Isaiah 45:1, 4-6 | 1 Thessalonians 1:1-5B | Matthew 22:15-21

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

The prayer that was being offered in this piece is a prayer of a mother praying for her son that he learn to honor God rather than the world, which underscores a problem that has been there from the beginning of time, the world of God and the world of the world.  This set of readings is really fascinating to me, and it comes at a time that I think is so interesting.  If I look at the gospel and start there, it’s clear that this is a story about the world and about God’s world, and I remember, often when I would go to this, it was a clear indication, and it kind of – think about taking a statement in scripture that is so loaded and so filled with meaning and then reducing it to something so simple.  It sounded like this is Jesus saying, “Okay, you have to put your money in the church, and you also have to support the government.”  So you have an obligation to pay either one of these things.  They’re both services in some way.  And it’s so much deeper than that, so much more powerful than that.  It’s about paying attention.  Where do we put our attention?  Everyone, I think, knows, if you are a serious, spiritual person, you have a longing for truth more than almost anything else, and so you have to find where is the truth.  And the interesting thing about – what does the truth produce?  It produces people who have a heart that is open and receptive to other people.  The core of all religions is the way we learn how to be open to a God and then, through that openness to God, receive the gifts that he gives that we can be gift-givers to other people.  That’s the heart of almost every religion.  It’s about service, about caring for people, but it’s also about learning the nature of who we are and who God is so that we can work with this duality, in a sense, of, “I turn to my God, and he speaks to me through my religion, but then I turn to the world, and there’s nothing there of any value.”  That’s the fault that we fall into.  This gospel is saying, “No.  No, you have to pay attention to God, his world inside of you.”  We believe that God dwells in us.  We believe he dwells in our hearts, and that indwelling presence is called God consciousness.  And when we go there for wisdom, we say we’re going into our conscience, and in that privilege we have is we have the authority. 

Through the Catholic Church for sure and many religions, we’re saying you go to that inner place with the anticipation that it speaks, that it gives you answers, but not answers about how to fix things but how to work with the world.  How do we allow the world to be the source of life that God has created it to be and not put it in a position of the world is evil, and then religion is spiritual?  Yes, we listen to religion leaders.  We listen, and we engage in practices of our faith.  As Catholic, my background is a sacramental life, and it’s so rich and so powerful when I look at it and realize what it’s drawing us into.  And what it’s offering us is a mystical world, that we live in a world where things aren’t what they seem.  A piece of bread can be the Christ’s body.  A sip of wine can be forgiveness.  How does that work?  Well, we don’t have to know how it works.  We have to know it works.  We have to believe in that, believing that God is a God that communicates, and he uses ritual.  He uses stories.  He uses church leaders.  He uses the community more than we ever realize.  The community is where all the power is, in the believer.  So we know that religion is a rich source of information for us and things we need to ponder, but at the same time, what this reading, I think, is telling us so clearly is so is the world.

Now, look at the first reading.  It’s about Cyrus.  Cyrus was one of the greatest emperors.  He’s one of the ones that created the first civilization 500 years before Christ, and the interesting thing about this man who was – basically he was calling people into – he was working to conquer people.  Doesn’t sound like the most holy thing in the world, but what God is saying to us in this reading is that Cyrus didn’t know that God was a part of his whole plan, that God was the one that was allowing him to do the things that he did, even though Cyrus had no idea about who God was, didn’t pay any attention to him.  You’d say he was an atheist, but God was using him to bring about a change in the world that was going to allow his people to return to Jerusalem.  So there he is.  God was in that work that was a pagan emperor/conqueror, and God was using him to achieve a goal that was good for his people.  Now, just take that image and say, “All right then, if we believe that this God communicates to his people, and let’s say we’re caught in that narrow vision of he’s only going to talk to us through our religion or through scripture, then that’s the only sources we have.”  No, no.  The world is the source of his wisdom, and what he’s asking us to do is to pay attention to that world and read it.  Read the signs. 

It’s so interesting.  For example – let me just go back for a minute to St. Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians.  He says, “We give so much thanks to you people who are believers now, and we recognize something, and you recognize something.”  Something has happened in the world when Christ died on the cross, and I’d like you to think about it as the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, wisdom, the feminine has come into the world in a way that is beyond anything that could have ever happened naturally.  It was a supernatural action on the part of God to awaken people to a new way of being in the world, not just working out of our minds and our wills, which is what everybody did – some people still do – but working out of this new experience of a heart that has the capacity to take in things that are going on and to read the signs, both that are in scripture, in a ritual, in the world, read those signs and listen to what they are trying to say.  But the listening is the strangest thing.  It’s not like the mind and the will that sits down and figures out why this is all happening, who caused it, what’s the fix and how do we get out of it.  That’s the way the mind works, but the heart, the wisdom that has been poured into us, that Paul is so excited about how it’s changed these brothers and sisters who are living in the way of God because they have faith, they have hope, they have love for one another – and what Paul’s pretty clearly saying is, “This is a gift.  This didn’t come because you all of a sudden had this – you figured it out.  No, it’s been given.  Wisdom is given to you.”  And think of wisdom as something you have inside of you, but what God is saying, I think, in this gospel, is, “Yeah, wisdom is inside of you, but it’s also inside of the world and what’s going on in the world.”  How do you read the world in a way that you can say, “God, I think I understand in some way, or I can feel what’s going on in the world is your will.” 

