an evolutionary process. It’s a growth in consciousness. It’s a beginning to see the reality, see with our eyes, hear what’s true with our ears. That’s the thing that this gift of faith is showing up in this passion account. It’s like he knew enough truth, but he still resisted the way it had to unfold, and to me, that endears Jesus to me so much. And so it also endears me to one other very important aspect, and that’s me, my humanity, my weakness.

I want to go back to one other image that’s in the scriptures, and it’s in today, and that’s the image of Barabbas. Jesus loved that image, Son of Man, Son of Man, Son of Man. “I’m a human being.” And the word Barabbas is interesting, because it basically means Son of God, bar Abbas. So I want you to look at the crowd for a moment, and think about the world and the way — the level of consciousness maybe in the world. But it’s like the crowd represents this sort of mob mentality where everybody is, and it’s not always very reflective. It just picks up whatever the person next to them is saying. They start screaming the same thing, that unconscious part of us that’s so danger, but what I love about this image is the unconscious, even though they don’t know it, have deep within them a seed, a light, a truth, and they all scream out, which is so crazy when you think about it. They’re all screaming out, when they say, “Do you want to kill the Son of God, the one who claims to be the Messiah?” And they’re saying, “Yes, yes. Release the Son of God. Release the Son of God. Release the Son of God. Barabbas, Barabbas, Barabbas.” Amazing.

There’s so much in this set of readings to give us hope, so much for us to now, in these days of quiet and stillness, to ponder, to wonder about in our sheltered-in-place places, but do it. Open your heart to it. Feel it. See it. It’s as real as every single thing you’re dealing with every single day of your life. No, we’re not hanging on a cross every 20 minutes or so, but boy, there’s enough out there to irritate us and make us crazy and give us a loss of peace. And each one of those is a time when we’re asked to do what Jesus did. “If this is the way it has to be — I wish it wasn’t, but I accept it.”

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Ezekiel 37:12-14 | Romans 8:8-11 | John 11:1-45

By your help, we beseech you Lord our God, may we walk eagerly in the same charity with which, out of love for the world, your Son handed himself over to death. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The essence of God is his longing, his desire to both create and then to bless and enrich and care for what he creates. The interesting thing about our humanity is that we have a strong, strong drive inside of us to be connected to one another, to be in relationships. We also have a deep desire to do some kind of work, to be engaged in something that’s creative, that gives us a sense of joy when we accomplish it, and there’s something also about human nature, is that it longs for a kind of — I don't know how to say it but a sense that all is well and all will be well. We long for one another. We long for effective accomplishments. We long for peace, and the God who placed those longings in us is wise enough to know that he wants to be the one who enables us to accomplish them. And so he left us with a kind of need for him, because his deepest desire is union, communion with his people. He wants to be in our life, not just interested in it but dwelling in it.

Those first two readings so clearly and powerfully describe the relationship that God has always wanted with his people. “I want to enter into your life and bring you out of a place of darkness, a place of no life, a place of death. I want to lift you out of the places you find yourself in where there’s no hope, no direction, no enthusiasm for anything. I want to bring you into the fullness of life.” And he knows that we need to understand, and he teaches us over and over again, that that goal of being alive is not something we can accomplish, nor should we think we’re supposed to accomplish on our own, but St. Paul’s letter to the Romans talks about what it is that God has promised so this thing called life can be something we experience. It’s about the spirit of God. The spirit of life, the spirit of light and truth dwells in us. It’s like it’s not something we learn at one time and take it in and say, “Oh, now I’ve got that.” No, it’s an ongoing, dynamic, intimate relationship that we’re made for, that we need to believe in and trust in to sustain us. It’s not something we get sort of a — I don't know — instruction manual. We study it, and then everything works. No, it’s nothing like that. It’s so much more mysterious.

