Pastoral Reflections

Original Airdate: August 30, 2020
Jeremiah 20:7-9 | Romans 12:1-2 | Matthew 16:21-27

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

There’s a beautiful image in the opening prayer of our liturgy today, and it’s this image that there’s a God who has a work to be done for us.  He ministers to us, and in return, we minister to him by ministering to each other.  But one of the things that we prayed for is, “God, continue to do what you’ve been doing all along, nurturing us, nurturing us.”  An image of nurturing us is also then – we find it in that wonderful reading from St. Paul when he’s saying, “Be careful.”  Paul says, “Do not conform yourselves to this age,” but there’s so much that the Jews had learned that they have such a hard time letting go of, a misconception of who God is, too much emphasis on the law, too much emphasis on perfection and sacrifice and for sins.  So he has this longing to free people from that kind of system that keeps us from receiving the most beautiful, the most powerful thing that God can share with his people, and that is wisdom.  “Let me renew your mind,” he says.  “I want to give you – I want God to give you, I want to give you the hope and the trust in a God who will give you discernment so that you will know what God wants.  You will know what is good, what is pleasing, what is perfect.”  

Now, if you’re like me – I grew up in a religion.  Mine was Roman Catholicism.  It was a – it is a marvelous tradition.  It’s the mother lode, they call it, the oldest of the Christian traditions, but what it really is that I want to say is that I have learned most everything about God through my religion, through pastors who mostly preached to me and through teachers in Catholic schools and through witnessing of people that are Catholic.  And so all those things tend to give me a sense of what it is that I’m supposed to do and who God is and what I need to believe about him, and we need that kind of information, especially as long – most especially if it’s grounded in the essence of the message of Jesus, the pure message of Jesus.  We know that every religion is also not only guided by divinity and guided by the Spirit, but it’s also human, so we don’t expect perfection.  We shouldn’t expect perfection.  What we should expect is that we would get the thing that God wants us most especially to know and to feel, and that is his relationship with us as a source, a direct source of wisdom and understanding of who we are, why we’re here and what is good, what is right for us.  You, we all came into the world, in a way, filled with certain understandings of who we are.  Because of our ancestors, we have certain traits we have that we pick up from our ancestors also, but basically what we come into the world with is this openness to, “Who am I?  What is this place?”  And we start taking it in, and we learn from the people around us.  We’re memetic people.  We imitate.  If we have parents that are loving and kind and gentle to us, we tend to be that way.  If we had parents that are constantly at war with each other, we have that kind of understanding.  That’s what relationships are, I guess, but all that comes into us, and it seems to me that, once it’s set, then there’s a tension between the person we are and the person we’ve learned to be.  And there it is.  There’s the real challenge of living a spiritual life.  How do I find my authentic self?

So what I’d like to look at and see from these readings, we get something really interesting about the experience of Jeremiah and the experience of Jesus.  That’s what I want to talk about.  Now, Jeremiah is such an interesting prophet.  He was supposedly called to this work when he was very young, but the one thing about anybody that does any kind of work – if God gives me something to do, like I’m a pastor, and I do it, and I see people responding positively, and there’s respect for me and love, and I love them, and they love me back, and it’s wonderful.  But Jeremiah was-- he never found that kind of satisfaction in his work, because every time he went to people – and they were always doing something that was destructive to them, and so he had to tell them, “You are destroying yourselves.  You’re destroying each other.  You’re going to self-implode if you don’t change, if you don’t change.”  He was always crying out vengeance, outrage.  “Stop what you’re doing.”  And he would just be crucified for it.  He would just be thrown into cisterns, sinking in mud, all these things, and so he said, “You know what?  I don’t want to do this anymore.  I’m not getting anything out of this.  I keep trying to work with people, and they do not respond.  But then there’s this thing in me, this life in me that is not me maybe, or it is.  It is me.  It doesn’t feel sometimes like me, but I cannot not do this work.  There’s an energy, a life force,” calls it a, “fire burning in my heart.  It’s imprisoned my bones, and I can’t hold it in.  It’s like there’s a me that wants desperately to be, even though it’s not working, even though it doesn’t feel like it’s satisfying.”  Now, the most interesting thing about the frustration of Jeremiah, who’s often called the weeping, complaining prophet, is there’s something about him that’s so unique to me, and that is he gave a prophecy that seemed so powerful, because this is what he said.  He said, “This system of people trying to follow a law – they’re told, ‘You stop this, or do this.’”  He sees such resistance.  He calls their hearts hard-hearted evil hearts.  They aren’t receptive, and so he said, “There must come a day when there’s going to be a kind of miracle that’s called redemption.”  He didn’t call it that, but he said, “Somehow God is going to enter into people’s hearts, the core of their being and write his law – his law for them on their hearts.  So no one will have to worry about being taught anything.  They will have the teacher inside of them, awakening them to what is their destiny, what is their authentic self.”  Or another way to say it, which Jesus talks about, is it’s their life – their life.  

So there’s much more we find in Jesus teaching in this when he’s describing to his disciples the way his life is going to go.  It’s planned that way.  It’s God’s will for him, and let’s face it, Jesus was not greeting this way his ministry was going to go with open arms, saying, “Oh, this is great.  This is what I always knew it would be.  This is perfect,” because we don’t always have, as human beings, a full understanding of what our destiny is.  It’s something that’s revealed to us slowly, slowly over time, and we have to pay attention and reflect on everything going on so we can figure out, “Who is this person I am called to be by God?  It’s not the person that other people have told me what I should be.”  That’s always dangerous, or even what you in your – if you have a misconception that what God really wants more than authenticity is perfection, if you get caught in that, you’re going to put yourself under all kinds of pressure and condemnation and shame over the fact that we’re not perfect.  None of us are.  We’re not intended to be perfect, sinless, but aware of who we are, aware of our sin, aware of our shadow and embracing that and then waiting and listening and watching, looking to God who then is working to speak to us personally through our hearts, through kind of these mysterious ways, through dreams and things that seem – or that you can’t really figure out that easily, and then also just through the events of our life.  He’s teaching us all the time.  

So when he’s describing what life is for him, and he’s having a hard time with it, as we know, then Peter comes up and does what we all tend to do.  “Well, wait a minute.  That doesn’t sound like a God that would – no God would do that to his Son or to you who are so close to God.  He wouldn’t put you through something as painful and confusing and makes you look like a failure.  Why would he do that?  God forbid anything like that should ever happen to you, Jesus,” is Peter’s words.  And then Jesus just says, “No, you’re blocking the work of me finding, accepting and living my life, not the life I wanted, not the life everyone else expects me to have, no, the life that I’ve been given from God, that’s what I’m here to do, to live the life.”  It’s so interesting.  There’s a wonderful quote by St. Catherine of Siena where she said, “If anyone would become what God wants them to be, intends them to be, it would set the world on fire.”  Nothing is more important than living the life that we’ve been giving, and living on this planet has that work built into it of discovering that which is my life.  So that’s when Jesus explains something to his disciples, and this is always one of those statements that, for most of us, at least for me, it never made any sense, but it does now.  “If you want to come after me, if you want to follow me, take up your cross and follow.”  

You have to take up your cross.  What is the cross?  Well, in Jesus’ case, it was this moment of crucifixion, but the cross, crucifixion is a part of everyone’s life on a regular basis when we come against something that we think we know is true, and we have to let go of it, and to let go of something that we’ve based our life on is a painful, excruciating situation.  And we feel like we’re losing something.  “This is the way I’ve always been.  This is me.  I can’t let go of that.  I’m so comfortable with that person that I think I am.”  No, if you want to save your life, if you want to be not just living but fully alive, then you’ve got to let go of your life.  So it’s like, “Wait a minute.  To be alive, to be in life, I have to let go of life?”  Well, it’s obviously there’s two lives in this.  There’s the life that the world tells you to live.  There’s a life where control – your ego tells you, “That’s a great way to be in this world, to be successful.  How about to be better than everybody else?  That would be wonderful.”  All those are images that come both from our culture and from our ego, and they can create this being called me or you, and we can be caught up in these things that just do not produce what they promise.  And so what Jesus is saying is, “I will show you your true self, and your work is to look at that that is not you and let it go, let it die.”  Because what is more important?  What is your life worth?  Having an easy life, having a rich life, having a powerful life, is that better than the life God is giving you?  It’s the thing that makes you most satisfied.  It’s the thing that is most authentically you.  It’s the thing that will make the biggest on the impact on the circle of people God has given you in your life, and if you have any expectations of exactly what it is before you start asking the question, you will not get an answer.  He wants you to be open to his revelation of you, the life he’s asked you to live, and it seems like – it’s so funny to me in a way.  I’m just saying this because it sounds like, “Of course I would do that,” and then I looked at myself, and I see there’s so many things I refuse to let go of.  I like to be comfortable.  I like to be well-thought of.  I like to be in the center of things.  I’m a three on the Enneagram.  I love performing, all those things.  Well, those are good things, but performing how?  So I get all kinds of accolades in return?  Does that work?  If I pattern what I say so that people like me, is that going to be feeling good for me?  No, the only thing that really feels like me is when I’m up there doing what I believe I’m being asked to do, and somehow when you spend a lot of time reflecting on this, you can begin to feel what’s your fake self and what’s your real self.  I know when I’m sitting in a room feeling like, “Why isn’t everybody talking to me?”  What is that?  You need to be the center of attention all the time?  Well, there’s something in me that thought that was a really great way to live my life, to be the center of attention, and now whenever I get that, I say, “Are you kidding?  That’s not what I want to do.”  You ever been at a party where one person runs the whole dinner party and talks unceasingly?  What’s your reaction to that?  It’s not a pleasant thing to be engaged in, somebody demanding attention from everyone, and yet if I be honest, I used to do it all the time.  

So that’s what I’m talking about, God entering into you and into me and giving us those insights into who we really are meant to be.  And when you’re in that state, the things that tend to disappear, the three things I talk about all the time that get in the way of being who we are called to be, living the life we’re called to live, and that’s fear, anger, and then the big one, shame.  Whenever I am not who I unconsciously, perhaps, know that I should be, there’s going to be a mild feeling of uneasiness, that something’s wrong.  And the wonderful thing about shame, when it’s in its right place, it reminds us, tells us, makes us aware that something’s off, and if we say, “Well, life is just lousy.  There’s no joy in life anymore,” no.  Look at what it is that seems to be robbing you of your joy and ask God to reveal it to you.  And if you say, “Okay, I’ll change it,” you’ve made the biggest mistake.  All you have to do is see it, admit it, name it, own it, and then say to God, “Please, open my eyes, the eyes of my heart and let me see who I am.”  I just know how little in my prayer life, especially in my early life, I ever even thought to pray that way.  I had all kinds of clear ideas as to what would make me happy.  I remember once even thinking, “If everybody loved me, I’d be really happy.”  I have to laugh at that, because who wants everybody in love with them?  It’s crazy.  I want a relationship with 500 people or something?  No.  “Give me a friend.  Give me somebody that loves me.  Let me love somebody.  Let me learn how to gain a sense of my own value, and then let me be out there in the world, used by you in every way you want that I can bring life to people, and I’ll feel it.  I’ll know that this feels right.”  That inner, wonderful place of calm called peace, that’s our inheritance, and when you’re living your life and not someone else’s, that’s when you feel it.  That’s when you know.  It’s that feeling all is well and all will be well, and that’s our inheritance.  

