Pastoral Reflections

Original Airdate: November 12, 2023
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.

Original Airdate: November 1, 2020
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.

Original Airdate: October 25, 2020
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.

Original Airdate: October 18, 2020
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. 

 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.

Original Airdate: October 15, 2023
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. 

Original Airdate: October 8, 2023
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.  

Original Airdate: September 27, 2020
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.

Original Airdate: September 24, 2023
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. 

Original Airdate: September 17, 2023
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.

Original Airdate: September 6, 2020
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.