When we look at these Sundays of Lent, it’s so clear what they’re trying to focus on: the key message of Christ, the key essence of what it means to be human and a deep understanding of who God really is. Those first two Sundays of Lent describe, first, the humanity of Jesus. He’s like us, gets tempted like us, has weaknesses like ours, and then we see in the next Sunday that he’s more than just a human with human weaknesses. No, he’s a God filled with a mysterious, mystical power that can transform a human being from darkness to light, from death to life. He resonates this force, this light, this life, and then we recognize so clearly that this is a gift that God longs to give to everyone. It’s not deserved. He describes it in many ways, but in that third Sunday, he reminded us that it’s like flowing water. It’s like this thing that quenches a thirst that’s deep inside of us for meaning, purpose, for hope, and once we understand and drink of this indwelling, mysterious presence of divinity offered to each and every one of us, we begin to see what’s real. And then we begin to live a life that is full, and this Jesus had the power to do that. It’s so interesting that he always was trying to convince people, still trying to convince you and me that we should trust in this power. It’s available. It’s real, but our tendency always, like Adam and Eve, is to go back to self-centered autonomy. “I’ll do it. You teach me what life is like, and I will achieve it.” We waste so much time trying to do that. We don’t really surrender to the fact that there is no way we can accomplish what he’s promising unless we open ourselves to it as a gift, unmerited, unearned, just simply given.

So let’s look at the details of this wonderful story about — I think the miracle that climaxed everything that Jesus was trying to say — he hid most of his miracles from those who weren’t present at the time, because he was afraid and knew that the more he did miracles, two problems would crop up. One, people would accompany him just for the miracle of healing. The other was he’d get into deep trouble with those who were in conflict with his teaching. It gave him authority that frightened the institutions that ran the temple, and so he knew doing miracles that were really spectacular were difficult for his ministry. In other words, it put him in great jeopardy. He could be killed. He knew that, but the frustration of that truth and his inability to convince his disciples was such a tension that he must have really struggled with it. And what we see in this story is that he comes to a point, I believe, in his life where he’s saying, “Look, I don’t care what it’s going to cost me. I don’t care if I’m going to lose my life over this miracle, but I’ve got to convince my disciples, before I leave them, that I am who I say I am, and the power I have is awesome.” It can do anything if you allow it to work within you, but most especially it can give you this thing called life, meaning, purpose, understanding that there’s something about me that’s important. There’s something about my being here that’s effective, and I’m in it, and I feel good about it. Things feel like they are the way they must be. That’s the feeling life that only God, I believe, can give us through his miraculous, indwelling presence. And so he took a chance, and of course it was kind of the reason his ministry ended so abruptly. The healing of the man born blind, the raising of Lazarus was more than the church could handle, but the reason he took the risk was he wanted people to understand and believe. It’s so interesting. He realized that even the closest friends he had still didn’t believe in him. He’s been with them for three years, and he said, “I can do anything. You know that. I can bring life to people. I can bring sight to the blind, freedom to prisoners. That’s my work. That’s what God has empowered me to do, and I can do it.” And they didn’t yet really believe it, because when he said to them clearly, “Look, Lazarus is dead. I know that, and I know that I can bring him back to life, so trust me. We’re going to go there and bring him back to life,” and all the disciples seemed to be worried about was, “Okay, let’s go, because it will probably mean the end of everything. It’ll probably mean that we’re all going to die.” That’s what Thomas predicted, the doubting Thomas. “It’s all over, folks.” But what happened when he did arrive and said, “I’m here. Don’t you believe I can do what I can do,” when he saw them weeping and wailing and in fear, it perturbed him. It made him sad. He wept, and it was not over Lazarus, I don’t think, even though that’s the tradition. Why would he weep over someone he knew he was going to do such an incredibly marvelous thing for? Why would he feel sad when he was manifesting the greatest asset that he was there to bring to the world, life over death? No, I think he was perturbed because of their lack of faith. They didn’t yet believe. It’s funny. When those who did really finally see this, the words that the scriptures say was not that they believed, they believed, they believed. No, it was they began to believe in him. What a resistance we have to believing in who God really is and what he’s really doing and what he can do and what he longs to do for us. That’s the challenge of this whole season of Lent, to get ready for the most awesome miracle when Jesus died and then came back and did his most incredible, marvelous work. Death was destroyed. Life was restored.