Father, your gifts are beyond our imagining.  The longing in your heart for us to find fullness and light in this world is crucial for us to know and to experience in order to know who you are and why you’re in our life and what you want from us, not something that takes life away from us but that enables us to find it.  So bless us with open hearts, open minds.  Let us be good disciples, good learners, good listeners, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

Original Airdate: August 27, 2023
Isaiah 22:19-23 | Romans 11:33-36 | Matthew 16:13-20

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

I’ve been around for a long time.  I’ve been through the ‘40s, the ‘50s, the ’60s, the ‘70s, the ‘80s, and on to today, and I don’t ever remember a time in my life when I looked at my world around me and I see something that is always ⎯ I don't know ⎯ frightening, disturbing, unsettling.  And it’s just simply that it seems everywhere the institutions and the people that we’ve trusted and longed to be there for us to help us to live a full, rich life, they seem to be found wanting, and authority seems to be misused.  Truth seems to be a matter of opinion, but more than all that, it’s just a spirit in the world that seems negative.  And for the first time, I’ve heard people say something.  “Well, maybe I’ll go to another country,” or, “I don't know if I want to bring children into this world.”  What’s missing?  What’s the cause of this?  Well, I think the readings make it clear that there is something that God has given to every human being.  It’s their authority.  It comes with the package of being human.  You have influence.  You make a difference to the people around you.  You have power to bring them into something beautiful or to continue to feed something that robs them of what God has made this world into, what he wants it to be for them. 

So we see in this first reading, from Isaiah, very clearly that Shebna ⎯ he was a very powerful guy, and he had just won a battle.  But he never, ever turned to God to ask God to help him do that, and what he ended up doing was basically achieving the goal of the battle.  He achieved it through violence and destruction, and when God looks at him and says, “You never called upon me.  You never asked for my help.  So I’m taking your power away from you.”  Shebna was so full of himself that he was building a beautiful temple so everybody would come and remember him as this great leader, and God said, “I’m taking everything away from you, your authority, your robe, your sash, everything, and I give it to someone who will be more like a father, not someone who has power over people but someone who cares for people and will give honor to his family,” meaning he will be respected.  So we see very clearly the work of God in our life, the power that he gives us, has a very clear focus.  It is for others ⎯ for others.  If you look at the truth of the Old Testament, what we find in those beautiful stories, an intention on the part of God.  He wanted to convince people that there was only one God.  So monotheism was one of the basic teachings of the Old Testament, and then he added justice.  There’s one God, and he stands for something that makes sense: fairness, justice.  The good are rewarded; the bad are punished.  It gave order.  Ten simple rules, connect with God and be there for other people.  Treat other people as you would want them to be treated.  Love them.  

That’s the heart of the Old Testament, but all through that story, there’s something about a Messiah.  Something’s coming.  Something’s better.  Something’s more, and it wasn’t until Jesus comes into the world that we begin to understand the depths and the riches and the wisdom of who God really is, for we never really understood the mind of God until the coming of the Messiah.   And we’re told in Romans, and Paul recognizes this incredible new thing that has happened, that he worries about his own people not accepting it.  But this new thing that God has revealed through this figure, Jesus, has a name.  It’s called the kingdom of God, and 100 times or more in the New Testament, it says the difference with the Old Testament and New Testament is the Old Testament establishes justice and fairness and the presence of a single God, but in the New Testament, there’s a work to be accomplished.  There’s a thing to be done, and it’s called establishing the kingdom of God.  And in that kingdom, we are able to understand the fullness of what God has in mind for us.  And the kingdom of God could be described very simply as everything that the world doesn’t seem to be right now, because it’s not only based in justice, but something is added: mercy, compassion, understanding.  Those things are part of human nature, but they are not necessarily something that one can do without someone, something enabling them, increasing their capacity to do this.  It’s like it’s taking them beyond their human nature, and so the foundation of the kingdom of God is believing in the way God has revealed himself through the life of Jesus.  And so the key to being in the kingdom is to believe who he is.  Without that, it will never work. 

And so we have in the gospel a new authority being given to Simon, and what is necessary for Simon to be the one who could manifest and work for this new kingdom of God is the fact that he knew who Jesus was.  That’s the key, to know who Jesus is, because he is revealing who God is, and when we understand who God is, we have the key to the kingdom.  We know that we have something that we know, and when it is lived, the kingdom is established.  When it is disbelieved and ignored, we have chaos, disorder, fear, shame, anger.  So what is it about this figure Jesus that is so important that we believe in if we’re going to establish the kingdom of God?  We have the capacity to be understanding and compassionate, but when you think about what God is asking us to do, it is really an amazing thing, because we’re asked to believe that we have within us a power, the presence of God dwelling in your heart.  And that experience of this loving God within us, if we use that as the main reason why we hope in the kingdom of God, if we believe it is being established through us and not because of us ⎯ it’s not that we have to become so perfect.  We can still be filled with all kinds of weaknesses and faults and frailty, but at the same time, if we believe in our work of establishing the kingdom, God can use us, because he knows that what he wants and what it’s going to take for the world to enter into a place of harmony and oneness and compassion and empathy is out of our reach.  Humans can’t do it.  All we can do is act as if in a way, but when you think about it, Jesus came into the world to teach us that his life, everything he did, all the miracles were because of something dwelling in him.  It wasn’t him.  He’s saying, “I’m basically just like you.  I’m a human being, but I have something that makes me extraordinarily effective.  I can open people’s eyes.  I can open their ears.  I can make them speak.  I can get them to walk and to do things.  I can drive out demons.”  And what do the people say?  What do the Pharisees say about him?  “There’s a problem here.  It’s one thing that he’s talking ways [sic] about a world that we don’t understand, but what are we going to do with the fact that he’s doing miracles?  How can you write him off as somebody who doesn’t know what he’s talking about?”  Miracles, God using Jesus, a human being to perform miracles.  And what do they symbolize?  Freedom from evil and integrity, a whole person making us into who we are intended to be.  What a gift, to know and to believe that God will take you, take the gifts that you have, that you are, along with all the faults and mistakes and stupidity of us, he’ll take that goodness that we are and use it.  Not simply by making it the source of what happens but allowing him to work through you as the source changes everything.  It means that there is a power within every human being to go way beyond anything they could imagine they could accomplish, to believe that, to know that.  

So how would it work?  Would I go around and, say, intend something that ⎯ a miraculous event?  No, no.  You just sync your will with God’s.  Think like he acts.  Act like you know he would act or you would hope he would act, and you will find that this power then, that is not just you but God in you, will change people in ways you’ll never, ever understand or even maybe even know.  But it’s transformative to meet people who are angry and isolated and fearful and acting out the same kind of negative behavior.  When you look at them, and if you judge them and condemn them, you’re just living in the kingdom of the world.  But if you look at them and love them and want them to change and have patience with them and long to help them without having to argue with them or change their mind but just you want that, you have an intention for that ⎯ your intention, when you believe in God’s inner presence, you have that power of God in your intention.  So think of it.  If you want to condemn this world and judge it and add more negativity to it, you have power to do that, authority to do that, but if you would take another road and the kingdom of God becomes real to you, and you know that you have this gift to be able to give to other people, and you believe that it is not dependent on you but dependent on God, and he has planned it this way so that life on this planet has real, real purpose ⎯ that purpose is to change it all, to not look at the world and condemn it but to think, “I can change it, not me but God in me, but he won’t do it without me being the one who brings it into the world.”  

It's so interesting.  I’m not saying that God can’t do anything he wants, but think of it.  If he’s waiting for us to be the ones that manifest the world that we would like to live in, that we would want to live in, and we’re putting it out there, longing for it to happen, wanting to be a part of changing it, wanting to be a real key figure in this thing called the kingdom of God, and then we’ll see it happen, we will.  Promise.  Loving those, caring for those who are filled with hatred and anger, we can change them, just by intending that they see and hear and listen to the truth.  Everything depends on that. 

Father, awaken in us the plan you’ve established for us.  Help us to joyfully, enthusiastically participate in building your kingdom, knowing that it is the thing that everyone longs for and the only true source of joy and peace.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

Original Airdate: August 16, 2020
Isaiah 56:1, 6-7 | Romans 11:13-15, 29-32 | Matthew 15:21-28

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

This is a fascinating set of readings.  The overarching truth that we see in them is that God has come into the world to reach all people, to call everyone into his community, into a loving community that understands who he is and why we’re here and who God is and who we are as human beings.  It’s clear that, from the first reading, it’s that God has called all men, all women, not just one group, not just the Jews, but everyone is called to be in a relationship with the God who created every one of us. 

Then Paul’s reading from Roman’s, he says something so fascinating about his insight into who we are as human beings, and he knows that he has been given this challenge to speak to the Jews and to try to open their hearts to who God is.  But he found himself, when he understood who Jesus is and what he wants of him, he went ahead and found himself drawn most especially to the Gentiles.  He had pain in his heart over the fact that the Jews were so stubborn and would not accept Jesus, but he was eager to show to the Gentiles the beauty of this God revealed in Jesus.  And he was so successful but always carries this pain inside of him that, “I’d give this up,” as he said last week, or, “I wish so much that the Jews would understand this.”  But their hearts were closed.  Their minds were closed to something so radical and so different as Jesus, but then at the end of it he says the most interesting thing. 

The thing that the Jews had such a hard time with was the mercy of God, the mercy, the thing that no one really realized who God was until Jesus entered the world and he reveals himself as a lover, but most shockingly a lover who loves sinners.  The broken part of humanity he loves, and in that act of loving that, he shows and proves to all of us what we need to understand about who God has always been, a lover of those he created no matter what they do or who they are.  That love is never diminished by any action they have, but in the Old Testament it was always clear, if you didn’t do as God asked, you were left, rejected.  You were on your own, and your enemies would overtake you.  That idea that God would reject sinners is probably the most serious thing we need to look at.  If there’s any shred of that inside of us, we’re going to be caught in one of the most obvious things that most people carry inside of them as they struggle to become who God calls them to be, and that’s shame over their humanity.  It’s fascinating to me that the first thing that we have in the story of creation is a story about human beings separating themselves from God, hiding from God.  The first words that God spoke to sinful humanity was not, “What have you done,” but, “Where are you?  Why aren’t you here with me?  Why are you hiding?”  “We’re ashamed.  We’ve done something that we feel is not your will, and if we’ve done that, we believe, like we believe our experiences, love is conditional.  And if you don’t do what the one that you want to love you wants, you lose their love.  You find yourself rejected.” 

I spent a couple of times at a wonderful treatment center in Wickenburg, Arizona, called the Meadows, and one of the things that we learned there is about conditional love and codependency.  And one of the things that was shocking to me, in a sense, was that the hardest thing for a child growing up in a family, the most abusive thing that can happen to a child is rejection, being ignored, being not considered as important at all.  That can leave a wound so deep, so wide open that there’s such a difficult time for that person to find their own value.  I remember there was a story of one of the young men in our group, and he was saying, when he was a child, he remembers doing something that didn’t make any sense to him as an adult.  But every time he left the room – let’s say they were watching television or listening to the radio, and he would leave the room, and he’d say, “Well, I’m going to the bathroom now.”  Then he’d come back, and everybody’s still watching television.  Nobody noticed.  He said, “I’m back now.”  He said, “I used to do that all the time, letting people know that I was there.”  He was there because his brother had committed suicide, and he struggled with those same thoughts.  And it was just such a powerful image for me of neglect, someone important to you looking at you and saying, “You’re not valuable.” And from my own experience, I can remember so vividly whenever I – even today when I sin, I feel like there’s something wrong with me.  I’m 80 years old, and what the hell am I doing still going back to these stupid sins, and I know they’re wrong, and I know they don’t work in terms of promising – I don’t get what they promise.  They don’t really give me any kind of real joy, but I find myself going back to them.  It’s silly to say this, but I just feel there’s something really wrong in my relationship with God.  I shouldn’t be human. 

