Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Isaiah 58:7-10 | 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 | Matthew 5:13-16

Keep your family safe, oh Lord, with unfailing care that, relying solely on the hope of heavenly grace, it may be defended always by your protection 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.

It was almost 45 years ago that I received an assignment from my bishop to leave basically the usual pattern of being an associate pastor in another church to become chaplain of the University of Dallas.  I remember how excited I was, because I’d gone to the University of Dallas.  I knew it well, but I also had this typical, I guess, for any newbie in the business — I thought, “How do you be a chaplain?”  And I remember I had to put out some kind of letter or some kind of welcome to the students and introduce myself as the new chaplain.  I remember using the passage from St. Paul that we just read, and so my mind flashed back to that moment.  I remember intuitively not knowing how to be a chaplain.  I thought, “What am I supposed to do?”  And there was something in that reading that gave me a kind of enthusiasm that, whenever I was in that enthusiasm, I was, I think, effective, and whenever I lost it, I think I lost my compass a little bit about what you are when you’re a chaplain living amongst students.  The university is small, and I lived in a dorm for 13 years.  I remember, looking back on it, what I did is I didn’t think I had come with a great deal of understanding and wisdom about the church, because I was pretty much a new guy, having been ordained only six years.  But I felt like, if I could come and somehow display to people who God is through my actions — and I’m not sure I saw it that clearly, but that’s when I felt that, maybe if I just was who God called me to be, I wouldn’t have to be an intellectual, because that community is extremely intellectual.  And what I found was, when I was myself, when I was simply doing what I felt was the most natural thing to do, and that was to love the people I was around, I think it worked.  The relationships I’ve made have been lifelong in many cases, but I remember those days.  I felt like I was with a group of people who I wasn’t their boss.  I was one of them, and I was learning as they were learning.  And it probably was the most important assignment of my life in terms of my own development.  I grew up there.  I was 33 when I came, 58 when I left, and it was amazing.

So when I look at this set of readings, I’m thrilled to see that there’s something in my life that has lived out this experience that is being discussed in these readings.  It’s very affirming, and the first reading, that just has such wisdom, when it simple describes what God is asking us to become, not sinless, not perfect.  That’s what I was taught, not to spend a great deal of time looking at myself and trying to improve my perfection by not failing in any way, shape or form, not committing any sins.  No matter how big or how small, they were all sins, and they all somehow had the power to separate me from the favor of God.  What I didn’t realize is, when I was in that disposition, my focus was on my performance, and I’m a three on the Enneagram.  So that was my bread and butter.  To perform was everything for me, but that performance is not being sinless but being someone who sees someone who is in need, all those images, poor, hungry, naked, broken, diseased. The call of the gospel is going to be clear when it comes about in the life of Jesus, when it’s manifested in him. His greatest, greatest asset was the way he treated human beings.  His love for them was so obvious, and it was natural for him.  I think it just came naturally, and what it did was it always had this tremendously effective healing power.  When he gave a talk and said everyone there was healed, or even when you look at the types of healing that Jesus did, it was always making a person whole, that their legs would be strong enough to carry them, that their hands would be able to do the work they were here to accomplish, that their eyes could see what’s real and what’s true.  They could hear the truth.  They could speak it.  All those miracles, and particularly the one about leprosy, because leprosy was something inside of us that disfigures us — it’s a slavery to an image of who we think God wants us to be, and that was always, in my life, perfection.  Got to be perfect.  Focus on God, and when you’re perfect, then you’ll achieve what God wanted.  That is such a — first of all, narcissistic, but it’s also — it doesn’t work.  If you’re focusing solely on yourself to make yourself into something that is perfect, what you’re going to do, like most of us did and still do, I guess, is pick a few things that you really see.  “These are the things that are my religious life, and I do them perfectly.  And I avoid all the sins that I’m told that I shouldn’t do.”  And that’s the focus, but this set f readings makes it so clear.  No, the focus is not you.  It’s what you have been created to accomplish, and the you that has been created is a lover, someone who cares for people, someone who nurtures people.  

When you’re in the presence of a nurturing spirit, it is amazing, and you can be with somebody who’s so polite and so nice and so correct, but you don’t feel anything.  And that’s the person who’s created this person that they feel they present to you.  But the person who is themselves, who understands themselves, who knows themselves and sees themselves just like you and doesn’t feel better than and doesn’t wallow in their imperfection with shame and anger, no, they’re people who just are filled with this mysterious thing, this resonating power of presence of God inside of them.  And it loves.  It’s funny.  When I talk about love, I’m not talking about an emotion that you have for everybody you see, you’re just crazy about them.  No, it’s so — I don't know — mysterious love in this way, loving in this way, because it isn’t you that is doing the loving.  It is God in you that is doing the loving, and the way you accomplish the ability to give something to somebody else is you first have to have it.  You have to possess it.  So then it seems clear that the most essential thing that we have to do in our work here on this earth is to allow someone, in particular God, to love us, and that love is not a kind of blindness to our faults.  Just the opposite, it’s an unbelievably clear acceptance of us as we are with all the imperfection, with all the selfishness, not ignoring it as if it doesn’t count but somehow seeing something beyond our actions, which is our essence.  The minute you’re with somebody who loves your essence, your essential being, the thing that God created that you don’t even maybe know yet, that’s the miracle.  The miracle of the presence of God in another person perceiving your essence and loving it, bypassing all the shame you might have or all the anger or all the blindness or all the unconscious awareness that you have of this gift inside of you, that’s the mystery of what it means to be a Christian, what it means to be religious.  

