Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Cycle A 2019-2020

Jeremiah 20:10-13 | Romans 5:12-15 | Matthew 10:26-33

Father, guide and protector of your people, grant us an unfailing respect for your name.  Keep us always in your love.  Grant this 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.

We’re entering the ordinary time of the year, and this is cycle A, which means that we’re going to be focusing for the next many weeks, until Advent in November, on the gospel of St. Matthew.  We have four stories, four eyewitness reports of this experience of Jesus in the world, and Matthew, Mark and Luke are most similar, called synoptic, and then there’s this very mystical work called the Gospel of John.  But it’s so interesting to me that we wouldn’t count on just one story, one person’s view of this experience of God entering into the world, becoming one of us and inviting us into a relationship with him that none of us could ever have imagined was going to be possible.  No one figure could do that, and what I find in these readings is a historical account, and obviously that’s important, because we need to know what happened back then.  But the whole invitation of these stories is not to listen to them and learn what Jesus said then.  That’s important, helpful, but it’s a story about something that’s going to happen to you and to me, just that happened to the disciples, that God is going to enter into us, call us by name and want us to enter into a relationship with him.  And it’s an intimate relationship, and what it does is it opens us to a wisdom that we’re here in the world to bring into the world.  

We’re to be disciples, every one of us, and I think it’s interesting to realize that in this call that we have we need to make sure we see it in the light of the New Testament, the light of redemption, because in the Old Testament God also called on people to be his disciples.  They were patriarchs, and they were prophets.  And we have one in the first reading, Jeremiah, and the interesting thing about the prophets is God did speak to them.  It’s true.  He gave them the word, but they hadn’t been transformed into what we potentially are in this world.  So what we look at are people that were listening to the word of God.  God would speak to them in their hearts.  They would have studied the other prophets perhaps, maybe, but mostly they would just have a relationship with God where God would be telling them, “This is what I need for you to say.”  And what’s so fascinating, when you look at the life of the prophets — and I’m going to focus on two, Jeremiah in this story and also Jonah, but both Jeremiah and Jonah have a kind of reputation as a kind of ushered kind of prophet.  Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet.  Another way to describe it would be the complaining, the whining prophet, because as a very young man, maybe at 17, he was called to be a prophet, and he was told that he could build up and tear down and build up and tear down.  And I think he — my guess is he might have really liked the building up part, like most of us do.  We like encouraging people, seeing them grow and change and develop.  We don’t necessarily like the job of criticizing and condemning and confronting those who are resistant for two reasons.  One is it’s a difficult job to convince someone that you’re telling they’re doing something wrong, and if they’re powerful, it’s dangerous.  And so most of the prophets lived in tremendous fear, I think, of receiving retaliation.  You go up to somebody powerful and strong and tell them they’re wrong, and they have the power to destroy you, and more likely, rather than negotiate your thoughts with theirs, they’ll say, “Stop saying that, or I’ll kill you.”  And so Jeremiah found himself so often in positions where he was being rejected and punished.  In the famous scene where he’s sinking into a well, into mud, saying, “Thanks, God.  You really duped me.  This is really great.  This is what you do to your prophets.”  I’m saying all that just to say these men were very human.  

They had their struggles, and they were trying their best to confront evil.  And one of the ways they tended to do it was head-on, straight attack, and there’s something in that that is not necessarily what happens when we, as his prophets, so to speak, are in the world trying to lead people out of darkness into light.  It’s a different kind of model of confrontation with evil, and who do we learn it from?  We learn it from Jesus, Jesus the teacher, the transforming teacher.  He didn’t just information, but there was something about him, about the way he approached people, about the way he would attack their errors but not attacking them.  And so I’d like you to imagine that the prophets of the Old Testament are a model, in a way, for bringing people into light, into truth, because what you’re trying to show people, as the prophets did — if you don’t change your ways, you’re going to self-destruct.  And they often asked God to — I mean, they’d use God as their weapon and say, “Now God is going to destroy you.”  God isn’t in the business of destroying people.  What he’s trying to do is, if you’re choosing a way of life that’s going to lead to destruction, he’s going to tell you that, and he’s going to tell you, “You will be destroyed.”  You do something unhealthy on your body, and God says, “You have to stop.”  And you say, “No, I’m not.”  And he says, “Well, it’s going to destroy you.”  Well, that sounds like, “God’s going to destroy me.”  No, the issue is God saves, God redeems, God calls into wholeness.  He doesn’t destroy, but he had to make people aware that what they were doing — and so often you find something in prophets that’s dangerous, to any today prophet, meaning us.  It’s a desire for revenge, a desire to see people suffer.  “Okay, you’re not going to do what’s right?  Well, I can’t wait to see how God is going to get you.”  That’s what Jeremiah would often say.  “I can’t wait to see you just destroy these people.”  The same way with Jonah.  Jonah didn’t want the Ninevites to change.  He wanted God to send down and just destroy the heck out of them.  I bring that up, because it’s sort of a shadow you see in the Old Testament prophets, and it’s not necessarily condemned.  But in this world, when you and I have been called to be prophets, we have a different model than the prophets of the Old Testament.  

We have the prophet, the prophet Jesus, and what’s the difference?  Well, the difference, it seems to me, is the image the prophets had of those who were doing the wrong thing.  They needed to be stopped, and they should be destroyed, and I’d love to see them destroyed.  Jesus looks at a sinner, looks at somebody in a self-destructive mode.  His motive, yes, is to change them but not by threats, not by even any simple desire that would say, “You deserve, if you’re not going to do what I say, you deserve what you’re getting.”  That was never the intention of Jesus the prophet, and it can never be our intention. 