So that brings me to the gospel.  Jesus’ humanity is all over this gospel, and by that I mean we’re looking at a human being working for God, filled with divinity but a human being with all the weaknesses and struggles of a human being, like impatience, frustration.  And he’s working so, so hard to reach the Israelite people, and they were so resistant.  And he has these – some of the things he said to the Pharisees, if you were looking at his work as a nonjudgmental observer, you might say, “Well, do you think you should have been calling those main people that ran the temple hypocrites and people twice as fit for hell as their converts and ranted and screamed at them?  Was that smart?  Maybe you could have worked a little bit more subtly and tried to win them over.”  But Jesus, in the face of their hypocrisy as a human being went nuts in a way, crazy.  He just said, “I can’t stand it.”  His humanity, beautiful humanity, impatient, intolerant at times, not loving all the time, and now in this case you see Jesus being very frustrated over the fact that he’s struggling so hard to open the hearts of the Israelite people.  And they’re so resistant, because the system Jesus is inviting them into is so radically different than the system of justice and law.  You do this, and you’re guaranteed a place.  It doesn’t matter where your heart is or where your intention is.  You just do what you’re supposed to do.  It was an action-centered kind of spirituality or morality.  It’s all about your actions.

And Jesus is so much more evolved than any of the prophets could have ever been.  He’s this mysterious connection of humanity and divinity, and it wasn’t until the fifth century, in 451, at the Council of Chalcedon that the church finally figured a way to talk about Jesus’ humanity and divinity.  And I love what they came up with, because it’s so perfectly mysterious that it doesn’t give you any kind of clarity as to, “Oh, of course that works,” 100 percent human, 100 percent divine.  How can someone be 100 percent perfect, 100 percent imperfect?  Well, question is, is imperfection, is that something that God sees as our greatest problem, and whenever we’re caught in it, we cut ourselves off from him?  No, it’s the opposite.  What this humanity and divinity coming together is, is this mysterious way in which we have to understand that, in our human nature, we find all the tools we need to be able to grow into more and more our own participation in divinity.  We’re not divine, but we participate in it.  We become a part of it.  What a beautiful thing that our humanity is there for a purpose, and the purpose is to learn patience and to learn tolerance and to learn that God looks at us with this strange, mysterious thing I never dreamed existed, because I never experienced it from a human being – unconditional love, that when you fail, there is not one shred of a decision on the part of God to separate himself from you.  It’s like a parent with a sick child.  The child is sick.  Oh well, he’s not functioning as he should, so that really bothers me.  So I’ll just dump him and get going with the healthy ones.  No.  No, his heart goes out most especially to the sinner.

And then we see in St. Paul, in this set of readings, a phrase that seems almost impossible to believe.  When he says, “You know what God did?  He imprisoned all of us in this thing that we call our weaknesses, our sins, disobedience, and he said we’re subject to that.  We’re under the power of a spirit inside of us that’s going to resist God by its very nature.  It’s egocentric.  It wants to be the heart of everything.  It doesn’t want to surrender to ways of thinking that it doesn’t think are correct, that make – the will and the mind is naturally resistant to something different.  It makes one have to admit that, “I made a mistake.  I’ve been wrong.”  And isn’t it interesting how it seems, when you look at the way God responds to our sins with nothing but love and compassion and understanding, then why is it that we as human beings still fall into this trap of shame?  “There’s something wrong with me.”  You need to feel guilt.  If you don’t have guilt, you’re a sociopath.  “That was wrong.  I see that.  Okay, I did something wrong.”  That’s a good, healthy description of how we should function but, “There’s something wrong with me if I did something wrong?  There’s something intrinsically wrong and negative about me?  There’s something in me that makes God look at me with disgust?”  When I was a child, I learned from my teachers, and I pray not everyone had those same kind of teachers back in the ‘40s, but they really did ingrain in me that, when God sees me as a young boy sinning, he rejects me.  I was even taught that, when I sin, I’m nailing the nails into Jesus’ body.  It was a horrible experience.  I guess they were trying to make me so afraid of my weaknesses that I would control them with an ego and a will that can do that, which is a frightening thought, that the ego and the will can really repress everything in us that isn’t what we think it should be, and then we end up hating everybody else who is those things. 

It’s so clear to me that there’s nothing more essential for you and for me to believe than the mercy of God, and if you see Jesus as perfect, which I always did – if you see him as not a human but some God acting like a human, then there isn’t any way to identify with Jesus.  And yet that’s the core of what the New Testament is saying to us.  “Here is one like you, and he’s loved by his Father.  And he’s got weaknesses.”  It’s true he didn’t sin, but when we act on our human weaknesses, when we fall back into an egocentric mode, is that automatically a sin?  I don’t think I do it sitting there thinking, “Well, I should do this.  I shouldn’t give into my ego, but I’d like to.  So I know.  I’ll sit here and think for – now I think I’ll give into my ego.”  No.  I blurt out something to somebody who’s just corrected me or humiliated me or made me feel awkward or funny or different.  No, it’s automatic.  That’s so true of our nature.  When we’re working with our nature, we have to be patient and loving and merciful, just as Jesus is revealing to us that’s the Father’s response to your and my weaknesses, and there’s something about the anger that I was taught that God had over our sins and the way sins can hurt his people and so he goes to punish those people that have done this harm.  That’s a very Old Testament image of God, but what it’s really about, today in the way in which I understand my God through Jesus, is there’s a sadness in him when we fail, not an anger so much as sadness.  There are quotes in scripture that imply that Jesus is saying, if we don’t do what we’re supposed to do, we’re all going to be condemned.  And I don’t know if those are all translated exactly right, but it doesn’t really sound like the God that I have learned to love through the actions of this God/man Jesus.  I don’t see him as somebody who’s angry over our sins but sad over the effect sin can have on us and the people we love.  It’s like watching people stay in a disposition that harms people, that robs them of their dignity and their value is a sadness in God.  The image of weeping over Jerusalem is so powerful to me, God weeping over the fact that something is going on that is causing pain, and it doesn’t have to go on.  And if we just understand we are loved in that sin, there’s a much greater chance that we’ll change. 

So just consider it.  We are caught in sin, caught in disobedience as a human, and when we struggle with it, we learn about how to free ourselves from it and how God frees us from that.  But it always depends upon one key piece.  You are loved.  You are safe.  You’re forgiven, and you have a purpose.  And the purpose is to evolve and to change and to grow, and God is patient, not in a rush.  And he has a deep faith and trust in our nature that ultimately we’ll turn to him and allow him to truly love us.

Father, your goodness, your love, your mercy is so far beyond our expectations that we need your help in grasping the fullness of being loved unconditionally like you so generously do.  Bless us with the freedom from shame and from a distance that we create over our weaknesses, knowing that you are there, filled with mercy, filled with understanding, filled with compassion, which brings us great peace and hope and life.  And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

Original Airdate: August 2, 2020
Isaiah 55:1-3 | Romans 8:35, 37-39 | Matthew 14:13-21

Draw near to your servants, oh Lord, and answer their prayers with unceasing kindness that, for those who glory in you as their creator and guide, you may restore what you have created and keep safe what you have restored.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Time is such a strange thing.  I turned 80 years old this year.  It seems strange to be 80.  I don’t feel 80.  I don’t feel that much different than I felt, maybe, about myself when I was in my 70s, 60s, 50s, but I know I’ve changed a great deal.  But when I go back, thinking of when I entered the seminary, actually it was 60 years ago, immediately after – well, before the council, the Vatican Council, which so much changed the focus of the church, and I remember the things that we studied.  The core of the curriculum was pretty simple.  Toward the end of your theology training, those last four years, you were focusing very much on theology, who is God, and moral theology, what does he ask of us, and what are the rules and laws that are built into our heart, and the history of the church.  There wasn’t any course on spirituality, which there probably is today, nor was there a big emphasis on scripture.  It was more about church doctrine rather than going to scripture, which was probably typical of the church before the council.  The scripture was the work of the church to interpret what it meant, and it would tell us what it meant.  And we were not necessarily – certainly if you go back in history not too long ago, we were never encouraged to read the Bible, as Catholics, on our own, because we would be too prone to misunderstanding it.  And there’s a little bit of wisdom in that, also not much trust in human nature, but the danger is, what scripture is, it’s such a strange, wonderful piece of literature and truth and wisdom and infused words with Spirit.  And one of the things that it reveals is a God who revealed himself slowly over time, and a God who was presented to, let’s say Abraham and to Moses, when he was guiding the people, is not fully who he was, because there’s no way to understand God the Father without understanding Jesus.  And Jesus is the final piece, the final keystone that holds it all together, and it’s not until you see God incarnate in a human being that you begin to understand who he is.  And who he is, is so radically different than what a story from the Old Testament might imply.  In the Old Testament it seems he was more likely to be someone who was angry when we failed, who was judgmental, who had a short fuse, who lost his patience, who often wanted to destroy everybody because he was so frustrated with their hard-heartedness, their egos that wouldn’t change.  All of that is in there.

The frightening thing about being a preacher and a teacher of scripture to the people –  and that’s what a homily does.  The word homily means a reflection on scripture.  Sermon is a religious topic in a talk, but we were taught after the council, no, it’s got to be a homily, and the homily has to go to the scripture and dig into it and break it open and make it real in terms of today’s world.  And that’s what I struggle to do, and it’s such a strange thing, because if you are not sensitive to trying constantly to stay with the fullness of the message through Jesus, you can come up with a God that is really scary.  And many people do, and you know that fear is one of the greatest motivators that human nature has.  So it’s easy to see, if I were a religious leader and I wanted to get the people to stop doing something, I would tell them, “If you don’t stop, you die.  He’s going to cast you into hell.”  And yet in the New Testament, you see Jesus so clearly making it so – making sure that we see who he is, and he is forgiveness, and he is never, ever intending to condemn, never.  He is not condemning people to hell.  People are condemning themselves by their actions to hell, but his intention always is not to punish the sinner but to save him or her, to transform them.  And so you can see so beautifully in the ministry of Jesus his servant heart.  He wants more than anything to create for us a world that he has intended us to have, and it is supposed to be good, wonderful, life-giving, not painless, not easy but wonderful.  

So I want to start with this set of readings, because it seems that to understand it properly, you need to have one thing onboard, and that is an understanding of who God is in terms of what is he doing with you and with me.  What does he long to see change in you and me?  It’s not to get us to stop sinning.  That’s a byproduct, and what you need to then understand, if you’re going to respond to this intention of God, you need to have some clue or some kind of sense of who you are, what really satisfies you.  And then you would hear very differently, I think, this set of readings particularly, because it strikes me that the first reading is saying something very, very clear to the heart.  In fact, most all the things that Jesus teaches, when he teaches us about our nature, he’s going to rely upon our heart to know what he’s talking about.  The mind has a really hard time accepting someone else’s insight, someone else’s way of seeing when it feels it sees already exactly what is, and it’s patterned this life after all that it thinks.  And so when you’re asking somebody to change what they think, you’re really in many ways saying, “I want you to change and be someone you’re not.”  And if that person you think you’re supposed to be is your full identity, it’s like someone saying, “Well, I want you to die.”  That part of you dies, and that’s why we have as the core of what this transformation is about is a thing called crucifixion.  Something has to die, and what Jesus was doing, it seems to me so clearly, when he accepted the plan of the Father, that he would have to give up his whole ministry and his desire to change the world, and as a man and as an ego, he had to have a lot of plans that went way beyond those three years.  When he found out that he was going to be asked to leave it, when it was just taking root – it was just like these seeds he planted in the human race were just beginning to germinate, and he felt he had to nurture that. And the Father said, “No, this is all I need from you, and I want you to surrender to this.  And I want you to teach them something about the way I work, and the way I work is I need you.  I create you, because I need you to be an instrument of saving people, helping people, feeding people, freeing people from shame and guilt and fear.  That’s what I need you for.  That’s what you’re made for.”  So in a way, it was asking Jesus to stop what he was doing, even though he just began, and surrender to a plan that was bigger than he was.  And the ego had to resist that, and that’s why he said no two times before he finally said, “Okay, Father.  If this is really what you want, then I’ll do it, because I surrender myself to you, because I know the only thing you would ever do would be for me, for my work, for my intention.”  And he said yes. So we need to basically understand that what God is intending to do is move us from an ego-centric part of our being that is able to create a world, and when we create it, we’re in it.  That’s what’s so scary about the brain.  If it’s the world is a frightening place, it is frightening to you.  If you see it as a challenging, wonderful catalyst to help you grow and change and develop, then that’s what it is, and one is stressful and frightening and hard on us.  The other is natural, and it brings about peace.  So we have to get those two things in sync.  So it means we have to develop our heart and tame a little bit the mind.  They’re both so essential.  

