Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Gustave Dore - The Pharisee and the Publican

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."  Oscar Wilde

Last week's posting has an epigraph from Meister Eckhart, one of the church's great mystics, who famously wrote that if you only had a single prayer to pray, "Thank you" would suffice.

This week, we continue with the general theme of prayer with the righteous Pharisee as an exemplar of how not to pray and the sinful "publican," or tax collector, the one whose prayer for mercy was answered.  As usual, the unexpected is central to this parable, but this is not one of Jesus' many Kingdom parables; it is, rather, a parable about relating directly to God.

      Jesus famously had told his disciples how to pray with the gift of the Our Father; however, he doesn't answer the question when asked by his disciples how to pray directly.  Instead, he tells them what to pray for.  Today's gospel moves into one's disposition in prayer, the how, that is directed at all of us because gift easily becomes possession (Daniel Harrington, S.J.).  

     The Pharisee's prayer was more horizontal than vertical; that is, his prayer was gratitude for not being connected with sinners, of being an island of righteousness.

O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity --
greedy, dishonest, adulterous -- or even like this tax collector.
I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.

His gratitude springs from "not being like the rest of humanity," it begins in separation, focusing on his side-view of a sinner.  And the tax collector was a sinner.  Let's not make him into some noble hero.  Tax collectors were famous sellouts in Jesus' time.  They were Jews who profited from their association with the Romans and were allowed to keep whatever more they could collect from their fellow Jews and had the power to have non-compliant Jews arrested.  As with most people invested with such power, the power was abused, and these folks were famously despised.  The Pharisees were a group of religious scholars who were trying to bring the average Jew hope by helping the average person live a righteous life through the commentary on the Torah that translated the Law into practice. St.Paul is, perhaps, the most famous Pharisee to become a Christian.  The Pharisee's pride grew from being socially, educationally, and religiously set apart from the people he was called to lead.  I think there is a lesson somewhere in it for me as a priest, and for anyone in a position of authority within the church.  I can imagine such pride was incremental and crept in as he appropriated each compliment and praise received from the people he helped, growing like a wildfire until it consumed him in the deception that what they adored was him rather than God's gift to him.  The tax collector had no such delusions.

     The tax collector's prayer was vertical; off at a distance, and prostrated, he couldn't even see or hear the Pharisee.  The tax collector's sins were too painful for him to list.  He simply prays "Have mercy on me, a sinner!" Scripture says he went away justified; God forgave his sins not because he was a righteous person, but because he prayed from his poverty rather than his wealth.  The Pharisee prayed from what he considered his great possessions: his righteousness. Like the widow only putting a penny for the Temple collection, she gives all she has.  She isn't donating a small portion of her wealth; Jesus observes in that parable that "she gave from her poverty."  In prayer, we must pray from our poverty because this is our state in relation to God.  We have nothing to stand on but clay feet, but it is the same clay God formed, it is human clay, and it is the source of true humility and genuine gratitude because God has redeemed it in Christ.  

     It is when we pray from our poverty that we tap the riches that God has given to us.  Time and time again, God's grace seeks out the humble, the lowly and the dispossessed.  Throughout salvation history, God visits the least regarded and comes to visit and give great comfort.  There is something in the nature of God that desires such intimacy like that of a mother caring for her sick child. We don't need to be great and notorious sinners to attract God's notice, but merely to be people who understand they share the lot of humanity in the struggle to image the Divine. The Oscar Wilde quotation "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars" comes to mind. Our prayer is always a cry for mercy when we begin with being grateful for having the vision of the stars from the gutter.

Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

^"Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances"  1Thessalonians 5:16-17

“If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.”
Meister Eckhart

One of the greatest acts of faith is prayer. Prayer acknowledges God explicitly and is done with the hope that God is listening.  To surround one's daily life in prayer, to strive to "pray without ceasing" is to hold on to the tail of a tiger and not let go.
      Today's gospel has a widow holding on to the tail of a tiger in the form of a judge who refuses to hear her case, but she prevails in the end because she refuses to let the matter drop.  Out of sheer fatigue, boredom, or a desire to simply get on with it, the judge finally relents, and she is afforded justice because of her perseverance.  Jesus uses this story to suggest that his disciples will soon find themselves like the widow, alone and in need of help and that the only way to proceed is to pray and not lose faith.  Jesus links faith with the endurance of prayer by asking "But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"
     How much more, Jesus reasons, will God who loves you hear your prayer and act decisively to render judgment? The word "quickly" in the scripture does not indicate a short time from asking, but rather the speed of God's action once God acts, His decisiveness.  As we read a couple of weeks ago, faith the size of a mustard seed is all that is required because faith is not measured in degrees; it is experienced by its presence or absence.  
     Faith is not something that is mainly feeling but is an action guided by the will and sustained by the strength of hope.  Though we tire, and at times fail to pray formally, our fatigue and desire for prayer itself is a prayer.   Reciting to oneself "Oh God, I wish I could pray" is a prayer.  Constant prayer is living with this awareness.
    The strong tradition of the "Jesus Prayer" in the Orthodox Church ("Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner") is the mantra-like prayer that infuses one's being so that prayer is made constant in the awareness of one's beating heart or breathing.   The practice of stillness, or waiting upon God as prayer has a long and honored tradition within Christianity. Lighting a candle, paying attention to one's breath and only finding oneself in God's presence is also prayer.  Today, we might say that books on all manner of praying abound, and sell very well; whether or not anyone is praying is another matter.
     Prayer may not satisfy us that we are praying, but this need not distract us.  Lifting our hearts to God, desiring to be seen by God in our hesitation, our fear, our inability to form words allows the Spirit to pray in us and through us.  Being involved in praying can be as simple as sitting quietly and listening for God's "quiet, whispering voice."  We don't have faith because we pray.  We pray because we already have faith. It is God, through the Holy Spirit, which ultimately makes prayer possible.  We have this great stream of prayer running directly through our heart like a great torrent.  We have only to jump in and let it carry us for God's "quickness" to be realized.

Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

Ten had Faith; One had Gratitude

            Today's reading from The Book of Kings and the Gospel of Luke highlight healing and the outsider.  In Kings, Naaman, a Syrian, is healed by Elisha as a sign of God's blessing to those outside Israel.  In Luke, of the ten healed of leprosy, it is only the Samaritan that returns to give thanks.  Both the Samaritan and Syrian have the dubious distinction of being least-favored, not part of the "Chosen Ones," yet God's blessing rests on them.

            In the gospel story, the ten lepers are outside the city and cry to Jesus not directly for healing, but for mercy.  Such a cry reveals the connection between illness and a loss of favor with God; if you were sick, you had lost favor with God.  Jesus doesn't pray for them, but simply commands them to journey to a priest to be certified as being healed.  They had to begin the journey still uncured.  It was on their way that they were healed; this was their faith that got them moving.

            Faith requires us to act as if what we proclaim has already been brought about.  This is why there is always an element of the absurd in living a life of faith.  St. Paul speaks of this in 1 Corinthians, chapter 1:

 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, ²³ but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.

What, then, is the point of returning to give thanks if everyone was healed?  The other nine didn’t return to a leprous state because gratitude can only be a gift, not a requirement.  The gratitude of the Samaritan was rewarded by the relationship with Christ, a personal encounter one-on-one the other nine did not establish.  The Samaritan’s gift was relationship---the ongoing and direct connection to God.

            This story also serves to highlight another reality of the Christian life.  While a Christian may have faith, faith enough even to heal, that doesn’t mean she or he has that intimacy and closeness that those whose faith is sustained by gratitude enjoy.  Gratitude is what sustains us when we are not healed, for whatever reason; when our prayers seem to go unanswered.  Gratitude is what allows us to pass the blessings of our faith to others.  The other nine were healed, but how many lived that restoration and “returned Glorifying God in a loud voice”? One.

