Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sirach 15:15-20 | 1 Corinthians 2:6-10 | Matthew 5:17-37

Oh God, who teach us that you abide in hearts that are just and true, grant that we may be so fashioned by your grace as to become a dwelling pleasing to you 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 most interesting thing about this set of readings is it talks about two very distinct things.  The first two readings talk about the wisdom of God.  This mysterious, in a way, unheard of thing that we’re asked to surrender to and believe can only be given to us by this mysterious thing called the Holy Spirit, and many people have sought to describe what the Holy Spirit is.  What does it do?  And the only thing I can think of is, when God chose to enter into the human race in the person of Jesus, something emanated from him.  A God living in a human emanated this mysterious power that had the ability to heal blindness, deafness, muteness.  It was opening people to a new, more exciting, more engaged life, and so I just want you to feel that this plan of God, this mysterious thing that God is doing with us needs to be understood before we really get into his direction on how to live with this gift, how to live with the Spirit, how to let it flow through us and become amplifications of that Spirit. 

So the first thing I want to make sure that you understand is this God who is incarnate.  That miracle did not just happen to one person.  It happened to Jesus in such a way that, yes, only happened once, and that is that God’s spirit inside Jesus, the human, was so well integrated into his humanity that the two were one.  He was the best manifestation we have of who God is and what is in the world to bring human beings, but it’s so interesting that God never seemed to want to work with individuals alone.  He always said, “I want a community.  I want a people.”  Another word for that could be, “I want a church.  I want a gathering of people who understand my message and my work, as my work demands that I enter into each and every human being.  I dwell within them, and my work is not so much directed to each individual in their needs.”  It is but not directly from God.  To ask everyone to have this direct contact with God is asking, I think, a lot of the human race, because believing in this mysterious God is not something that comes as natural to a lot of people.  It’s easy to listen to any kind of program about does God exist, and you’ll find there are people who absolutely know it as a truth that you couldn’t take it from them if you tried, and others say, “There’s no such thing as a God.  We don’t need a God.  This is all just sort of random.”  And I don’t know how they live with that, but they do, and there’s many of them.  More common is someone who just thinks of God, but then he’s this distant sort of — like a deist.  “God created the world.  Yes, there is a God — placed us here, and then he’ll see us when we end our life.  And then he sees us again, and says, ‘Okay, how’d you do?  How was it,’” as if he wasn’t engaged in it.  But the truth is the plan he has for each of us is the same plan he had to make himself manifest in the world for the first time.  He enters into us.  You can’t miss that in the teaching of Jesus.  “The Father is in me.  When you see me, you see the Father.  Everything I do is the Father doing it through me.  Everything that goes beyond my humanity is God.”  And you must believe that that same Spirit of God lives in you, and your work is to integrate your humanity into this divinity, become more and more and more like God until we finish the work here.  And then we enter into heaven, and then perhaps we become — it’s hard to know, but we become so much more connected and like our Father, and we live that way in him forever.  And the life is so full and so rich we call it heaven, the kingdom that we’ve all longed for.  So if the Holy Spirit is the manifestation of God in you and in me, then the way we treat each other is absolutely crucial.  People like to say to God, “God, I love you, but oh, these people around me, they’re creeps.  They drive me crazy.  They’re ugly.  They’re dirty.  They’re unattractive.  I hate people, but I love you, God.”  That’s impossible.  That’s not the Holy Spirit moving in you.  That’s your ego telling you you’re better than everybody else, and the more you put them down, the better you feel.  No, the real issue is that God longs to be manifesting himself through you, and then you represent him.  You let people know, indirectly, I guess, through humility, but you’re basically letting people know, “This doesn’t all come from me.  This is God working through me.  It is my love for you that is so powerful, and that love goes way beyond my human capacity to heal and to care for and to release people from all kinds of negativity.”  That’s what God gives everybody, the power to love, and that love goes way beyond human attraction or human affection.  It’s the work of the Spirit.  

So then we see Jesus looking at the world that has been created, and he’s there at the time he was, because that’s where consciousness was ready to finally receive this mysterious Spirit coming into their lives, enabling them to do so much they could never have dreamt of doing.  What’s interesting is this work of believing that, entering into that is a slow and long process that’s continued to work, and the biggest problem is hypocrisy in the people who claim to be religious.  That’s the flaw.  That’s the obstacle.  It was raging at the time of Jesus.  The Pharisees, the scribes, they were self-centered, self-serving human beings whose dignity demanded [sic] on how people saw them, whether they were at the front seats of synagogues, whether they were dressed appropriately.  They acted and lived as if they were pure spirit almost, and they were filled with dead men’s bones.  They made their converts twice as fit for hell as they were.  It was an amazing indictment about hypocrisy.  “You represent my Father, and there’s nothing about you that is like my Father.  You treat people as objects.  You take money from them for the things you do for them in a way that doesn’t imply, or that does imply that you’re not really that concerned about human beings and their plight.  You’re concerned about yourself, the importance of the temple.”  

And so Jesus starts talking to his disciples about all this, and this list of things is really, taken out of context, is really terrifying.  It’s like there’s no way we’re not sinning.  If every thought we have or everything we do is a sin, we’re finished, but if you listen to this teaching of Jesus to his disciples, think of it as if he is really, really intense and, in a sense, frustrated.  “You’re told not to kill somebody, but I’ll tell you, when you hate your brother, when you hate your sister, when you put people down, when you tell them they’re not good, or when you tell everybody else they’re no good, you’re killing them.”  It’s like he’s trying to say, “Don’t you see?  I can’t love these people unless you allow me to love them through you, and you’ve got to stop acting as if your intention in your heart doesn’t matter.”  That’s the thing the Spirit uses, your intention, your heart, your look, and when you have this in your heart for everything that the law requires, and if you go down to the basic thing that the law, the Ten Commandments, have asked of us, it’s nothing more than a love that can best be described as compassion, empathy and a deep desire for every person around you to become fully who God intended them to be and to delight in your ability to do that.  That’s the heart of the faith, and when you’re in a community, a church, when that is absolutely the overwhelming sense of what it feels like to be in that community, then you’ve got church.  It’s not the hierarchy and the people that make the rules and laws that set the tone.  It’s every individual filled with divine grace, filled with divine presence, manifesting the love that was manifested through Jesus into the world that healed everything and transformed everything.  We have not the same intensity that Jesus had, but we have the same reality.  We have this ability to bring life into the world through our intention, and it’s amazing when you start feeling the joy that comes from seeing people respond positively to the most basic thing you’re offering them, compassion, empathy, love.  It feels your darkness.  It removes your darkness.  It gives you meaning and purpose, and it seems to me, in a way, so obvious now, but it was never obvious to me before.  I was always thinking, “I’m not good enough for God to come to me.  So I don’t really have him in me, because he needs me to be more perfect.  I’m not good enough.  So how can I be of great value to the people around me?”  Well, the truth is you can be of great value and life and truth.

Father, your plan exceeds our expectations of the role that we play with you in saving the world.  Bless us with openness to this responsibility without it being a burden, with it being rather the joy that you long for it to be.  We need your wisdom.  We need to grow in our understanding, our consciousness of this great spiritual life you’ve called us to.  Bless us in that work.  Bless this program so that it becomes an instrument of that work, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.