And what is going on in the world?  My God, three or four things stand out like crazy.  Never in the history of our civilization have we had access to what’s happening everywhere.  The news now is not about Dallas and its suburbs and the United States.  No, you listen to the news now, especially on something like NPR, and you hear what’s going on in a small town in Africa and what’s going on in the Antarctica and what’s going on in Mexico.  It’s like we’re getting this information, information, information, and a lot of it is, in a way, disturbing, because it’s about people struggling – people struggling, people being oppressed, people being abused, people struggling to get out of that.  It’s everywhere.  And then it’s like we’ve had this period of time when we’re looking at all this, and we see it so clearly.  The world looks terrible in a way.  It’s frightening.  It’s falling apart, and then you have to remember that, when things are falling apart, that means what?  They’re going through transition.  They’re changing.  The world is changing at a pace we’ve never, ever experienced before, and our task is to pay attention.  My church, the Catholic Church, has changed so radically since a thing that happened in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, the Vatican Council.  It was the most amazing transformation of a focus of a church from being the protector of orthodoxy and saying no to every new thing that came along that wasn’t true to now a place where we are open and receptive to the mystery of this world that God has created for us.  And the dignity of the individual has been lifted from – it used to be the hierarchy was the holy people and the priests and the nuns.  Now it’s like, no, no, we are all equally capable of reaching holiness if we’ll just allow the Spirit to enter into us and change us to the point that we do not any longer try to fix any problem or blame it on some other place. 

Look at us.  We have amazing uncovering of imperfection in almost every industry, from churches to government to industry to politics to medicine.  There are abusers everywhere.  Did we all of a sudden develop these people?  Is it they’ve never been there before?  No, they’ve always been there.  Has there been individuals that have been robbed of their dignity and their value by a government that doesn’t feel that they are the essential reason why government is in place, to guide and help these people?  Yeah, that’s been there forever.  So what do we do with something like that?  One way is get depressed and go inside, and the other is to use your mind and your will and say, “Okay, who caused this,” till you find an enemy that did it to us.  And then you go after that enemy.  Or you do an insulation kind of thing.  You pull away from the world and say, “No, it’s only about our country.  It’s only about my life.  That’s all I care about.  I don’t care about the world.  It’s too much to handle.”  All of those are just easy ways of not doing the work of paying attention to the God who speaks consistently, constantly to every soul, every heart and is saying the same thing.  “Wake up.  Pay attention to what is going on.  Don’t fix it.  Don’t try to change it too quickly.  It’ll change.  But ponder it.  Hold it in your heart.  Wonder.” 

One of the things that’s so interesting about this pandemic is its effect on people, and one of the things that is so clear, the friends I know that have it that aren’t really that sick to go to the hospital, they say it’s a fatigue.  You’re just so tired.  Then I realized all of us now are going through a kind of – they even talk about it, the fatigue of the virus, the fatigue of not being able to be out there in a world that we were so used to.  It’s weighing on us.  It’s wearing us out, because we keep trying to figure out what it is and fix it.  It’s not to be fixed yet.  It’s going to take its course.  No matter what we do, it’ll all unfold as it is, but if you don’t believe and don’t pay attention to what it’s saying and don’t believe that it will turn into something wonderful, different, not back to the way it was but back towards something so much better – do you believe this?  This is so crucial right now.  Hold it in your heart.  Ponder it.  Don’t try to fix it or blame anybody for it or understand exactly when it’s going to be over.  Just stay with it.  It’s like the whole world has been asked to go on retreat and reflect and ponder and decide what kind of world do you want to live in.  What kind of world do you want to support?  It’s got to be a world closer to what our Creator created the world to be.  That’s the direction we have been moving in since the beginning of the human race, growing in consciousness and becoming more and more like the God who created us and making the world more like his kingdom.

Each of these pieces that we’ve played today are prayers, and this prayer is a beautiful prayer, the Prayer of the Pilgrim.  This question is: on what path am I journeying?  What consolation do I have?  Am I on the path of error or truth?  It seems appropriate for the theme of this liturgy of the word, and I pray – well, let me just close with the final prayer. 

Heavenly Father, you have called the world onto this amazing path of growth and transformation.  It’s interesting that we’re not needing more information about what’s going on.  We need more formation, transformation into being able to deal with and listen to and learn everything you’re saying to us.  Nothing in the world exists without your permission, and everything in the world you promise us is for us.  Open our eyes to the heart of our belief.  Open our eyes and hearts to the world.  Let us hold both and listen to both and not look for answers as much as to wait to see the fruits of all that you’ve planned for us, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.