            We are called to “Glorify God in a loud voice” by displaying our gratitude, living our life as a gift from God that we can share with the world, with the “foreigners”, the outsiders who cannot lay claim to any blessing other than the one we can give that comes from God.

Twentieth Sunday after Penetost

"If today you hear God's voice, harden not your hearts"--Psalm 95

Having heard the voice of God, how could one’s heart be hardened?  Last week we began a subtle transition from focusing on justice for the poor and shifting our focus to faith.  Last week Jesus’ story quoted Abraham speaking to Dives who was seeking a spectacle to save the faith of his ancestors, “If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.” Faith does not grow from spectacle; however, the apostles seem to be asking Jesus to somehow “increase their faith.”  His reply isn’t a recipe for “increasing,” but suggests they already possess sufficient faith.

"If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.

The mustard seed is famously small---roughly the size of a grain of sand.  Essentially, Jesus is saying “If you had any faith, you would not have to ask for more.”  Faith isn’t something that comes in all sizes; it comes in one size. The gift of faith, though, is often seen as a type of passivity, of letting life wash over oneself and hoping for the best.  This passivity, however, is heresy.  It is called “quietism.”  Because faith has an element of endurance and patience, it doesn’t mean that faith is only waiting for something to happen.

The three cardinal virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love are joined for a reason.  They are joined because they complement one another and work together.  One aspect of this trinity can be understood as true faith engenders hope and the courage to love in the face of evil and doubt.  Despair is the relinquishing of hope and is not the same thing as feeling depressed or defeated or searching for hope in the chaos and disappointment that marks many lives of people with faith.  True despair is acting in the world as if there was no hope; hating rather than loving, because “What’s the point? Life is meaningless anyway; why not hate?”  Just as faith engenders love through hope, despair allows for hatred by renouncing hope.  One a virtue, the other a mortal sin, but they both are realized in action.

The “hardened heart” is the heart that lives from despair.  Even the heart that has heard the Lord’s voice can despair because very often where faith leads us, the heart fears to go.  Make this a spiritual practice and the heart stiffens in unnatural reluctance to love, to be vulnerable. What unlocks the potential of faith (rather than simply “strengthening” it) is action expressed in loving despite feelings of fear, doubt, and despair.  Love is not a feeling; it is a commitment to action in response to Christ’s command to love God and love one’s neighbor.  If you wait to feel like loving someone, your love will only serve an emotional need.

If you respond to God with “I can’t possibly do this!”, listen for the reply “You are right. You can do nothing without me."  Open your heart and let the Spirit live and guide you”.   We are indeed, as the gospel says “unprofitable servants,” we bring God no profit through loving others.  Loving others, especially those for whom the feeling of love is absent, is God’s gift to us, and the source of God's great gift of grace.

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

“'If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.'"  Luke 16:31

                Sometimes when I am not presiding at Mass, my mind wanders (actually, it wanders when I’m presiding, too, on occasion).  What I imagine seeing is a great white light descending from the crucifix and a low, soothing voice proclaiming: “Everyone here today who is sick is healed; everyone who cannot pay your monthly bills, your debts canceled; everyone whose relationships have become broken is healed.”  Of course, there is stunned silence, and then great rejoicing.  The Eucharist becomes energized with profound thanksgiving as befits its name.  Thousands flock to the next Mass, etc…you get the idea.

            These daydreams arise, I suspect, from what I call “faith fatigue.”  So often in our daily lives, we are confronted by problems and suffering that overwhelm us and our perceived ability to make a "meaningful" response.  As the psalmist laments in Psalm 73:

“This is what the wicked are like-- always carefree, they increase in wealth. Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure; in vain have I washed my hands in innocence.  All day long I have been plagued; I have been punished every morning.”