So let’s look at this first reading.  Because it’s from Isaiah, it’s a long time ago.  Isaiah is one of those books in the Bible that probably, if you could only read one part of the Old Testament, it would be the best, because it’s always predicting the things that Jesus is going to bring into the world.  And so there’s this image of God the Father that is radically different than, say, the story about Moses and the law and the tablets and God being so frustrated with people that he wanted to kill them all and Moses talks him out of it.  That’s one God.  Seems very different than this one, because Isaiah is saying, “No, this God is making a promise to you.”  But maybe he was implying to the people, “This promise is not yet fulfilled, and it won’t come until the Messiah comes.  But what I’m promising you is every single thing you need, everything you want to live your life as fully as it was intended to be and experience the peace and the joy and the enthusiasm that comes into someone’s life when they’re so – their life is effective.”  That’s what we want, and he said, “What I want you to do is believe that whatever it takes for you to do that, I’m giving it to you.  So don’t think that you have to go out and get the things that you need to be able to live this kind of surrendering to reality and to my will and to my ways.  No, I have covered all that you might need to do in order to evolve high enough to be able to see this message.”  It’s called redemption.  He did it for us.  So these images are so beautiful.  There’s, “Don’t work for anything.  This is all there.  It’s all a gift.  All you have to do is be thirsty.  All you have to do is listen and come to me and listen.”  It even says, “To come to me heedfully,” and I think what that means is the part of you that can heed, listen, can hear and understand this relationship that God wants to have with us and the presence of what it brings to us is only through the heart, because the heart can know without figuring it out. The mind has to be able to somehow be able to figure things out.  I think you know enough about the difference between the brain and the heart.  They’re made as the perfect partnership, but they operate very differently.  The mind, as I said, needs proof and needs something that it can say, “Okay, this makes sense to me, so I ‘ll believe it.”  And since the mystical world is what God is calling us into, you’ll never understand how it works.  It’s angels, saints, miracles.  How do you explain that to the mind?  You can’t, but the heart?  The heart just takes to it like, “Yes, of course.  I know this works.”  And true, the heart will have experience after experience that affirms what it believes, and so there’s a way it’s sort of giving you proof but not the same, the brain.  The brain is different.  I think the most interesting thing about the brain is how it resists someone else’s power over them or even with them.  God never wants to overpower you, but he wants to empower you.  Empowerment means new insights, changes, radical changes.  That’s hard for the ego, easy for the heart. 

So the first thing, you’ve got to make sure in this journey, this spirituality that I teach and the work that we’re doing together, you have to understand there’s nothing you do to earn it or to work for it.  Vatican 2 made a profound statement when it said, “Holiness is the right of everyone who believes in God,” holiness.  In the ‘40s, ‘50s, the word holy meant a kind of person that wore a long, black dress if they were a woman, and a black suit and a white, little collar – to us, the only ones that were holy were the hierarchy and the priests and the nuns, because they gave up their life, and they didn’t take – they were pure.  They were sort of separate from the world, and that made them holy.  And nothing would be further from the truth.  They were – could be holy, but it’s not the only way you do it.  In fact, it seems more exciting to me, though I don’t take anything away from those kinds of strict ways of life, but just to be engaged in everything with this wisdom inside of you is wonderful.  So once you have it, Paul goes on to say, “Look, nothing that’s difficult, nothing that’s hard is going to separate you from this, this gift.”  And it’s funny, because you look at Old Testament.  If God is taking care of their needs, they believe in him.  If he doesn’t make their life comfortable, he loses it.  So that’s what this is referring to.  Don’t base your faith in God in terms of your comfort level.

But then the gospel, which is so beautiful and so wonderful, so intriguing, what’s Jesus teaching when he’s there?  John the Baptist has just died.  He must have been extremely reflective, and he goes away to be quiet and be by himself, and of course the crowds come.  He needs solitude.  He needs to be away from the world, but the world cries for him.  “Come.  Feed us.  Feed us.  We’re hungry.”  And so he does, but he says something so powerful.  “I will feed you.  Don’t worry, but I won’t be with you always.  So what I’m doing is I am promising you that I will dwell in each of you, and my indwelling presence will be food to everyone around you.”  So the story is so powerful when you’re looking at it.  When Jesus said, “I can feed all these people with a miracle, 5,000 with another 3,000 women and children, a piece of cake.”  “Well, do it.”  “Well, no, I’m not going to do it.  You’re going to do it.”  What does that mean?  “You can do anything with me inside of you, and the most important thing you can be – food to your brothers and sisters.”  What kind of food?  Energy, life, stress lessness, goodness, modeling a way of life that makes so much sense that, when we’re in that way of life, we’re so comfortable and so at ease and so safe.  That’s the gift of being who we’re intended to be. 

Father, your goodness, your generosity, your mercy are so far beyond our mind to comprehend, but our heart understands.  And when we live in that atmosphere, in that environment, in that comfort of that sense of who you are, we find ourselves feeling so much less stress.  It is stressful times for us, this virus, how are economy is going.  So please bless us with a conviction that all of this somehow has purpose and meaning and is going to bring us to a place of abundant life.  And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

Original Airdate: August 2, 2020
Isaiah 55:1-3 | Romans 8:35, 37-39 | Matthew 14:13-21

Draw near to your servants, oh Lord, and answer their prayers with unceasing kindness that, for those who glory in you as their creator and guide, you may restore what you have created and keep safe what you have restored.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Time is such a strange thing.  I turned 80 years old this year.  It seems strange to be 80.  I don’t feel 80.  I don’t feel that much different than I felt, maybe, about myself when I was in my 70s, 60s, 50s, but I know I’ve changed a great deal.  But when I go back, thinking of when I entered the seminary, actually it was 60 years ago, immediately after – well, before the council, the Vatican Council, which so much changed the focus of the church, and I remember the things that we studied.  The core of the curriculum was pretty simple.  Toward the end of your theology training, those last four years, you were focusing very much on theology, who is God, and moral theology, what does he ask of us, and what are the rules and laws that are built into our heart, and the history of the church.  There wasn’t any course on spirituality, which there probably is today, nor was there a big emphasis on scripture.  It was more about church doctrine rather than going to scripture, which was probably typical of the church before the council.  The scripture was the work of the church to interpret what it meant, and it would tell us what it meant.  And we were not necessarily – certainly if you go back in history not too long ago, we were never encouraged to read the Bible, as Catholics, on our own, because we would be too prone to misunderstanding it.  And there’s a little bit of wisdom in that, also not much trust in human nature, but the danger is, what scripture is, it’s such a strange, wonderful piece of literature and truth and wisdom and infused words with Spirit.  And one of the things that it reveals is a God who revealed himself slowly over time, and a God who was presented to, let’s say Abraham and to Moses, when he was guiding the people, is not fully who he was, because there’s no way to understand God the Father without understanding Jesus.  And Jesus is the final piece, the final keystone that holds it all together, and it’s not until you see God incarnate in a human being that you begin to understand who he is.  And who he is, is so radically different than what a story from the Old Testament might imply.  In the Old Testament it seems he was more likely to be someone who was angry when we failed, who was judgmental, who had a short fuse, who lost his patience, who often wanted to destroy everybody because he was so frustrated with their hard-heartedness, their egos that wouldn’t change.  All of that is in there.

The frightening thing about being a preacher and a teacher of scripture to the people –  and that’s what a homily does.  The word homily means a reflection on scripture.  Sermon is a religious topic in a talk, but we were taught after the council, no, it’s got to be a homily, and the homily has to go to the scripture and dig into it and break it open and make it real in terms of today’s world.  And that’s what I struggle to do, and it’s such a strange thing, because if you are not sensitive to trying constantly to stay with the fullness of the message through Jesus, you can come up with a God that is really scary.  And many people do, and you know that fear is one of the greatest motivators that human nature has.  So it’s easy to see, if I were a religious leader and I wanted to get the people to stop doing something, I would tell them, “If you don’t stop, you die.  He’s going to cast you into hell.”  And yet in the New Testament, you see Jesus so clearly making it so – making sure that we see who he is, and he is forgiveness, and he is never, ever intending to condemn, never.  He is not condemning people to hell.  People are condemning themselves by their actions to hell, but his intention always is not to punish the sinner but to save him or her, to transform them.  And so you can see so beautifully in the ministry of Jesus his servant heart.  He wants more than anything to create for us a world that he has intended us to have, and it is supposed to be good, wonderful, life-giving, not painless, not easy but wonderful.  

So I want to start with this set of readings, because it seems that to understand it properly, you need to have one thing onboard, and that is an understanding of who God is in terms of what is he doing with you and with me.  What does he long to see change in you and me?  It’s not to get us to stop sinning.  That’s a byproduct, and what you need to then understand, if you’re going to respond to this intention of God, you need to have some clue or some kind of sense of who you are, what really satisfies you.  And then you would hear very differently, I think, this set of readings particularly, because it strikes me that the first reading is saying something very, very clear to the heart.  In fact, most all the things that Jesus teaches, when he teaches us about our nature, he’s going to rely upon our heart to know what he’s talking about.  The mind has a really hard time accepting someone else’s insight, someone else’s way of seeing when it feels it sees already exactly what is, and it’s patterned this life after all that it thinks.  And so when you’re asking somebody to change what they think, you’re really in many ways saying, “I want you to change and be someone you’re not.”  And if that person you think you’re supposed to be is your full identity, it’s like someone saying, “Well, I want you to die.”  That part of you dies, and that’s why we have as the core of what this transformation is about is a thing called crucifixion.  Something has to die, and what Jesus was doing, it seems to me so clearly, when he accepted the plan of the Father, that he would have to give up his whole ministry and his desire to change the world, and as a man and as an ego, he had to have a lot of plans that went way beyond those three years.  When he found out that he was going to be asked to leave it, when it was just taking root – it was just like these seeds he planted in the human race were just beginning to germinate, and he felt he had to nurture that. And the Father said, “No, this is all I need from you, and I want you to surrender to this.  And I want you to teach them something about the way I work, and the way I work is I need you.  I create you, because I need you to be an instrument of saving people, helping people, feeding people, freeing people from shame and guilt and fear.  That’s what I need you for.  That’s what you’re made for.”  So in a way, it was asking Jesus to stop what he was doing, even though he just began, and surrender to a plan that was bigger than he was.  And the ego had to resist that, and that’s why he said no two times before he finally said, “Okay, Father.  If this is really what you want, then I’ll do it, because I surrender myself to you, because I know the only thing you would ever do would be for me, for my work, for my intention.”  And he said yes. So we need to basically understand that what God is intending to do is move us from an ego-centric part of our being that is able to create a world, and when we create it, we’re in it.  That’s what’s so scary about the brain.  If it’s the world is a frightening place, it is frightening to you.  If you see it as a challenging, wonderful catalyst to help you grow and change and develop, then that’s what it is, and one is stressful and frightening and hard on us.  The other is natural, and it brings about peace.  So we have to get those two things in sync.  So it means we have to develop our heart and tame a little bit the mind.  They’re both so essential.  

