The Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Cycle A 2019-2020

Oh God, who has prepared for those who love you good things, which no eye can see, fill our hearts, we pray, with the warmth of your love so that loving you and all things and above all things, we may attain your promises, which surpass every human desire.  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.

This is a fascinating set of readings.  The overarching truth that we see in them is that God has come into the world to reach all people, to call everyone into his community, into a loving community that understands who he is and why we’re here and who God is and who we are as human beings.  It’s clear that, from the first reading, it’s that God has called all men, all women, not just one group, not just the Jews, but everyone is called to be in a relationship with the God who created every one of us. 

Then Paul’s reading from Roman’s, he says something so fascinating about his insight into who we are as human beings, and he knows that he has been given this challenge to speak to the Jews and to try to open their hearts to who God is.  But he found himself, when he understood who Jesus is and what he wants of him, he went ahead and found himself drawn most especially to the Gentiles.  He had pain in his heart over the fact that the Jews were so stubborn and would not accept Jesus, but he was eager to show to the Gentiles the beauty of this God revealed in Jesus.  And he was so successful but always carries this pain inside of him that, “I’d give this up,” as he said last week, or, “I wish so much that the Jews would understand this.”  But their hearts were closed.  Their minds were closed to something so radical and so different as Jesus, but then at the end of it he says the most interesting thing. 

The thing that the Jews had such a hard time with was the mercy of God, the mercy, the thing that no one really realized who God was until Jesus entered the world and he reveals himself as a lover, but most shockingly a lover who loves sinners.  The broken part of humanity he loves, and in that act of loving that, he shows and proves to all of us what we need to understand about who God has always been, a lover of those he created no matter what they do or who they are.  That love is never diminished by any action they have, but in the Old Testament it was always clear, if you didn’t do as God asked, you were left, rejected.  You were on your own, and your enemies would overtake you.  That idea that God would reject sinners is probably the most serious thing we need to look at.  If there’s any shred of that inside of us, we’re going to be caught in one of the most obvious things that most people carry inside of them as they struggle to become who God calls them to be, and that’s shame over their humanity.  It’s fascinating to me that the first thing that we have in the story of creation is a story about human beings separating themselves from God, hiding from God.  The first words that God spoke to sinful humanity was not, “What have you done,” but, “Where are you?  Why aren’t you here with me?  Why are you hiding?”  “We’re ashamed.  We’ve done something that we feel is not your will, and if we’ve done that, we believe, like we believe our experiences, love is conditional.  And if you don’t do what the one that you want to love you wants, you lose their love.  You find yourself rejected.” 

I spent a couple of times at a wonderful treatment center in Wickenburg, Arizona, called the Meadows, and one of the things that we learned there is about conditional love and codependency.  And one of the things that was shocking to me, in a sense, was that the hardest thing for a child growing up in a family, the most abusive thing that can happen to a child is rejection, being ignored, being not considered as important at all.  That can leave a wound so deep, so wide open that there’s such a difficult time for that person to find their own value.  I remember there was a story of one of the young men in our group, and he was saying, when he was a child, he remembers doing something that didn’t make any sense to him as an adult.  But every time he left the room – let’s say they were watching television or listening to the radio, and he would leave the room, and he’d say, “Well, I’m going to the bathroom now.”  Then he’d come back, and everybody’s still watching television.  Nobody noticed.  He said, “I’m back now.”  He said, “I used to do that all the time, letting people know that I was there.”  He was there because his brother had committed suicide, and he struggled with those same thoughts.  And it was just such a powerful image for me of neglect, someone important to you looking at you and saying, “You’re not valuable.” And from my own experience, I can remember so vividly whenever I – even today when I sin, I feel like there’s something wrong with me.  I’m 80 years old, and what the hell am I doing still going back to these stupid sins, and I know they’re wrong, and I know they don’t work in terms of promising – I don’t get what they promise.  They don’t really give me any kind of real joy, but I find myself going back to them.  It’s silly to say this, but I just feel there’s something really wrong in my relationship with God.  I shouldn’t be human. 

So that brings me to the gospel.  Jesus’ humanity is all over this gospel, and by that I mean we’re looking at a human being working for God, filled with divinity but a human being with all the weaknesses and struggles of a human being, like impatience, frustration.  And he’s working so, so hard to reach the Israelite people, and they were so resistant.  And he has these – some of the things he said to the Pharisees, if you were looking at his work as a nonjudgmental observer, you might say, “Well, do you think you should have been calling those main people that ran the temple hypocrites and people twice as fit for hell as their converts and ranted and screamed at them?  Was that smart?  Maybe you could have worked a little bit more subtly and tried to win them over.”  But Jesus, in the face of their hypocrisy as a human being went nuts in a way, crazy.  He just said, “I can’t stand it.”  His humanity, beautiful humanity, impatient, intolerant at times, not loving all the time, and now in this case you see Jesus being very frustrated over the fact that he’s struggling so hard to open the hearts of the Israelite people.  And they’re so resistant, because the system Jesus is inviting them into is so radically different than the system of justice and law.  You do this, and you’re guaranteed a place.  It doesn’t matter where your heart is or where your intention is.  You just do what you’re supposed to do.  It was an action-centered kind of spirituality or morality.  It’s all about your actions.