Sin is, as we hear in the second reading — sin is destructive.  It separates people.  It isolates people, and they end up living in darkness — darkness.  And so when you think of this darkness that is self-destructive and you see prophets came to point it out and then, when they didn’t respond, would love to see them wallow in pain, Jesus comes and said, “I have the same intention of opening people’s hearts and minds to what is real, what is true, called the light.”  But he doesn’t have that side of the Old Testament prophets that seemed to be vengeful, and why not?  Because of something he understood about who we are, and he points it out in that description when he’s talking to the 12 and he’s telling them, “I’m going to be sending into the world to open the world to what is real, to what is true.  That means you’re going to have to expose darkness.”  And I love this image that Jesus gives of all the work that we share together as prophets, as ministers, as people calling others to wholeness.  Our work is going to mean that we are called to expose that which has been hidden that needs to be exposed so that those engaged in it know what they’re dealing with is destructive, not constructive.

I have an advantage over almost all of you that are listening, not everybody, but most of my listeners are much younger than I am.  So you live 80 years, as I have, and I remember the 40s, when I was growing up, from zero to ten, and I saw the world for the first time.  And in 1940, it was after the war.  It was a time of great prosperity in the United States, but I had one simple image that I had of the world that I lived in.  Number one, it was safe.  It was truthful.  It was honest.  It was never, in my mind, conceivable that a doctor would harm a patient, that a police officer would not be there to protect and guide a person into a safer environment.  I never thought a priest could ever abuse some child somewhere.  All those things, they were there.  It wasn’t a perfect world.  It seems perfect compared to the world we live in, but it was a world where things were hidden.  And over these years, I’ve learned so much about the darker side of the world, and sometimes, when you see it exposed, you get depressed, thinking the world has gotten so much worse, but there’s something else that you should look at that comforts me.  And that is these things have always been present, but the beauty of the revelation of God, the beauty of his incarnate life in us, in the world is engaged in this work of exposing evil.  And sometimes it’s too much.  It seems like there’s more polarization today between people involved in almost every industry, every institution, be it religion, be it medicine, be it politics.  This polarization — all of a sudden, we’re hearing things that I think are filled with light, and we’re listening to things filled with darkness.  And what do we do?  How do we discern that?  How do we deal with all these messages and all this information?  Can you imagine that — when I was the age of most of you, we had a radio and a television and four channels and a phone and our local neighborhood and a newspaper.  That was it.  And now I’m just blown away by spending time on the Internet and going into some of these news services or whatever, and you’re listening to every conceivable concept of what’s going on in the world, every opinion.  It’s not truth exactly that you can count on that you’re finding on this forum imploding us or filling us with information.  It’s mostly opinions, and the opinions are now more than ever, it seems to me, so diverse, almost one against the other.  And so I feel like, “Well, all right.  We’re in this time of everything being exposed, which seems to me healthy, but then where do you go for the truth?  Where do you go to say, ‘That opinion is correct.  That opinion isn’t’?”  

And that’s what gets me to the heart of what I’m trying to say in this homily today, that we have got to be prophets.  We have got to be those who look and see and listen to opinions and thoughts and images and situations, and we have to be somehow gifted to be able to pursue the truth that is in them and to believe we can find it.  And you can’t find it by going to the Internet.  What you can do is go inside and go to your heart and go to this promise that God is making in the gospel to his disciples, and you are one, and I am one of those.  And what is he saying?  “All right, you’re in the world, and what I’ve given you is a chance to be an instrument of the same work that I did.  I want you to awaken people to life, to goodness, to joy, to peace, to unity, to all of it.  You’re here to do that.”  And so in a world like today, it seems more important than ever that we would recognize two things, that we should not be afraid of the way the world is going, because it’s going in the direction that God intends it to go, and it’s going to ultimately bring us all to a better place.  That’s one thing.  So fear has got to go.  You’ve got to get away from that and to realize that nothing can destroy you.  No situation in the world can harm you, harm me.  So we’re fearless in facing all of this, but at the same time, we’re hopeful, because he’s going to give us a gift, going to give us this truth.  And I think the most interesting truth he’s giving us, one thing I can focus on that is a key ingredient in you and me being open to the truth of God and knowing that, if he fills us with it, we will resonate it in the world and we’ll have an impact, and that is how valuable every single person is.  Every single person is known by God, loved by God, intended by God to flourish and grow and become.  So don’t be afraid that any situation is going to destroy that promise of God to care for each and every one of us.  

So if we know that God is in us and God is going to give us wisdom, and the wisdom of God is a loving participation in our life that brings life to everyone engaged in the way he wants us to live this life — you think about it.  That’s the promise, and that should give us enormous confidence in two things.  All of this that goes on is going to bring about something good, and everyone involved is valuable.  The ones who are in the darkness, the ones who are in light are equally valuable.  We need to honor them, respect them, love them, want them not to be punished, as sometimes the Old Testament prophets were so thrilled about saying, “Let me see them squirm.  I want to see them vanquished.”  No.  No, now we don’t have that spirit.  We have a spirit only of wanting to see conversion, transformation.  Transformation rather than information is the key, and we carry that in our essence, in our being.  It’s not necessarily what we say.  It’s everything that we are.  It’s our intention and the way we see the world.  That’s what’s essential, to be engaged in the world today.

Father, there’s so much in the world today that is confusing and hard for us to grasp.  Between not knowing where we are with our pandemic, not knowing where we are politically, conflict in your church and leaders, it’s all a time that we need more than ever the conviction of who you are in us.  So bless us with this anchor, this rock that is you so that, as we discern and look at things, we will look for the truth only, and you will show it to us, and you’ll let us, by our very understanding of it, bring others into the light, out of darkness, out of fear.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.