So let’s look at this first reading.  Because it’s from Isaiah, it’s a long time ago.  Isaiah is one of those books in the Bible that probably, if you could only read one part of the Old Testament, it would be the best, because it’s always predicting the things that Jesus is going to bring into the world.  And so there’s this image of God the Father that is radically different than, say, the story about Moses and the law and the tablets and God being so frustrated with people that he wanted to kill them all and Moses talks him out of it.  That’s one God.  Seems very different than this one, because Isaiah is saying, “No, this God is making a promise to you.”  But maybe he was implying to the people, “This promise is not yet fulfilled, and it won’t come until the Messiah comes.  But what I’m promising you is every single thing you need, everything you want to live your life as fully as it was intended to be and experience the peace and the joy and the enthusiasm that comes into someone’s life when they’re so – their life is effective.”  That’s what we want, and he said, “What I want you to do is believe that whatever it takes for you to do that, I’m giving it to you.  So don’t think that you have to go out and get the things that you need to be able to live this kind of surrendering to reality and to my will and to my ways.  No, I have covered all that you might need to do in order to evolve high enough to be able to see this message.”  It’s called redemption.  He did it for us.  So these images are so beautiful.  There’s, “Don’t work for anything.  This is all there.  It’s all a gift.  All you have to do is be thirsty.  All you have to do is listen and come to me and listen.”  It even says, “To come to me heedfully,” and I think what that means is the part of you that can heed, listen, can hear and understand this relationship that God wants to have with us and the presence of what it brings to us is only through the heart, because the heart can know without figuring it out. The mind has to be able to somehow be able to figure things out.  I think you know enough about the difference between the brain and the heart.  They’re made as the perfect partnership, but they operate very differently.  The mind, as I said, needs proof and needs something that it can say, “Okay, this makes sense to me, so I ‘ll believe it.”  And since the mystical world is what God is calling us into, you’ll never understand how it works.  It’s angels, saints, miracles.  How do you explain that to the mind?  You can’t, but the heart?  The heart just takes to it like, “Yes, of course.  I know this works.”  And true, the heart will have experience after experience that affirms what it believes, and so there’s a way it’s sort of giving you proof but not the same, the brain.  The brain is different.  I think the most interesting thing about the brain is how it resists someone else’s power over them or even with them.  God never wants to overpower you, but he wants to empower you.  Empowerment means new insights, changes, radical changes.  That’s hard for the ego, easy for the heart. 

So the first thing, you’ve got to make sure in this journey, this spirituality that I teach and the work that we’re doing together, you have to understand there’s nothing you do to earn it or to work for it.  Vatican 2 made a profound statement when it said, “Holiness is the right of everyone who believes in God,” holiness.  In the ‘40s, ‘50s, the word holy meant a kind of person that wore a long, black dress if they were a woman, and a black suit and a white, little collar – to us, the only ones that were holy were the hierarchy and the priests and the nuns, because they gave up their life, and they didn’t take – they were pure.  They were sort of separate from the world, and that made them holy.  And nothing would be further from the truth.  They were – could be holy, but it’s not the only way you do it.  In fact, it seems more exciting to me, though I don’t take anything away from those kinds of strict ways of life, but just to be engaged in everything with this wisdom inside of you is wonderful.  So once you have it, Paul goes on to say, “Look, nothing that’s difficult, nothing that’s hard is going to separate you from this, this gift.”  And it’s funny, because you look at Old Testament.  If God is taking care of their needs, they believe in him.  If he doesn’t make their life comfortable, he loses it.  So that’s what this is referring to.  Don’t base your faith in God in terms of your comfort level.

But then the gospel, which is so beautiful and so wonderful, so intriguing, what’s Jesus teaching when he’s there?  John the Baptist has just died.  He must have been extremely reflective, and he goes away to be quiet and be by himself, and of course the crowds come.  He needs solitude.  He needs to be away from the world, but the world cries for him.  “Come.  Feed us.  Feed us.  We’re hungry.”  And so he does, but he says something so powerful.  “I will feed you.  Don’t worry, but I won’t be with you always.  So what I’m doing is I am promising you that I will dwell in each of you, and my indwelling presence will be food to everyone around you.”  So the story is so powerful when you’re looking at it.  When Jesus said, “I can feed all these people with a miracle, 5,000 with another 3,000 women and children, a piece of cake.”  “Well, do it.”  “Well, no, I’m not going to do it.  You’re going to do it.”  What does that mean?  “You can do anything with me inside of you, and the most important thing you can be – food to your brothers and sisters.”  What kind of food?  Energy, life, stress lessness, goodness, modeling a way of life that makes so much sense that, when we’re in that way of life, we’re so comfortable and so at ease and so safe.  That’s the gift of being who we’re intended to be. 

Father, your goodness, your generosity, your mercy are so far beyond our mind to comprehend, but our heart understands.  And when we live in that atmosphere, in that environment, in that comfort of that sense of who you are, we find ourselves feeling so much less stress.  It is stressful times for us, this virus, how are economy is going.  So please bless us with a conviction that all of this somehow has purpose and meaning and is going to bring us to a place of abundant life.  And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

Original Airdate: July 30, 2023
1 Kings 3:5, 7-12 | Romans 8:28-30 | Matthew 13:44-52

Oh God, protector of those who hope in you, without whom nothing has firm foundation, nothing is holy, bestow in abundance your mercy upon us and grant that, with you as our rule and guide, we may use the good things that pass in such a way as to hold fast even now to those that ever endure.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

I want to begin my homily by going back to the very beginning, Adam and Eve.  That original mistake they made, the original sin, is very interesting.  It needs to be understood clearly, and what I believe they were doing was something that’s so natural to human beings in a lower level of consciousness.  They wanted to be their own gods.  That’s exactly what they said.  They listened to a lie that said, “You can be just like God.  You can be him.  You don’t need him.  You’ll be like him, autonomous.”  And that’s a wonderful way of imagining one of the core spiritual struggles we have in this world.  Are we in charge of our whole life?  Are we the ones responsible for everything we do?  It’s so easy, if you just listen to the Old Testament, to realize that God can give you pretty clear notions of what you should and should not do.  The church is very good at telling us what to do and what not to do, and that’s helpful.  But in a sense, it leaves out the most exciting, the most wonderful, the most beautiful, the most valuable thing that we have in our relationship with God, and that is his indwelling presence.  He wants to be a part of us.    

So let’s look at this gospel, because when Adam and Eve were sent away from the garden, they entered the earth, and there was a statement that God made to Adam.  He said, “You’re going to be ⎯ work’s going to be hard.”  And he, of course, used agrarian images.  He’d be plowing the fields, and there would be thistles and all kinds of struggle and difficulty in raising plants, and then you’d just have the food, and you would eat it.  And it’s not a bad image of just the way we can sometimes get into a way of believing or a way of thinking life is just a lot of work, a lot of drudgery.  We’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that, and it’s difficult.  And then we get a certain benefit from all the work we do.  It feeds a part of us.  It certainly takes care of our existence, but as far as our longings and our soul and our heart, it’s not very fulfilling just to be able to finish the task, though it’s enjoyable to do a good job.  So what is it that this gospel then is talking about, when Jesus, knowing our heart so perfectly ⎯ he said, “What’s you’ve got to understand is that, in this world that I’ve given you, there is something hidden.  It’s actually ⎯ you can find it in the very life you’re living, in the work you’re doing.”  And every now and then, you might find something that you hit in your work, and usually it’s sometimes a dark time.  And all of a sudden in that time, you discover something that you never saw before, a treasure, something wonderful, some insight that you have that life is good, life is full, life could be wonderful.  It’s so valuable, because it gives you that ability to not get bound into a kind of dark drudgery of life.  I hear people saying, “I don't know if I want to have children today, because the world is so dark and so conflicted, and we’re going to go through a horrible experience with the planet, and I don’t want to bring a child into this world.”  Imagine saying that, and I know people say it.  I’m not judging them for saying it.  It’s an easy thing to feel, but where’s the hope in that kind of statement?  And finding this treasure that Jesus talked about in the parable is finding something that changes everything, so much so that everything you have you let go of.  All the things you were focused on you let go to a sort of soft focus, and you’re on this thing, this treasure.  And that treasure is hard to describe, but I’m going to try.  There’s also an image in this parable of a pearl.  It’s beautiful.  There’s something about the beauty of life.  What I think Jesus is talking about is there’s a way of seeing the world where there is so much abundance and so much life and so much enjoyment of the beauty that’s all around us.  That’s what I would call grace, grace coming into us.  

Listen to Paul when he’s talking about our relationship with God.  Go back to the way it was with Adam and Eve.  They just thought they could be what God is and went on to do their work, but here Paul is describing what he’s learned from his intimate relationship with God through Jesus speaking to him.  And he’s saying, “Look, here’s what you have to understand.  You were known before you came into this world.”  “I knew you,” God said.  “I know you.  I made you a certain way.  I know exactly everything about you, and I’m going to do something.  I am going to call you into life, all you into birth, and then what I do, when I call you into birth, I’m going to do something for you.  I’m going to justify you.  I’m going to take away everything that separates from you, in the sense that sin does create a kind of separation.  I’m going to make sure that never happens.  No sin of yours is ever going to separate you from me.  So I’m going to call you into this world, justify you by forgiveness, and then I want you to be my glory ⎯ my glory.  I’ll glorify you.”  What is glory?  Uranius said it so beautifully.  Mankind fully alive, fully engaged in the work that God has given them, giving life to those around him, being fruitful.  That’s the glory of God.  That’s what he wants.  He wants you and me to live in this world as we’re intended to, to be a little bit ⎯ this goes so strong ⎯ about saving people, and I don’t mean saving people by talking them into religion, all that.  I’m just saying you’re there to have an impact on the people around you, and when you feel that that’s the essence of who you are and that you can feel what that feels like, because it’s so much a part of your human nature ⎯ it’s how you were made.  You’re predestined for caring for people, and that can be done in so many ways.  It doesn’t mean necessarily ⎯ somebody who’s doing something for humanity that has nothing to do with contact with a person is still doing something compassionate and empathetic, because they’re doing it for the good of human beings. 

So then you look at Solomon, and David was the greatest of all the kings.  He was amazing.  Most kings, and Solomon included, never really fulfilled their obligations to God.  They all turned away from him, so many of them, and that’s what happens when you get power and fame and all that.  Human beings aren’t made for that, but what he does do in the beginning, he goes back to his humanity, and he turns to God and says something so beautiful.  “Look, you’ve given me a job that I cannot do.  I don’t feel I’m capable.”  That’s what I would say when God says to me, “I want you to be compassionate and save the people.  Help me heal people around you.”  I’m too selfish.  I’d rather just do something else, but when God heard that prayer from a human being, his response is the response he gives to us when we discover this treasure, and this treasure is his gift of his presence inside of you and inside of me.  I don’t know what to say.  I have too many responsibilities, all those things.  I’m not capable of doing this work.  I’m not capable of giving this homily.  I’m not, but if I trust in you, if I believe in this treasure that I have, this energy, this life force in my heart resonating out of it to other people, I can be doing that, even unconsciously, without having to worry about whether I’m doing it or not, but it’s my intention.  Solomon’s intention was what God was so thrilled with.  Here is a human being, among all the human beings that want to be gods, who wants to do the work that I want to do.  