            This story of the rich man, Dives, and Lazarus was familiar to Jesus’ time and was used to encourage its listeners to act with justice towards the poor.  But, in true form, Jesus re-works the common line of “treat the poor with justice” by revealing the source of why folks fail in living with compassion towards the poor.  Jesus uses the story about the rich man(Dives) suffering in the afterlife and Lazarus resting comfortably in “Abraham’s bosom,” a type of Heaven, as being more than a punishment-reward story; it is more than a kind of “poor man’s revenge” tale.  The story gets at why people ignore the prophetic in their lives.  I say “prophetic” rather than prophets because prophecy comes to us in many different forms.

            The gist is that spectacle will not convince if people are not disposed to see it.  In other words, you can’t grow faith from spectacle. Using the typical figure of a “leap of faith,” William Sloane Coffin once preached “First you leap, and then you get wings.”  One must embrace Faith before “Moses and the prophets” become credible sources of wisdom.

            It would seem self-evident that treating the poor with justice is an ethic that needs no faith; however, what constitutes “justice” is always the part most easily rationalized.  Jesus, after all, is famously quoted that “the poor you will always have with you.” This, taken from when the poor woman anointed Jesus’ feet at Bethany with expensive perfumed oil and the disciples were indignant at the apparent waste of something that could have been sold and used to help the poor.  The lesson in connection to what constitutes “justice” reveals that it isn’t simply a matter of raising money and giving it away, but living your “justice” as something that flows from one’s worship of God.  To paraphrase a famous advocate and social justice worker, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, “God has not called me to be successful; he has called me to be faithful.”  The social justice of the Christian is animated by how we view every human, not just the poor ones. It comes from a faith lived that is oriented towards loving the world, but its source is distinctly divine.

            If we would simply do good to avoid punishment in the afterlife, then our works are in vain; such dedication to humanity cannot be sustained out of fear, but only out of love.  The saints were all first in love with God before they loved humanity with such passion.  We seek the Kingdom first in relationship, a living and dynamic relationship with the Divine so that the words of “Moses and the prophets” mean more than yet another voice “crying out in the wilderness” telling us to act with justice.

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

"You cannot serve both God and mammon"--Jesus, Luke 16:13
 

The word “mammon” means more than money.  At its root, it implies anything that we rely on for our life.  Luke Timothy Johnson suggests in his commentary on Luke that Jesus might have been using the word as a bilingual pun with the word for faith.  An intriguing prospect; instead of the pairing of God vs. Money, it now is a pairing of “what we place our faith in other than God” versus “our faith in God.”  This isn’t to suggest that we can safely exclude money from our understanding.  Clearly, given the context of Jesus’ teaching to his disciples, money is the key element; however, it does broaden our concern not to exclude anything else that we might place our faith in other than God.

            As in Jesus’ time, money is a fundamental source of security. Money provides for our basic needs, but it can also afford us an independence that is inimical to the gospel.  Paul Piff, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, recently completed a study which suggests that the wealthiest Americans are less likely to engage in ethical behavior than the poorest. Most striking was, however, the relative likelihood of giving to charity.  Piff found The wealthiest Americans donate 1.3 percent of their income; the poorest, 3.2 percent.  Piff speculates that the poor live dependent upon one another more than the wealthy.  In a nutshell, independence from one’s neighbor is the defining social aspect of being rich.

            The gospel understanding of wealth regarding insulating the wealthy from the community is at the heart of Jesus’ and Amos’ admonitions in today’s readings. William Sloane Coffin once declared in a sermon “To believe you can approach transcendence without drawing nearer in compassion to suffering humanity is to fool yourself. There can be no genuine personal religious conversion without a change in social attitude”.  This is key in today’s gospel. 