Father, your gifts are so beyond our imagining, so wonderful in a sense, so longed for, in another sense, that it’s hard for us to grasp how generous you are and how awesome the gift is when we receive it. Bless us with belief and faith. Even though we can’t see or feel what’s truly happening, we know that within everything there is this plan that you bring us all to a place where we can see and be all that you want us to be. And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

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1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a | Ephesians 5:8-14 | John 9:1-41

Oh God, true light who created light eternal, spreading it far and wide, pour, we pray, into the hearts of the faithful the brilliance of perpetual light so that all who are brightened in your holy temple by the splendor of your presence may happily reach the light of your glory through Christ our Lord, amen.

It’s impossible to miss the theme of this fourth Sunday of Lent: light, understanding, wisdom, insight. Jesus came into the world to open the eyes of the world, particularly the world of religious leaders, to a truth that they had lost, but in defense of them, they didn’t lose it intentionally or in any way that you could say is all their fault. It was just simply that what had evolved over centuries, in terms of a misunderstanding of who God is, that his demand from us was perfection, that sin was our great enemy, that our imperfection was our great enemy, that our humanity was our great enemy. If you could look carefully at the ministry of Jesus, he came to open our eyes to all things, who the Father is, what we’re here for, but the most interesting thing to me is he opened the eyes of something that had been hidden for so long, and that is the beauty, the dignity and the wonder of our humanity — our humanity. Jesus loved the title Son of Man, loved saying, “I’m a human being; I’m a man filled with God.” And that image of a man filled with God was still so foreign to those who grew up with the temple as their guide that they ended up having a really hard time with a God living in something imperfect. So perfection became, in a way, the great blindness. It had grown so strong that it was considered that anything, anything that was seemingly a difficulty, a suffering, a malady, a disease, an accident, it was all punishment for sin, and yet they could say, “Well, wait a minute. This person didn’t do anything wrong. Why is it that they’re in the shape they’re in? Why did this thing happen to them?” Well, the church had a simple answer. The institutional religion did. It just simply said, “Well, it was the sins of the parents.” So imagine living in a world where you saw a God who was constantly watching his people, and anytime they sinned, he would inflict some kind of painful situation on them to somehow say, “Now you deserve to be punished, not to be supported, not to be helped and not to be loved, not to be forgiven, not to have compassion as your companion.” No, you’re to be punished. It’s into that darkness that Christ came to bright light.

So perfection is not the goal of anything in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is a byproduct. Yes, we do get perfect. We do get more perfect. We get better, but the reason we get better is because we become more who God intended us to be. So the core of the goal of this wonderful tradition is to accept and embrace exactly who God has intended us to be, to be enlightened, to know ourselves, to know why we’re here, to know what our goal is. That’s something I would call authenticity. So let’s shift from thinking that religion is calling us to perfection but to some kind of authenticity, to some kind of enlightenment where we see exactly what is real, what is true. And I think the most amazing truth that came into the — that Jesus came into the world to reveal to us was the illusion of a temple that was designed to somehow keep people in the fear of God constantly and the need of a place where they could find reconciliation. That role of religion is so toxic and dangerous. It separates us from an intimate, loving Father, and it’s there still today. And you know where it breeds? In a human being who feels they have privilege and power over people, and when you get that coupled with an image that the reason they exist is to somehow keep us from doing anything that is outside the norm of what they set, you’ll find a community that is built on some kind of false notion of oneness. Oneness is not uniformity. The oneness of religion, the shadow of it is everybody in this group is understanding the same things, believing the same things, doing the same things, same practices, dress the same way, act the same way, that whole image of the classic church person that is so wrapped up in an image that you have no idea who they really are. It’s that that wisdom, enlightenment is destined to free us from.