And what I think we’re asked to understand in the mystery of the incarnation is that, when Paul says that we are made in the image of Jesus, that’s what he’s talking about.  We think the image of Jesus is to be crucified.  Well, there’s that work there, but we think it’s about being perfect.  Well, we’ll be better.  No, but the real thing that Jesus is is a manifestation of who we are and what our destiny is: human beings dwelling with this divine presence in an organ that can think, that can feel, that can talk to the brain and get it to do things.  It can ⎯ this heart can resonate out of its very center, three feet of an electromagnetic field that can affect the heart and the feelings of another person.  All of this science is showing us, and yet it’s underscoring so beautifully for me the big issue of what I think is in this homily.  You have a destiny, and your weaknesses are not a block.  Your agreement with this plan, your wanting to be who God made you to be, along with working, along with doing it, but you do this, and it gives joy.  And there’s something about that joy that then opens you, I think, to the beauty of this whole thing.  This world is beautiful in all of its mess and all of its conflict.  There is beauty here, and life is full.  A man fully alive, “A human being fully alive is the glory of God,” said St. Uranius.  So think about it.  Think about your destiny.  Think about the call.  Think about being forgiven and simply being called to pay attention.  Become conscious of your brother and sister’s needs and just join your intention with God so that you can do something wonderful, something lifegiving to the people around you.  Amen.

Father, open our eyes.  Open our hearts, our minds, our will to your ways, to what you’ve promised, to what you have invited us into and want to work with us.  Bless us with hope, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

Original Airdate: July 19, 2020
Wisdom 12:13, 16-19 | Romans 8:26-27 | Matthew 13:24-43 or 13:24-30

Show favor, oh Lord, to your servants and mercifully increase the gifts of your grace that, made fervent in hope, faith and charity, they may be ever watchful in keeping commands.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This parable is fascinating to me, because I worked with it for a long time without reading the final part of this set of readings, which is optional to read or not, which is interesting, why the church would make it optional.  But the way it’s interpreted for the people who listened to it at the time was that there were people who are good, and there are people who are bad.  God makes the good people, and the evil one makes the bad people.    And the problem is that the bad people are — the reason they’re bad is because they are caught in something.  It’s called evil, and the best description I can give you for evil is found in the Book of Genesis.  I go back to it over and over again.  When sin appeared, it appeared in a certain form, and the form was a lie. Adam and Eve were there, and they were told not to do something.  And this serpent said, “No, no.  The very thing that you’re told not to do is the very thing that you need to do, because it’s going to make you as fully alive and as strong as you could ever be.”  It fed the ego and said, “Break this rule.  Break this law, because basically, if you do, you’re going to be empowered.”  And power always is attractive to the ego, more than almost anything else.  “Tell me what to do.  Tell me what’s right, what’s wrong.  Let me figure things out.  If I can figure things out, then I’m in charge.  I’m in control.”  So the issue of sin is that it is attractive, its very nature, to the mind, to the brain, and it makes sense.  If I can choose something that I’ve been told is wrong but it’s there to give me something that I think I need and want, I’m going to go with what I want.  And so they disobeyed, and out of that action we know then that somehow, at the heart of what sin is, it is people caught in lies. 

So in a way, the simplest way to interpret this, and the way Jesus interpreted it, which is so fascinating to me, is because of his audience.  His audience is not yet redeemed.  They didn’t have wisdom poured into them.  This seed that we talked about last Sunday is this seed of God’s presence coming into a human being, and when it comes in, it comes in like fire, like a tongue of fire and enters into the human being.  And where it goes is to the heart, and the heart is the place of knowing.  The mind is the place of understanding, figuring things out, but the heart is that part of you and me where belief comes from.  Trust in something you can’t understand.  You can’t figure it out, but you believe it, because you know somehow it’s right.  That knowing comes from somehow some power given to us from outside of us is able to discern what is true and what is not true, and it destroys — it purifies us from all that is a lie.  And so we see this gift of the Spirit not yet given to these people.

And so the parable makes clear something that is very basic, and the people that were there needed this kind of information.  And it was that, if you choose a lie, it’s never going to produce fruit, and it means you’re going to ultimately not be fully who God wants you to be, which is a form of kind of death.  So to be caught in a lie is to be seen, in a sense, in your own mind, I would say, that there’s something so terrible wrong with that that, if you stay in the lie, you’re going to die.  You’re going to be burned to death, even though burning has this mysterious image of purification.  So in a way, the people that heard this parable the first time would have said, “Okay, I understand.  God is saying that there are good people and bad people.”  It’s a binary world.  That’s so easy for the brain to understand.  I understand this, two kinds of people.  We hate the ones that are liars, and we want them to be destroyed.  And even though they’ll be destroyed at the end, it means certainly we, probably in helping God in our own mind, could say, “Well, we ought to destroy them too.”  So whenever we see somebody bad, we want to destroy them.  Isn’t that interesting?  It’s kind of the way in which sometimes we think about evil people.  We think because they did something, they are that, and nothing could be further from the truth.  Human nature was created by God.  He didn’t create bad people, like the — the parable seems to imply that there’s another person that created life, and there isn’t anybody else that created life.  The evil one didn’t create people.  He gets into people and destroys who they are and clouds their vision, and so in a way, he’s created them into a being that is locked into a lie.  So what is basically being taught in this parable then is evil is destructive, and if it is, then we have a right to destroy it also.  

But then you listen to the other two readings.  They go in complete contrary to this.  The greatest thing, the first reading says, the greatest thing about the God who is is that he shows his greatness through his leniency, his patience, his love for a person even though they are caught in a lie.  He’s there to bring them out of that lie into the truth.  That’s his intention.  So what it says in the second reading, the intention of the Spirit is to enter into you and to transform you into a person who understands reality, God’s plan, and everything that chips away at that is somehow some half truth, some illusion, some lie.  And so in a sense, if you listen to those first two readings and understand that this God is absolutely 1,000 percent on our side, even though we are sinners, even though we are far, far from him — I remember as a child growing up in Chicago and getting my first communion instructions, and I was told so clearly that God hated sinners and that he would destroy them.  And then I learned in the New Testament, God loves sinners.  Jesus said, “I love sinners.  I want to be with sinners.  My whole reason for coming is to change them.”  

So how do you deal with this parable when you understand that it implies that, if you are evil from the beginning, you’re — it’s hopeless.  No one’s coming to your rescue in that image, and the only thing I can think of is that what Jesus was doing was using a parable that can be interpreted many different ways.  And the first way was interpreted for the audience — for the audience.  When you mess around with those images of lies and violence and destruction and harm to other people, it’s going to destroy you.  Okay, that is very clear and strong, but it implies that that’s fine with God.  “Doesn’t bother me to take these people that are evil and burn them, destroy them.  I didn’t create them.”  Well, nothing could be further from the truth.  So could it be that this parable was used — and it’s a parable, meaning it’s a puzzle, and you have to work with it.  The best they could do with the audience at the time was to say, “Okay, I understand that I’ve got to turn away from evil, because it’ll destroy me.”  But the truth, who God is and who he really is is that he’s really — the way I would interpret it now, with the understanding that we have and the capacity we have, because we have the Holy Spirit in us, this flame of insight and awareness and this purifying force that’s inside of us clearing our mind of the logic of the brain and moving us into hope and trust that’s in the heart, we can deal with this in its fullness, I believe, meaning that God doesn’t create bad people.  The world is filled with people who have been created by God who have a seed inside of them that is about growth and beauty and development and evolving from selfishness to selflessness.  It’s in everybody.  So if it’s in everybody, that means it has the potential of being awakened, and so in this story — let’s take it this way.  Let’s take it not to mean the world, good people, bad people, but there’s a clue that says the kingdom of God he’s talking about is inside of us also.  It’s inside of us.  So if it’s inside of us, it means it has something to do with the world that we are interiorly existing with, and it’s got good and bad in it.  The part of me that is healthy and strong is the part of me that’s been transformed by the Spirit, and I see the truth.  There’s still a part of me that’s caught in lies.  Those lies that were told to me when I was a child, they’re so hard to get over, and so much of what we can see in people who are evil, so we call them evil, that do evil things, that are caught in a lie, have been damaged by the people around them.  They’re victims.  

So let’s imagine that this parable is about the inner life of you and me, and in that inner life we have goodness, and we have lies.  And so the plan of God is that we move along as we grow, as we change, as we become who God is calling us to do the process of the Spirit entering into you and to me with its enlightenment and its power to radically change us from lies to truth is going to be successful.  In other words, at the end, everything in us that’s a lie will be ripped away from us and burned, and we’ll have this insight, this moment of truth.  That is an image I have of death.  It’s when all of a sudden you’re not there completely, but you’re going to go through this process where all of a sudden this light comes on, and you see everything. I’ve always thought, “What’s the sound people would make when they die?”  It would be something like, “Oh, oh my God.  Now I see.  Now I understand.”  What a different way to interpret the parable.  So is one right and one wrong?  No, they’re both right in a sense.  What’s different is the audience, the evolution of the audience.  And everything that Jesus said is for the world forever, but the people who heard it the first time did not have the capacity to understand it, take it in.  That’s why he said a parable is made for those who can hear, and if you can’t really hear the truth of who God is, you’re going to misinterpret a parable.  And many of us do.  The challenge is to believe first and foremost in who God reveals himself to be, a lover, one who forgives, one who’s lenient, one who desires more than anything else to save, who will not destroy.  The only people who can be destroyed in this world are the people that choose to be separated from God, and destruction is separation from God.  So he gives us the freedom to go against him, but he will always, he says, win.  He will always win us, save us, enlighten us, awaken us.  That’s the hope.  And your brain might say, “Well, how do you know that?”  Well, the brain can’t figure it out, but does the heart know it?  Yes.  I know that must be the plan, because it makes so much sense to me, and it gives me so much peace.

Father, you are mysterious, and the beauty of your love for us is that you’ve always met us where we are. You’ve always dealt with us exactly in a way that would reach us.  You presented yourself at times in the Old Testament as someone harsh and demanding and willing to destroy those who don’t follow you, and at the same time, you revealed yourself in the New Testament as the most loving, forgiving, patient, kind, desiring nothing but our transformation.  Give us wisdom to discern the truth.  It’s fundamentally in all the stories, and most especially give us the hope that is our inheritance so that our heart will always be filled with joy and peace.  And we ask this through Jesus’ name.

Original Airdate: July 16, 2023
Isaiah 55:10-11 | Romans 8:18-23 | Matthew 13:1-23

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

We’re listening to Jesus in this set of readings.  It’s coming to the end of his ministry, and he wants so much for the disciples to understand who he is and why he is in their life.  And he’s telling us some very, very important things.  He’s saying something about their way of living that is going to be revealed, through their life, to other people so they can live as the apostles have learned to live, and they live with the presence of God.  It’s hard to believe that Jesus was God, but that’s who he manifested so clearly.  He was a human being so filled with divinity that he was divine.  At the same time, he was human.  That’s a mystery.  We can’t understand it, but all you have to believe in is that he is the representative of who we are intended to be, not divine as he was fully but participating in divinity on a regular, daily basis.  He is in us, with us, doing something for us.  If I could do anything to change people’s minds about God, I would say, “Stop trying to earn anything from him or please him by doing things that you think he wants you to do.  Rather allow him to be who he wants to be in your life, in my life.  He wants to be a source, a way, a plan for how we are living our life.”