            The spiritual toxin of wealth is the building of barriers between oneself and those who suffer. But we can do this wall building, to some extent, without great riches.  All it takes is the desire to avoid those who suffer, and make it a priority to avoid any form of suffering at all cost. If the gospel teaches us anything, it teaches us to join in the mess and suffering of those on the margins of society, to need less so that we may share more of what we have.  Wealth, for St. John Chrysostom, was associated with thievery:  

"Not to share our wealth with the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own wealth, but theirs." [St. John Chrysostom (+ 407 A.D), On Wealth and Poverty, p. 55, SVS, Crestwood, NY 1984]

For Christians, the wealth we have to share is the amount we have that we do not need.  Jesus needed nothing and admonished his disciples to “carry nothing with you.”  Poverty as a Christian virtue isn’t the poverty of not having enough, but rather it is the grace of not seeking more than we need.  The widow who gave from her need was blessed rather than the person of means giving proportionally less from his wealth.  One gave in faith; the other gave secure in the knowledge that his sacrifice could not result in any hardship. Ultimately, for the Christian, it is the giving of our greatest gift, our life, for others.  To live for others and with others, is the real ethic of Christian wealth. God gave himself to humanity, all he had to Jesus, that we might have all that God has; he has held nothing for himself. He came into the world poor, and died with only a purple cloak on loan, but gave humanity the gift of Himself.

Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Lost and Found

"God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home.”
 ---Henry Nouwen The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming

              The longer of today’s gospel reading includes the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  Because we will hear that parable again in the season of Lent, I have decided to save it for later; however, I will mention it, since it is known by every Christian. It has a unique place with the other two parables: the Parable of the Lost Coin and the Parable of the Lost Sheep.  Atonement is the common thread that unites these three parables.  For those who need brushing up in theological-speak, atonement is God’s action to save humanity through Christ’s sacrifice. An easier way to think of atonement is at-one-ment; that we are united to God through the suffering and death of Christ who sacrificed himself for humanity.

Both parables today end with the idea that the salvation of a single sinner is vital.  Put another way: God is saying, “I’m saving humanity one soul at a time.”

            Often when we consider salvation, we think of a blanket of mercy encompassing the entire globe, kind of like a divine dome of safety.  But what today’s gospel parables suggest is a very personal salvation, of God seeking the one who needs to be found.  It is the personal image of the shepherd placing the lost sheep on his shoulders and carrying it home; it is the picture of a woman who has lost one of ten coins lighting a lamp and sweeping the house for the single lost coin.  God’s salvation is universally offered not through a vast network of spiritual energy, but as an individual initiative.

            The personal aspect is further enhanced, though, with the very clear notion that God is in pursuit of us.  He is looking for us like some beleaguered shepherd or a miserly woman who refuses to give up a single coin; there is no “acceptable loss” count with God.  That God seeks the individual is tough for us to imagine.  TTthe eternal creative and redemptive force of the universe worries that a single human might slip through the cracks unnoticed is extraordinary.  Very often I encounter people who say with great exasperation, “I looked, and I haven’t found God.”  The good news, I tell them, is that is okay, He is looking for you, too, and I doubt he will fail.  They look at me incredulously and usually say something like “If that is true, what is taking so long.”  I put my hand on their shoulder, and say “Welcome home; you are found.”

            Being found by God isn’t what most people think.  It isn’t accompanied by the trumpet sounds of angels or a large hand descending through the clouds to tap one on the shoulder.  Rather, it is that we are found, slip away, and are found again in a cosmic game of hide-and-go-seek with God. We are found, experience the joy of a new love and then are drawn away when times get tough, or things go wrong, and wonder why God isn’t with us.  God is always with us and has never left since the day we opened our heart to Him. Rumi, that great Sufi mystic tells of God’s closeness:

God is "what is nearer to you than your neck-vein,"
You have cast the arrow of speculation afar off.
O you, who have made ready your bow and arrows,
The game is close to you, and you shoot too far off.
The further a man shoots, the further off he is,
And the more removed from the treasure he seeks.
The philosopher kills himself with thinking,
Tell him that his back is turned to that treasure;
Tell him that the more he runs to and fro,
The further he is removed from his heart's desire.
The Almighty says, "Make efforts in our ways,"
Not "Make efforts away from us," O restless one.

Finally, God is in the image of the Prodigal Son’s father who has sighted his son from afar, and lifts up his garment and runs out to greet him.  How can God find us again? Sit still.  Open your heart and call to mind who last showed you love, and to whom you loved last; God is in your midst.