So let’s look at this set of readings. It’s interesting, because the first reading is about the work of a prophet trying to accomplish the work of God, and the work of God is not the same as the work of man. So what we see in the story is a lesson that says God is looking for the right person who has real authority in the world to be a voice for them, and the first son is always the privileged one. Out of an entire set of children, he’s the one that has the authority over the others, and that authority often is exercised by power over someone else. But when God looks for those who are going to speak the truth, he doesn’t go to the top, but he interestingly goes to the bottom. The interesting thing about the bottom, the youngest of that family, it’s the one who is young, who is open, who is receptive, but also the one who tends the flocks. Isn’t it interesting that, in the first conflict of human beings, Cain and Abel, Cain was the one who thought that he should be the one who is the superior, and he was in charge of crops. And Cain [sic], his brother, was the younger one, but he tended flocks. So there’s something about youth, openness, eagerness to learn, not feeling that you know it already or have the position you need already, and that you’re interested in tending people, caring for people. These are the ones that God calls to be what — authentic witnesses of the most profound teaching that Jesus is going to bring into the world, this notion that this God, this Father of ours is revealing a truth. And the truth is the intoxicating forgiveness and compassion of the Father for our weaknesses and who we are and a desire for nothing other than authenticity. Every soul open to life, to longing for life, understands that message, and so we see in the first reading that God is the God who is seeing differently than human beings see. So right away we have to be careful of who do we trust, human authority figures or the God who dwells within us, reveals himself to us. It’s obviously the latter.

In the next reading from Paul, it’s so beautiful what he’s saying about light — light, wisdom, insight. It’s the thing that Christ has come to give to the world, and if it’s not accepted, if it isn’t embraced, if we don’t want to see what’s real, we’re going to lose out of the most exciting, dramatic thing that God has promised us: this participation with him in bringing life to the world, not surrendering to some authority over us but finding the inner authority that God has created in us to be the person that brings the gift that is us to others. That’s the key. So in the gospel, we see this interesting tension between these two figures, the authority of the church that refuses to see, the authority of religion that refuses to see, and I’m not blaming the institution. I’m just saying it’s in an institution’s DNA to be this, and it just refuses to look at the truth of a man who’s been gifted with this sight that is not deserved, not earned. And it so throws them off, so undercuts their whole system that all they can do is, looking at the face of the absolute certitude that this happened, refuse to accept it and see it for what it is. It’s why the end of the gospel is so important. If you really didn’t understand, you would be okay. You wouldn’t be so guilty of a sin, but you say you don’t see, and yet you do see. It’s clear that this man was gifted by this man Jesus through his sight, and yet you still denied it. What an incredible, interesting part of human nature that we can be so clear in seeing and at the same time refuse to see. That’s the danger, not just for an institution but for all of us, and we’re so eager — I pray you’re as eager as I and all those who long to see. Just show us. Show us what is real and give us the grace to embrace it and become a light to the world.

Father, you are our Father. You created us, and your intention is that we become exactly who you created us to be. Bless us with wisdom. It’s the only thing that is absolutely essential for us to see what you see, know what you know, believe and trust in what you believe and trust in, each of us, our work, our life, our struggles, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

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Exodus 17:3-7 | Romans 5:1-2, 5-8 | John 4:5-42

We’re in a very, very interesting time in our country and the world today because of the virus. I know many of us will be discouraged and, in many ways, feel responsible not to gather in groups, and so I’m so pleased to be able to have a vehicle through which I can speak with you, especially during these Sundays, these very crucial Sundays of the teaching of the tradition, the Judeo-Christian tradition that gives us life. So I pray you’ll listen. I pray you’ll tell your friends, if they can’t get to church, try my podcast or try my radio station at 10:00 every Sunday. So that’s the first ad I’ve ever started one of my programs with, but I think it’s unusual times.