So let’s look at this set of readings by starting off with the idea of, in Isaiah, Jesus describing who he is, but he uses another word rather than ⎯ well, it’s not ⎯ it’s God revealing who he will be, and he’s saying that, “What I am is I am like rain, and rain comes down, and it does something to the soil.”  Now, these were agrarian people who were listening to this.  They knew exactly what he meant, and without water, there is no ability for a seed to become a plant, to become a wheat that becomes the bread.  So what he’s really saying is, “I am something in your life that, without me, there will be no full life, and the way I want you to understand this,” he's saying, “Is that I am giving you an explanation, a way of living, a way of seeing that is key to your being in this world in the way in which you’re intended to be and which will bring you joy and life.  Pay attention to what I am offering you, like rain, over and over again so that this thing called your humanity, the soil of the earth,” which is a perfect image of humanity, “will grow rich and produce something wonderful.”  So Isaiah is prophesying something so clear, so powerful that sets the tone for the Old Testament, but the thing that’s interesting about the Old Testament is that it’s never able to achieve this goal of God being able to save his people. I’m not saying that God couldn’t do it, but the history basically is that the human beings that he worked with were not very docile or open or receptive.  And over and over again, they turned against him, and then when you look at the whole story, the whole Old Testament, when you get down to the time that Jesus entered into the world, he came at a time when it seemed clear that everything that had come before him was not received or not able to produce what it promised.  And there was the temple, which was the presence of God in their life, and it had become not a source of life for the people but a burden.  And those who were there became thieves, taking away the life that they were destined to have.  It’s an incredible indictment, not just on the religion at the time, but it’s a reminder that the Old Testament is not the full story.  

The full story is Jesus, and so Jesus comes into the world to make a difference, to fulfill the saying, in a way, of Isaiah.  Something is coming like rain, like moisture to dry, broken, hard earth, and that coming is God in the presence of a man called Jesus.  We call it the Holy Spirit, the presence of God in someone, and when you look at the way in which Jesus is talking to his disciples or to the crowd, of course, but then also to the disciples, he speaks in parables, which are really interesting, because the parable is a way in which, it seems to me, that God is saying, “What I’m teaching you is not so literal.  It’s filled with mystery.  It’s filled with a deeper understanding of what’s going on.  Don’t look at just the actions, but look at what they mean, what’s really being said by these actions of God in Jesus in the world.”  And so he describes to his disciples that parables are key.  It’s not necessarily that he’s only going to talk in riddles, but it’s everything that’s happening to you is filled with meaning.  And your work, and it’s kind of an exciting work ⎯ I have great enthusiasm for paying attention to what I see and paying attention to what I hear, what I see other people doing, what I see myself doing and what I hear people saying when I say, “Pay attention to that and ponder it like you would any mystery.”  It’s more than it seems.  People are more transparent than they ever, ever realize, and there’s a way in which God gives you the wisdom and the understanding and the power to discern.  That’s what he wants you to do.  Discern through reflection of what is really happening.  

We live in the final times.  The earth before was never fertile enough for God to truly enter.  In a way I’m saying, in a sense, that the Old Testament never was enough, but the New Testament is the essential ingredient to add to the desire that God had, that people will always be what he wants them to be, that they will follow his commandments.  He wants that, but he doesn’t want it just out of a sense of obligation.  He wants it out of a sense of knowing ⎯ knowing what they’re doing.  “Don’t do it because I told you to.  Do it, because you understand why it’s so important that you do this.”  So what he’s saying to his disciples in this parable about a sower who sows seeds, he’s talking about God the Father and his work, and what he’s saying is, “We’re offering, God is offering, through me,” in particular he is doing it through Jesus.  “I’m giving you something that will enable something incredible to happen, and that is what he calls a fruitful life, a full life, a life without excessive shame and fear and anger.”  That’s our promise.  That’s what’s been made fertile in us, the potential of that kind of life, and it was never there before Jesus.  It was never there before redemption.  We’re redeemed earth, redeemed soil.  We’re redeemed in the sense that our hearts have a capacity to understand, not our minds, our hearts.  

There’s something about seeing and hearing without judgment or condemnation, which is much of the theme of the Old Testament, but with mercy and understanding and compassion that radically changes your ability to see and to hear what’s really going on.  It’s true when you listen to others.  It’s true when you listen to yourself.  It is true when you see yourself doing things or see someone else doing things.  If you’re looking at it with judgment or condemnation, you will go nowhere, but pay attention.  Listen, and you will find something beautiful in the fact that there’s a person, that is valuable to God, working out their salvation in ways in which you may be called upon to be an instrument of bringing them something that is like rain, like water, like nourishment so that the thing that they long for to grow and deepen inside of themselves will take root and grow.  What an amazing gift God gives us, to be rain, to be truth, to be his presence, to be like him in the world.  Just think of what it would be like if you treat everyone, self-included, not with judgment and condemnation, criticism, comparison, but simply with this thing that God is revealed in Jesus to be, compassion, understanding.  It’s wonderful.  It’s filled with wonder, and it’s your inheritance and mine, and it’s up to us to open our eyes and to listen and to be able to see it for what it is and then to live it.  Amen.

Father, your gift of your presence is beyond our imagining.  Help us to see as you see, to hear what you hear, to know the truth that we are engaged in is going to bring the fullness of life to ourselves as we offer it to one another.  Bless us with this wisdom, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

Original Airdate: July 9, 2023
Zechariah 9:9-10 | Romans 8:9, 11-13 | Matthew 11:25-30

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

The beauty of this particular set of readings is found in its promise.  Life is not supposed to be a burden.  It is not supposed to be something that robs us of a sense of wellbeing.  It’s not supposed to be something filled with shame and fear, yet we often find ourselves in that kind of world.  And this is such a clear statement in all three readings, that God has done something unique and wonderful, and he didn’t do it in the beginning.  The Old Testament is a very important book to examine carefully, and first and foremost, you see so many references in the Old Testament to the coming of Jesus and this new life and this new earth, this new world that’s going to be created, but it wasn’t created in the Old Testament.  The Old Testament is filled with fear and shame and anger, and we see God angry at his people, willing to destroy them.  We see people constantly destroying each other, and we look at this way that people were living, and their performance was terrible.  So God came along and gave them the Ten Commandments, which is a way of telling you how to perform, how to do things, and you’re supposed to not do negative things to each other.  And you’re supposed to trust in God, but the Old Testament didn’t give people what they needed in order to not only live according to the Ten Commandments but to go beyond them.  And that’s what the New Testament is all about.  That’s what the revelation of Jesus is all about, a new heaven, a new earth, a new way.  And yet we go back and listen to the Old Testament, and we think that this is God speaking to you and to me.  And we can get caught up in a kind of darkness and an importance of how we’re performing and worrying about whether we’re earning salvation, and all of that gets caught up in our imaginations and in our minds mostly.  And this set of readings just blows that all apart and is saying that the flesh, living in the flesh is living in a world where you are told what to do, and you struggle to do it, and if you do it, you earn something wonderful, and if you do not do it, you are going to be deeply and powerfully punished.  It’s justice.  It’s performance.  It’s called the flesh.   

I remember as a young Catholic growing up, when you first receive first communion and all those wonderful things and you learn, you’re not supposed to disobey.  That was the big sin.  Don’t disobey your parents.  Don’t disobey your teachers or what the priest said to you.  It was also the whole image of not only that but you were supposed to, as you get older, then your body’s awakening, and you’re told that anything you do sexually of any kind is going to be a sin, and you lose God’s favor the minute you commit a sexual act.  And you live with that, and you feel, “Well, I know what the flesh is.  The flesh is my body, this body that longs for intimacy or longs for release or whatever.”  And nothing could be further from the truth.  The flesh is not our human nature in itself.  It is human nature without something, without spirit, without divinity.  If we could just make ourselves conscious and clear about this one single thing: the Old Testament is about performance, deeds, reward, punishment, and it’s necessary at the beginning of someone’s life.  Even now today it works, but then it evolves into something so much more amazing and mystical and wonderful, and it’s called God’s Spirit, God’s presence inside of you, living there, resonating life out to those around you and creating in you an amazing understanding of the way life works.  

Life is not supposed to be necessarily easy in the sense of not difficult and no problems, no pain, no suffering.  No, when Jesus is talking about a life without struggle and without ⎯ it’s easy, it’s almost effortless, well, there is a way to live in the world accepting its imperfection and the imperfection of individuals where it doesn’t create inside of you rage and anger and resentment.  There’s a way to deal with your own faults, your own fear, your own shame and that of others in a way that is easy, and it’s not that it goes away but that you understand this is part of what life is.  And resentment against someone else, shame for whatever you’ve done, anger that it’s too hard or whatever, all those things are the things that can be dealt with in a different way, and they become not a burden but a kind of tool that teaches and opens your eyes to a way of life that you do not want to participate in.  So what Jesus is trying to say to us so clearly in his ministry is that, “When you’re living in the flesh, trying to earn my Father’s affection, facing always your own shame and your own fear, you will never enter the kingdom of God.  You will be in a place of stress and worry and anxiety.”  

Look at the Old Testament and look at what happened at the end of almost 2,000 years of trying to live under this notion of justice.  And when Jesus came along and revealed who he really is and that his whole notion of you is nothing other than something he sees as beautiful ⎯  he loves what he created.  He is the Father.  He is the Son.  He is all things, and he sees everything as beautiful and everything as having meaning and purpose and working together.  And he wants to reveal that to the world, and what did the world that was living then, the religion at the time ⎯ it destroyed him.  And that’s always going to be the shadow of religion.  Religion thrives in power over people, telling them how to act, reminding them that they need to be better.  That’s not the message of Jesus.  The message of Jesus is, “You are human.  You have faults.  You have frailties.  You have fears, and you have shame, and I’ve come to release you from that.  I’ve forgiven everything you have ever done and will ever do, not because you deserve it but because I choose to.  And I know, if you know you’re loved, and if you know you’re held in that kind of esteem in God the Father, God the Son, that’s the same, that when you see God looking at you and loving what you are, you will change.  And then the scripture says this Spirit will be given to anyone that allows it to happen, anyone to whom Jesus wishes to give it.  Do you think Jesus doesn’t wish to give someone love?  Does he not wish to forgive someone who’s such a horrible sinner?  No, he is forgiveness.  He is love.  He is everything that we long for, and yet he stays at a distance as we focus on our performance and forget about what presence really means.  It means allowing God to enter into you, see all that you are, all that you’ve done, look into your eyes and tell you how wonderful you are created to be, all your potential.  And he said, “Would you let me be with you?  Would you let me be in you?  And if you allow me in you, I will minister to others.  That’s what I want you to do.  I’m not focused so much on your performance.  I’m focused on what you are potentially to me, my instrument, my hands, my eyes, my feet in the world.  I want you to allow me to work through you, even in ways you’ll never know and in ways you’ll see and be in awe of how God has used you to accomplish something for someone else.”  

St. Catherine of Siena has a wonderful line.  She said to God once, when she was ⎯ or ⎯ God and Jesus, they’re the same, but I think she had a mystical experience of Jesus saying, “What can I do?  How can I show you how much I love you?”  And Jesus said, “I don’t need your love, but you want to please me?  If that is something you want to do, love everybody around you.  That’s what I want.  That’s what I came into the world to engage in, in a life in you, my Spirit dwelling in you so that you can be what I was, and when you see the miracles I performed, they’re all about ⎯ they’re all almost medicinal, eyes that can see, ears that can hear, tongue that can speak, hands that can work, feet that can get you to where you need to be.  All of that you are able to do for your brothers and sisters if you will simply open your heart to the Spirit of God dwelling in you.”  It first has to remove within you any fear and any shame and any anger about the world that God has created.  It’s exactly as it’s supposed to be.  It’s exactly the place that God has longed to create at this point in our history, and our consciousness grows and grows and grows and has since Adam and Eve, and we’re getting closer and closer to awareness of who we really are as a species filled with divinity.  We are fully human.  At the same time, we are filled with divinity, and when we focus on that and we know that that’s there, and it’s not only there for others but also for us, we’ll know the joy and the peace and the love that is our inheritance.  It's such a basic message but so easy to miss, so easy to ignore.  Amen.

