Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

“So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Perfection.  The word is so infused with strong, positive idealism that Jesus’ call to be perfect seems rhetorical; no one can become perfect…..especially perfect the way God is perfect! The point is driven home in today’s gospel with the impossibility of the Jesus’ injunctions:

“You have heard that it was said,
An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.

When someone strikes you on your right cheek,
turn the other one as well.
If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic,
hand over your cloak as well.
Should anyone press you into service for one mile,
go for two miles.
Give to the one who asks of you,
and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow.

“You have heard that it was said,
You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I say to you, love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father,
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.

            Couple this with last week’s gospel where Jesus said it was enough to feel lust and anger in order to commit sin under the Law. Indeed, the point is clear: no one stands justified by the Law before God. How, then, could Jesus follow this up with an injunction to be perfect “as your heavenly Father is perfect”? Is this just another layer of impossibility heaped upon his earlier pronouncement?

            This gospel is situated in a section full of Jesus’ ethical teaching that extends from the Beatitudes in chapter five to capping off the Sermon on the Mount in chapter seven.  Interwoven with Jesus’ ethical exhortations, is the admonition to focus on seeking God, to seek the righteousness of the Kingdom first in your need and what is truly needed will be provided.  It is Jesus pleading with his disciples to focus away from the Law and on the Giver of the Law: God.

            The true Law is the law of love. Jesus proclaims that “in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”  A compelling corollary to Jesus’ reply to the Scribes as to what the greatest commandment of the Law: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" Fulfillment of the Law is only possible if it originates in the heart, not from a book. In the readings for today’s baptism, Ezekiel the prophet recounts the promise of God in relation to the Law:

“I am going to take you from among the nations and gather you together from all the foreign countries, and bring you home to your own land. I shall pour clean water over you and you will be

cleansed; I shall cleanse you of all your defilement and all your idols. I shall give

you a new heart, and put a new spirit in you; I shall remove the heart of stone from

your bodies and give you a heart of flesh instead. I shall put my spirit in you, and

make you keep my laws….”

The ethical demands of Christianity do not come from a book as a source of fulfillment; the Bible is essential for foundational training and inspiration, but it cannot simply be followed without the gift of discernment given as a gift at baptism. We must learn by practicing all of our lives to submit to the Law of Love, of the compassion God showed for his creation by entering into our suffering and resurrecting it to new life. We then, freely enter into the world of those who suffer around us, and enter our own suffering, with the sure hope of the resurrection.  Our fleshy hearts were remade from stone because we need to feel the world’s joy and the world’s suffering as part of our spiritual journey seeking God, together, as a people living in the Promised Land of the heart.

Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.
I have come not to abolish but to fulfill."  --Jesus

There is a popular refrain among some Christians: “God said it, I believe it, that settles it!” No doubt the fatigue of believing that uncertainty is opposed to maturing in the spiritual life can lead one to wish such simple slogans are true. Biblical fundamentalism, though, is borne from a lack of trust—the antithesis of life in the Spirit. Our relationship with God is primarily one of prayer and communal discernment, not textual fidelity; such errors are not unique to Christianity.  The Jewish people of Jesus’ time also struggled to live a righteous life through God’s revelation in the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament). Genesis is the story of origins. Most important, though,  isn’t the scientific details of origin, but of the origin of our relationship with God and one another, and the origin of our breaking communion with our Creator. It is also a story of the origin of our reunion with God through the faithfulness of Abraham, in whom God counted faith as righteousness. Exodus outlines the struggle of God’s people in exile and the fight to regain Abraham’s promise and again respond to a promise.  A text didn’t lead the Jews into the Promised Land, the presence of God did. Then God organizes them and gives Moses the Law to order the people’s worship and life. Leviticus reveals the detail of God’s Law, and tellingly, the book that follows, Numbers, is about God punishing the people’s failure to keep the Law; so begins the wandering. Deuteronomy is the all about reaching the Promised Land and learning to obey God. This begins the messiness of relationship with The Divine---exile, and return; promises made, broken and reworked again and again by a God hopelessly in love with humanity. The struggle of God’s people is mirrored by our struggle to be faithful to a Word, a living Word, not a text; but there is a catch.

            To say we live by faithfulness to a relationship with God, not with a text can also lead to a complete disdain for the Bible.  What is needed is a greater understanding of the role of the Bible in our lives as Christians. We need to avoid the trap of textual fundamentalism and the other extreme of living disconnected from tradition and the wisdom of those who came before us. The Bible, when used wisely and within a broader community of interpretation, helps us to discern our life in Christ from a life moving away from Christ. The Bible isn’t a book of answers as much as it is a book of questions, questions of how to live the radical demands of Christ’s gospel.  John Parsons, a great missionary, famously wrote that “In the end, it's not an act of interpretation that is called for but a life of commitment to the truth. Interpretation must reach an endpoint, a decision. We cannot indefinitely suspend our judgment without risking self-deception and the loss of the message of love...”

            In today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus confronts the stark reality that the Law, as text, isn’t enough to fulfill the Law; a change of heart is needed.  It is not enough to simply refrain from murder; one must treat anger with equal disdain. It is not enough to refrain from adultery, but cultivating lust by treating one as an object of desire should likewise be avoided. Making elaborate promises that lead to intrigue and misunderstandings is the error, but so is dithering to make commitments and honest communication.  When Jesus declared that “ I have come not to abolish but to fulfill [the Law] he indicated that fulfillment was only possible in a relationship of faith through him, not textual scholarship.  Scholarship only helps us understand the text; Christ penetrates the text to the heart of God.  We live in and through Christ, not in and through the Bible.