This reading is the third Sunday, the middle Sunday this great season of Lent, and it’s considered to be a unique Sunday, because it is a Sunday upon which, during this solemn season, we’re asked to rejoice. Laetare Sunday is the name of it. The vestments go from dark purple to pink, and the reason for that is the message that we have in this set of readings, and I want to see if I can connect them to what I would consider to be one of the most important things to have in your heart when you’re listening to scripture, is to have a sense of the overall plan of this incredible work called scripture. The truth is we’re being revealed clearly a message that is universal, that is so well-suited to our nature, and the topic is our relationship with the spiritual, with the transcendent, with the God who created us. There’s a certain overarching theme that goes through, a sort of core story in the Old and New Testament, and the two need to be read together. You can’t study one without the other. It’s like seeing the last two acts of a play and skipping the first act. So what is this theme? Well, the thing about these five readings, it tries to capsulize that whole broad theme, and it starts off, as you remember from the first Sunday, where Jesus is being tempted. His humanity is being exposed for what humanity is. Its weaknesses are that it doesn’t like to struggle. It doesn’t like pain or suffering. That’s normal, but when those difficult burdens come, the task is not to try to use all your strength and power to alleviate those sufferings but somehow to seek the truth that’s in them. Every burden, every suffering has a truth hidden in it, like gold hidden in a rock. Then the second temptation was to not trust — to need proof before we believe something when things get difficult, when things don’t make sense, to doubt rather than to say, “I believe, and I trust, and I’m interested in how this mystery is going to unfold.” And the third temptation was to buy into the world that just simply sucks life out of everybody. Take those three images, and then look carefully at what this particular set of readings is trying to enable us to see. It starts off with that stubbornness, that resistance to discomfort that was in the Israelites. They were on the way to this freedom. They were going through all the struggles that you and I go through to find who our true self really is, to live freely of all the pressures that are on us, that keep us from our authenticity. It’s a struggle, and the struggle is accepted and not just accepted passively but accepted with the idea that somehow it contains truth. And so the first reading is about the stiff-neckedness of the people, their hard, rock-like hearts, stubborn. “I won’t give into something I don’t understand.”

Then Paul reminds us that the gift that Jesus has come to accomplish — he tells us what that is. The gospel says very clearly that Jesus is the one who comes into the world to complete the work of the Father, to reveal completely who he is, in a way, finish the work of the Old Testament that is there to reveal who God is by revealing the fullness of who he is in a person. So interesting that God can only reveal himself completely when he is in human form, when he’s incarnate in someone, and so that work of Jesus to reveal the fullness of the Father is going to be fulfilled in the words of the second reading where this presence of God inside of us is best described as living water flowing through us into other places that are dry and empty and in need of growth and change and transformation, insight, life. So we have this beautiful image of the thing we’re rejoicing about is the fullness of God’s revelation, is the simplicity of a truth beyond most of our imagining. It is God living in us, just like he lived in Jesus but not as complete or as effective. We’re not gods, but he is God, because he was completely 1,000 percent God, also 1,000 percent human. But right away there’s that issue. Can you believe something you can’t understand? Yeah, try to believe that. It is the truth. And then this living water, what is it? Well, living water is different than water that just stands in a pond. Standing in a pond, it can get polluted, or things start growing in it. If you have a stream flowing in Colorado, the water’s coming down from fresh snow melting, it’s just as clear and as free of anything negative. It’s just pure, flowing water. So this image of God’s grace in us is not just water being given in a bowl from a pool. It’s living. It’s moving. It’s moving from one source to another, and the source is God’s love, his mercy. The fullness of God revealing himself in Jesus is how loving and how merciful and how compassionate, how understanding he is, and so this living water, according to Romans, is the thing that flows through us, our hearts, into the hearts of others.