Look at the description in the first reading of what it is we’re called to be, so beautiful.  Just be aware of the needs of a human being and have an intention.  That’s all it is, a deep, deep, abiding intention that, whatever that person is going through, you want them to be successful in seeing the truth that that situation they’re in is drawing them to.  You just want that.   You don’t have to talk about your faith.  You don’t have to talk about Jesus.  You don’t have to talk about God.  You have to be him, be his presence, and that’s why Paul is clearly saying knowing this and knowing Christ crucified is crucial.  Every time I hear that word [sic] Christ crucified, I remember my upbringing.  It was always the suffering and the agony of the physical pain of the cross, but it was not the physical pain of the cross that was the thing that was difficult for Jesus.  It was somehow accepting his life as it was written — as it was written.  Suffering means acceptance, and somehow you can’t love yourself, you can’t allow God to love you, you can’t love someone else unless there’s copious amounts of simple acceptance of what is.  When you meet someone and they’re close to their essence and they resonate that love back to you, it’s pretty awesome.  It’s what we call church, a gathering of people who know they’re loved and continue to nurture and support one another.  Church is not the hierarchy.  Church is people living the life that God has called us to live and seeing the fruitfulness of that.  Whenever people are gathered together with that, there is church.  There is the work of God being effectively carried out.

So you look at Matthew, and he makes it so beautifully clear that what’s he’s saying is, “Look, there’s something about you.  You are light, and you are salt.”  What is salt?  Salt is that mysterious ingredient that has a quality of preserving things, keeping them from being spoiled, rotten and also bringing out flavor.  He’s saying salt is and was then considered — at one time in the history of the world, salt was a way of making — it was a kind of money.  If you had salt, which was hard to get, if you had it, you could use it to purchase things.  So it’s like saying this precious item that preserves and somehow enriches what’s there, the flavor of what’s there, that’s what we are, and if we don’t have any flavor, then what good is it?  But the interesting thing about salt is salt never loses its flavor.  You never shake some salt out and say, “There’s nothing there.  The salt is bad.”  Salt is always salt, and I think it’s a way of God saying and using that image in that passage of the gospel that’s saying you have always the ability to do this.  It’s consciousness, being aware of using it in the way that it was intended to be used.  That’s our responsibility but not to create the salt.  That’s God, and he’s always there.  He always preserves and brings life.  He always enriches and opens someone to the fullness of who they are.

And then light, enlightenment — when I think about all the tomes and books that have been written about theology and all the long discussions people have about who God is and where he came from and what life is about — those are all important.  Nothing about that is not valuable, especially when it gets to the core of the teaching of God through Jesus, but somehow this light is also another way of imagining presence, the presence of God in a human being.  And God is love, no judgment, only acceptance, only a desire to see them grow and become all of who they are.  When that presence is in a human being, and it’s promised to us, absolutely promised — anybody who thinks they have to work for this, anytime — well, “I need to be in a monastery.  I need to separate myself from the world.  I need to turn off all my emotions and my physical needs and wants.”  All those misconceptions of what it takes to be whole and holy and life-giving, those are all kind of diversions from the simple truth of allowing this God to awaken in you a sense of your value and your dignity and your beauty and believing in it and having it and knowing it’s been given to you to be given away, to be used for other people.  And what I love that’s in these readings is the promise that, if you do this work, you receive what you’re giving.  If you alight others, your light will grow inside of you.  If you give light to other people, you’ll be enlightened.  Whenever we think, “Oh, I’m so tired of taking care of people.  Why don’t someone take care of me,” that sort of fatigue of the giver and the caretaker, well, we can wear ourselves out by overdoing that, and maybe that’s why we get exhausted.  But nevertheless, the promise is that, when you are in the role of service, when you really seek to do that work, you are served.  You are fed.  If you want someone to see more fully who they are, you will find more of yourself revealed to you.  If you try your best to bring the best out of another person, that’s actually the best of you, and people that are living that are the greatest witnesses to Christianity that God could ever ask for.  It reminds me of the words of Francis.  “Preach the gospel always, and only when necessary use words.”  

Father, why do we make a life with you so difficult?  Why do we focus on our faults and our weaknesses instead of our strengths and our gifts?  Bless us with a new way of seeing our role in the world.  It’s not for us to become perfect but for us to be clearly reflecting what you have done for us, what we long then to share with others.  Bless us with this wisdom, and we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.