            What sustained the early Christians, who had no common scripture for three hundred years after Jesus, sustains us today—The Holy Spirit.  Living God’s word, in a sense, allowing each of our lives to write a gospel message to the world, is the natural extension of both an educated reading of Holy Scripture and the give and take of our life in the Spirit.

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

 

Your Mission: Blandness, Lowliness, and Darkness

Today’s gospel is kind of a pep-talk from Jesus to his disciples (as well as a cautionary tale for those who waste this potential).  He uses three metaphors to get his point across, comparing his disciples to salt, a city on a hill and a light. He doesn’t insist that they will become salt, city and a light, but that they are and must allow the world to see them so that the world “…may glorify the heavenly Father.” 

            One aspect these images all share in common is that by themselves they are useless. Have you ever had a teaspoon of salt, or stared into a source of light only to be blinded when turning away, or heard of a thriving city cut off from commerce from other cities?  All of these metaphors suggest use in the context of need. Salt is used to season bland food, light to provide a way in the darkness and the visibility of a great city on a hill to attract people to its location.

            The nature of the gift always suggests the mission.  Salt brings life and sustains the freshness of food that otherwise would be bland and soon rotten. Our mission is to the bland. The routine of daily life where often people simply “go through the motions” is a dead-end ritual that often lacks meaning.  “Working for the weekend” suggests the only proper end of work is recreation rather than the value of work itself. Being the “salt”, Christians can bring tastiness, the hope of meaning, in living lives that celebrate all aspects of life itself. Animated by the Spirit, we have the power to live such a daily life others find meaningless, create community and flavor to the bland fare of modern work. We don’t have to be celebrated to find meaning; we can live a life of gratitude and allow our care and mindfulness to shape our work into something sacramental.

            Our mission is to darkness. There are places where fear imprisons its residents, but where people who are light chart a pathway out of the darkness.  Father Gregory Boyle in Los Angeles is a good example of one who has brought out the many lights hidden in youth gang violence by allowing his single light to illuminate hope and promise in a part of the city where hope and promise are too often well out of sight.  Today’s saint, St. Jerome Emiliani, in the darkness of a military prison found the light of Christ while captive, learned to pray and eventually lighted the way for thousands of orphans, the sick and the poor in establishing the Clerks Regular of Somasca. Our Christian heritage is rich with such lights, and the darkness is a time-honored mission.

            Our mission is to the hidden, the outcast and forgotten by entering into obscurity fearlessly to allow people to find dignity, love, and purpose in a world that tells them they are worthless is also a great calling.  The Alcoholics Anonymous parable of a man in a well will serve us here.  There was a man trapped in a well with no hope of getting out.  One man passes overhead and hears the cry for help, looks at the depth of the well and says he will go for help as soon as he can find someone with a long enough ladder to reach the bottom. A religious guy writes a prayer and drops it down.  Finally, a third man approaches and jumps down into the well.  The man in the well asks incredulously “Why in the world did you do that.  Now we are both stuck!” The man who jumped down replies “Yes. But I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.” 

            Our own darkness, blandness and hidden wounds are, though Christ, light, meaning and purpose for the world, because God bestowed these gifts to us through the Holy Spirit, as the famous hymn declares “When we first believed.” Such amazing grace is only realized though when it is accompanied by the fearless response of our calling to the bland, lowly and dark places in our world.

Feast of the Presentation of the Lord

The Re-Presentation of Our Lord

     Today’s blessing of the candles is linked to the verse from the Song of Simeon which declares Jesus as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel.”  This canticle is also said/sung daily in the office of Compline, the final prayer before bed for monastics and those who pray the Liturgy of the Hours.  There is a second part, though, to Simeon’s declaration which follows after the canticle.  In it is the substance of his prophecy:

“Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign of contradiction---and you yourself a sword will pierce—so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

     What a shift in tone from a moment of exaltation and celebration proclaiming revelation to the Gentiles and joy to the Jewish people.  Talk about a mixed message!  But, indeed, the revelation of God in Jesus as a Christ is full of these “contradictions”.  Let’s look at a few:

1.       God, all-powerful, comes to His creation as a servant and willfully sacrifices Himself in the name of love.

2.      Jesus, the Messiah, who comes to deliver Israel, comes as a healer and shows his strength in acts of compassion rather than military action against the Romans.

3.      Though a Jew, Jesus’ message spreads primarily in the non-Jewish world, primarily through Jewish disciples.

4.      Paul, formerly known as Saul, was one of the great persecutors of the early Church, whose conversion to Christianity did more to spread the gospel than any other disciple.

     It is the contradiction embodied in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (1:18-25):

¹⁸ For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ¹⁹ For it is written:

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
    the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”^[c]

²⁰ Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹ For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. ²² Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, ²³ but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴ but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵ For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

      How, then, to we re-present Christ to the world, the same Christ Mary presented to the Temple in Jerusalem?  The message of Christ is a message of love, full of all the contradictions and irrational behavior, sorrows and joys that come in establishing and maintaining relationships.  We find human relationships messy; what makes us think our relationship with God will be any less so?  God, the lover of humanity, whose overtures are awkward and self-revealing speak of a vulnerability and sincerity embodied in the contradictions of Christ and the gospel.

     Our true mission isn’t to spread the knowledge of God, because God has formed each human in His likeness, and planted this knowledge deep in every human heart.  What awakens the Spirit in each human is the great, contradictory gospel of Christ, the unconditional love of God for humanity. Our lights today are a symbol of that love.  I ask you to take your candles home, blessed to remind us that the best way to show God to the world, to re-present Christ, is to not avoid the darkness of despair, of poverty, of injustice or those living in darkness, but to bring with you the light of the Spirit, Christ’s love, that illuminates the love of God in every heart.