So now we see this whole image I just gave you being enacted in this beautiful encounter of Jesus with the woman at the well. The thing that’s so beautiful about the woman at the well is she had no right to anything that Jesus was offering. In fact, she was absolutely, totally unworthy. She was a Samaritan. Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans. She was a lawbreaker. She didn’t follow the rules of marriage, and she was a woman. Rabbis didn’t talk to women, and rabbis didn’t talk to Samaritan women, and rabbis never talked to Samaritan women who were not keeping the law. So she’s us. That beautiful woman is us, the feminine part of all of us that is sensitive enough to know our weaknesses and longs for wisdom. The feminine in every human being longs to understand things they can’t fully understand with their minds but can with their hearts. So in this encounter, he has this conversation with her. “If you knew who I was, you’d ask me for water.” Now, it’s interesting that, if she knew who he was, in a way, at the beginning, she would sort of be terrified that she was somehow not worthy, but her image is not that she wasn’t worthy so much as she thought that the people that worshipped in Jerusalem were judgmental and excluded people from their group. Does that sound familiar? The difference between Samaritans and the Jews was simply Samaritans believed that you worshipped God, and their temple was on their mountain, and the other was on the Jews mountain. So it’s all part of that old, ancient tradition that God dwelt in the earth, in a place, and you had to worship where your God was.

That image of God being in a place is so fascinating, because it’s what Christianity completely blows apart. God does not dwell in one place, not in the temple. Agustin said a beautiful thing when he wrote — he said, “You must worship God in the temple but only when you yourself have become the temple.” We are God’s temple. We possess him. I believe that’s what Jesus means when he said the day will come when we will not worry about whether God is in the Catholic church or the Baptist church or the Lutheran church or the evangelical churches or the Muslim church. He’s in hearts. He’s in hearts, hearts that are open to mystery and can receive this incredible gift of new life inside of them and allow it to flow and bring life to the people around. Those are the miracles that we see in the next two gospels. The next gospel is a man born blind, and Jesus, because of the power of God flowing out of him into this man, healed his blindness, his lack of insight. As that miracle took place, the blindness of the Pharisees and scribes was exposed, because even when they saw the proof, they wouldn’t believe it. Then the next miracle is raising someone from the dead, Lazarus.

So this flowing water that’s in you and in me has the power to open the eyes of people who can’t see the fullness of God, because it goes way beyond logic and beyond reason, and they’re not living the full life that God wants them to live. I’m not saying that people that don’t go to church don’t have that. I’m just saying no particular church has it, and it’s not necessary that you even have a church. God doesn’t need an institution to reach you. The institution is there to help you, and if it’s a good institution, if it’s true to the gospel, if it’s life-giving, if it’s authentic, it is a wonderful place to be. Why wouldn’t you want to be there if you wanted the gift that it offers? But not every religion offers it. Not every minister in charge of a community offers it as freely as it should be offered. That isn’t a condemnation of organized religion. It’s just a truth, but the greatest truth is what I’m trying to share, is in this set of readings. It’s a beautiful description of how God reaches you and me through the love, forgiveness, compassion, understanding of people around us. We know what that feels like when you’re loved and somebody sees you as important and valuable in their life, when they tell you that they felt something flowing through you to them that affirms something in their life. That’s church. That’s religion. That’s what we’re here for, and here’s a great thing to worship and to celebrate on this third Sunday of Lent. The middle of these five readings is so important, because it’s what the first two readings lead up to and what the next two readings — it just explains how it works. What an important set of gospels.

Father, you invite us to rejoice at the truth of who you are and most especially who you are within us and how you radically change the reason for us being here. It’s not about being comfortable. It’s not about being successful. It’s not about somehow achieving everything we want the way we want it. It’s about service. It’s about caring. It’s about giving life, life-giving, wisdom and strength. Thank you for this extraordinary ministry that we all carry within our hearts to the circle of friends we have, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.