Father, your love is beyond our imagining, your presence so intimate, so close to us.  Bless us with all abandonment to ways in which we’ve imagined the world to be and openness to the way it truly is, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

Original Airdate: June 28, 2020
2 Kings 4:8-11, 14-16A | Romans 6:3-4, 8-11 | Matthew 10:37-42

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

In ordinary time, we’re going to relive the experience of one of the evangelists, one of the writers of the gospel, their experience of this moment that they had with God in history, these three years and then beginning their work as moving from disciples to apostles.   A disciple is a learner, someone who’s listening and learning and spending time with someone.  An apostle is the one who’s sent forth to do it, and so you’ll notice in this particular gospel of Matthew, it’s the first chapter that we’re — this tenth chapter, rather, is when Jesus is calling his disciples to do their work, and he calls them apostles.  “I’m sending you forth.”   So what I’m asking you to imagine with me is here is Jesus sending his disciples into the world to do their work.  He is no longer with them physically, will not be with them physically when they begin.  He is, in this particular passage, with them, but what he wants them to understand is the essence of what it is they’re going to be doing.  And if you go back to that earlier part in the gospel, you see what God is asking the disciples to do seems like an impossible thing.  “Gentlemen, I want you to go into the world, and I want you to heal the sick, raise the dead and bring life to people and somehow heal leprosy.”  Now, leprosy is a beautiful, not a beautiful, but an effective way of describing sin, leprosy, something that distorts us.  It deforms us.  So when Jesus is giving that responsibility to the disciples, I don't know what it would be like, but if you would hear somebody say that to you — but in a way, Jesus does say it to all.  “I want you to go into the world, and I want you to heal people and lift them out of darkness, lift them out of a place that we might call death.”  So the main thrust, it seems, the ministry that Jesus has given to his disciples and he’s giving to us, sending us out into the world, has everything to do with this set of readings.  So let me see if I can describe it for you, give you a sense of what it is you’re empowered to do.

The first story is about a prophet who comes to a woman’s house.  He comes often.  This woman was obviously very impressed with this prophet Elisha, not Elijah.  It’s close.  I tend to mispronounce Elisha a little more just to separate him from Elijah, but anyway, she loves this man’s truth.  She loves spending time with him, and so she says to her husband, “Let’s create a space for him in our house.”  Well, just think of the image that is.  Here’s a woman touched by the truth.  She wants to create a space in her home, in her very soul, in her essence for this truth to take root, and so she creates a room for him.  And when that room is there, she has been longing for something in her life, and it’s to create new life.  And so she is like the symbol of all of us, longing to make a difference, longing to create life in the world, and so she has no son.  So he said, “I will give you a son.”  So here’s the prophet, who represents the truth, coming into a person who opens their heart to him, and when he dwells with them, he has a reward for their hospitality.  You will welcome a prophet.  You receive a prophet’s reward, and the reward is truth.  And the truth is something in her that produces life.  So the symbol is she has a son.  

Now, if you follow this passage from Kings, it’s interesting, because one of the next things that happens is that, as he returns again and again, he comes back, and the son is born.  But then she sends word to him one day, and she said, “My son is dead.  He’s died.  Come and heal him.  Bring him back to life,” another aspect of what the truth is able to do.  And so he sends his servant.  “This is my rod, my authority.  I’ll send it through somebody else.”  That didn’t work.  So he goes, and he does this miraculous — bringing this man back to life, and what he does is he lies on top of him, his lips to his lips, his eyes to his eyes, his hands to his hands, his feet to his feet.  It’s a powerful image of someone containing some energy, some life force, and he’s giving it to another person.  He just doesn’t put his hand toward him, or he just doesn’t say the words, “Be healed,” really fascinating image.  So let’s take this image of this figure, a prophet, as the image of the truth — the truth.  What does it do?  Opens eyes to see what is real, what is true.  Produces life, because it overcomes darkness, and what is darkness?  Sin — sin.  

So the second reading then focuses on the opposite of this great gift of light and truth, and that is sin and darkness.  And it’s interesting.  St. Paul is talking about this.  What he’s saying is that Christ went through something that we have to go through, and it’s a death.  And the death we have is the death that is — we all it change, being reborn, being remade.  What is it that this change involves?  Well, it’s a moving away from darkness.  So what is darkness?  Well, darkness is the absence of truth.  What is the absence of truth?  A lie.  How did sin enter into the world?  It was a lie.  A serpent is there, and he’s seducing Adam and Eve into believing something that’s not true.  “If you rely upon yourself and you rely upon your own decision-making qualities, if you want to know what’s right and what’s wrong and be the center of your life, well, eat of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”  It’s so interesting in that story, the minute you buy into a lie, something in you feels odd, feels strange.  You feel estranged from some source somewhere, and that’s exactly the effect of sin entering into the human race, was a sense of distance from God.  And the distance was, “I’m not worthy.  I’m not good enough.”  The minute you say, in your relationship with God, “I am going to earn his affection.  I’m going to earn his reward of eternal life.  I’m going to work for it, and I’m going to get it.  It’s going to be my task, and I can feel really good about having accomplished it,” that is the greatest of lies.  It’s not something we are called to do by a command from God to become holy and to do all these good things.  That’s probably the most insidious lie that’s out there, and it’s more about our human nature than it is about religion.  But religion buys into it.  

So what is it?  What is it that God wants us to understand about this truth that you and I are called to engage ourselves with?  And when we see it for what it is, it reveals something that has been hidden, and then we have this new life.  So how do we imagine that happening?  Well, it took redemption for it to happen.  All through the Old Testament people have been listening to prophets trying to tell the truth, and they try to live it, and they never do succeed.  And they’re punished, and then they straighten up.  And then they forget about the punishment, and they fall back into sin.  So the Old Testament is filled with people who are seemingly unable to deal with this thing called sin, darkness, another word, again, illusion, half-truths, lies.  So what was needed?  A Savior, a Messiah, someone who comes that makes a big difference.  What is the difference?  Well, without going into exactly how redemption takes place, I want to talk about how it impacts us and how and how we’re to participate in it.  And it’s the most important thing to understand.  By the second paragraph of this gospel, it’s so beautiful.  When Jesus sends his disciples into the world to do work that seems way beyond human nature’s possibility, that’s the first piece of truth I want you to ponder.  When God is asking you to love, to forgive, to give life to people around you, to be a source of wisdom for them, he is not asking you to produce that wisdom or to produce that capacity to be a healer.  It’s not something you do.  It’s something you receive.  So listen to Jesus when he’s just given his disciples this incredible challenge to go out into the world and to heal it of darkness and illusion and lies.  He said, “If you receive me, whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.”  So Jesus is saying, “You watched me make Eucharist.  You watched me make my body and blood into something that I’m asking you to take in and dwell inside of you.”  It’s so clear that the thing that was not possible in the Old Testament that is possible in the New Testament is a life force that’s been given to you and to me, and that life force is the truth, life, enlightenment.  And when it comes into us, if we receive it, then we become a prophet, and we receive a prophet’s reward.  What’s a prophet’s reward?  Well, when you give life to someone, when you are a source of life for someone, when you feel the dignity and the value of being a person participating in this life force, you’re going to feel good.  You’re going to feel full.   You’re going to feel like there’s meaning and purpose, and the reward of the truth is light, enlightenment and life.  

Whenever religion or anyone tells you that you’re no good and that you have to work harder and that you have to clean your act up and you have to do everything you can to make sure that you are pleasing to God, they’ve missed the point completely, because the main issue is how do you humbly receive the wisdom, the tree of life, light, truth?  How do you receive it, and then when you receive it, how do you allow it to flow through you?  And when it flows through you, you’re going to have everything you’ve ever wanted — everything.  So what I’m trying to say is, when Jesus is saying to his disciples, “If you love Mother or Father more than me, if you love son or daughter more than me, you’re not worthy of me.  Unless you take up your cross, you can’t be worthy of me.  Whoever finds life will lose it.  Whoever loses life —”  This whole — the word in there that I want you to pay attention to is worthiness.  It sounds like merit, doesn’t it?  “If you take up your cross, if you go through some really difficult, horrible experience of pain and suffering and humiliation, then I might consider taking care of you.”  No.  Taking up your cross is going through a radical transformation.  It feels like death.  We’re not asked to go through a crucifixion like Jesus went through and be humiliated by everyone.  That’s not the goal of Christianity.  The goal of Christianity is to go through an experience that is so transforming that at the other end of it you are somebody really different.  You are resurrected.  You have new life.  So the image is that we are engaged in work that is revealing the truth to us.  Our eyes are opened, and we change.  But the process of being changed by the truth is not just simply like being told — you know something you think you know, and you’re told, “No, that’s not it, and it’s something else.”  You go, “Oh, okay.  Now I’ve got it.”  No.  No, every time you’re living in a lie, you have a pattern of behavior in your life, a way of living, a way of seeing, a way of judging people, a way — whatever.  And when the truth comes in and you find out, “Wait a minute.  I’m not here to become the best believer.  I’m not here to become better than somebody else.  I’m not here to impress people with what I can do and who I am.  I’m here as a servant, and that kind of change, if your pattern of life has been to produce something beautiful for someone else in your life and to win affection and attention, that’s a radical shift.  If it doesn’t command death, I don't know what I can call it.  You need to die to all those patterns.  It’s really difficult, but it doesn’t demand that you do it.  It demands that you allow it to happen.  You allow God’s truth and light to come into your life, and it has its own strength and power.  It will change you.  It will change you.

So the image of being worthy is more like God is saying, “If you go through this, you’ll be worthy of me,” meaning, “You’ll be of worth to me.  You’ll be valuable to me.”  You’re already valuable in the term of God sees you, sees me, loves us as we are, unconditionally.  We can’t imagine what it’s like to be loved that way, but that’s what God wants us to feel when he says, “Receive me.  Receive my love.”  We have this sense of our dignity, our value.  When someone loves us, it’s an amazing experience, and in turn, we’re willing then to become whatever that transforming love creates.  And what it will create is someone who is there to be an instrument of bringing this same mysterious, new life to another person, and so if you can feel it with me in saying Jesus comes into our life and says, “I want to dwell inside of you.  If I’m inside of you, my Father is inside of you.  If we’re inside of you, then we are the source of the wisdom and the ability and the capacity you have to change the people around you.  And you are so — it is so important you do that, because then you are really valuable to me.”  It’s almost like God is saying, “I need you to take care of the people around you.  I want to take care of them, but I need you to receive me to be able to do that for them.”  Does that sound more exciting, more wonderful, more life-giving than being a person who turns out to be the best person in the room and has everybody’s admiration and everybody says, “You’re so great.  You’re so wonderful.  You’re beyond anybody I’ve ever seen”?  The ego loves that.  The heart can’t even fathom it.  What the heart wants is to be of value, and to know that you are a source of bringing light and life and healing and lifting someone out of the darkness of depression and fear, you can do that if you receive.  Whoever receives is the key.  That’s the work.  The lie is perform.  The truth is receive, and what an amazing difference that makes.  So we are all apostles.  We are all called to be instruments of God’s grace to the world, and it’s not about work.  It’s about a gift and receiving it. 

Father, open our eyes to see you as you are, to know your intention, your plan, your desire to use us, fill us with all the gifts that those around us are in longing for and to give us the enthusiasm and the excitement about being a channel for you.  And let us feel the joy that comes from watching those around us that we love enter into a place of greater wholeness and light and peace.  And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.