And Jesus is so much more evolved than any of the prophets could have ever been.  He’s this mysterious connection of humanity and divinity, and it wasn’t until the fifth century, in 451, at the Council of Chalcedon that the church finally figured a way to talk about Jesus’ humanity and divinity.  And I love what they came up with, because it’s so perfectly mysterious that it doesn’t give you any kind of clarity as to, “Oh, of course that works,” 100 percent human, 100 percent divine.  How can someone be 100 percent perfect, 100 percent imperfect?  Well, question is, is imperfection, is that something that God sees as our greatest problem, and whenever we’re caught in it, we cut ourselves off from him?  No, it’s the opposite.  What this humanity and divinity coming together is, is this mysterious way in which we have to understand that, in our human nature, we find all the tools we need to be able to grow into more and more our own participation in divinity.  We’re not divine, but we participate in it.  We become a part of it.  What a beautiful thing that our humanity is there for a purpose, and the purpose is to learn patience and to learn tolerance and to learn that God looks at us with this strange, mysterious thing I never dreamed existed, because I never experienced it from a human being – unconditional love, that when you fail, there is not one shred of a decision on the part of God to separate himself from you.  It’s like a parent with a sick child.  The child is sick.  Oh well, he’s not functioning as he should, so that really bothers me.  So I’ll just dump him and get going with the healthy ones.  No.  No, his heart goes out most especially to the sinner.

And then we see in St. Paul, in this set of readings, a phrase that seems almost impossible to believe.  When he says, “You know what God did?  He imprisoned all of us in this thing that we call our weaknesses, our sins, disobedience, and he said we’re subject to that.  We’re under the power of a spirit inside of us that’s going to resist God by its very nature.  It’s egocentric.  It wants to be the heart of everything.  It doesn’t want to surrender to ways of thinking that it doesn’t think are correct, that make – the will and the mind is naturally resistant to something different.  It makes one have to admit that, “I made a mistake.  I’ve been wrong.”  And isn’t it interesting how it seems, when you look at the way God responds to our sins with nothing but love and compassion and understanding, then why is it that we as human beings still fall into this trap of shame?  “There’s something wrong with me.”  You need to feel guilt.  If you don’t have guilt, you’re a sociopath.  “That was wrong.  I see that.  Okay, I did something wrong.”  That’s a good, healthy description of how we should function but, “There’s something wrong with me if I did something wrong?  There’s something intrinsically wrong and negative about me?  There’s something in me that makes God look at me with disgust?”  When I was a child, I learned from my teachers, and I pray not everyone had those same kind of teachers back in the ‘40s, but they really did ingrain in me that, when God sees me as a young boy sinning, he rejects me.  I was even taught that, when I sin, I’m nailing the nails into Jesus’ body.  It was a horrible experience.  I guess they were trying to make me so afraid of my weaknesses that I would control them with an ego and a will that can do that, which is a frightening thought, that the ego and the will can really repress everything in us that isn’t what we think it should be, and then we end up hating everybody else who is those things. 

It’s so clear to me that there’s nothing more essential for you and for me to believe than the mercy of God, and if you see Jesus as perfect, which I always did – if you see him as not a human but some God acting like a human, then there isn’t any way to identify with Jesus.  And yet that’s the core of what the New Testament is saying to us.  “Here is one like you, and he’s loved by his Father.  And he’s got weaknesses.”  It’s true he didn’t sin, but when we act on our human weaknesses, when we fall back into an egocentric mode, is that automatically a sin?  I don’t think I do it sitting there thinking, “Well, I should do this.  I shouldn’t give into my ego, but I’d like to.  So I know.  I’ll sit here and think for – now I think I’ll give into my ego.”  No.  I blurt out something to somebody who’s just corrected me or humiliated me or made me feel awkward or funny or different.  No, it’s automatic.  That’s so true of our nature.  When we’re working with our nature, we have to be patient and loving and merciful, just as Jesus is revealing to us that’s the Father’s response to your and my weaknesses, and there’s something about the anger that I was taught that God had over our sins and the way sins can hurt his people and so he goes to punish those people that have done this harm.  That’s a very Old Testament image of God, but what it’s really about, today in the way in which I understand my God through Jesus, is there’s a sadness in him when we fail, not an anger so much as sadness.  There are quotes in scripture that imply that Jesus is saying, if we don’t do what we’re supposed to do, we’re all going to be condemned.  And I don’t know if those are all translated exactly right, but it doesn’t really sound like the God that I have learned to love through the actions of this God/man Jesus.  I don’t see him as somebody who’s angry over our sins but sad over the effect sin can have on us and the people we love.  It’s like watching people stay in a disposition that harms people, that robs them of their dignity and their value is a sadness in God.  The image of weeping over Jerusalem is so powerful to me, God weeping over the fact that something is going on that is causing pain, and it doesn’t have to go on.  And if we just understand we are loved in that sin, there’s a much greater chance that we’ll change. 

So just consider it.  We are caught in sin, caught in disobedience as a human, and when we struggle with it, we learn about how to free ourselves from it and how God frees us from that.  But it always depends upon one key piece.  You are loved.  You are safe.  You’re forgiven, and you have a purpose.  And the purpose is to evolve and to change and to grow, and God is patient, not in a rush.  And he has a deep faith and trust in our nature that ultimately we’ll turn to him and allow him to truly love us.

Father, your goodness, your love, your mercy is so far beyond our expectations that we need your help in grasping the fullness of being loved unconditionally like you so generously do.  Bless us with the freedom from shame and from a distance that we create over our weaknesses, knowing that you are there, filled with mercy, filled with understanding, filled with compassion, which brings us great peace and hope and life.  And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.