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

Isaiah 55:1-3 | Romans 8:35, 37-39 | Matthew 14:13-21

Draw near to your servants, oh Lord, and answer their prayers with unceasing kindness that, for those who glory in you as their creator and guide, you may restore what you have created and keep safe what you have restored.  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.

Time is such a strange thing.  I turned 80 years old this year.  It seems strange to be 80.  I don’t feel 80.  I don’t feel that much different than I felt, maybe, about myself when I was in my 70s, 60s, 50s, but I know I’ve changed a great deal.  But when I go back, thinking of when I entered the seminary, actually it was 60 years ago, immediately after – well, before the council, the Vatican Council, which so much changed the focus of the church, and I remember the things that we studied.  The core of the curriculum was pretty simple.  Toward the end of your theology training, those last four years, you were focusing very much on theology, who is God, and moral theology, what does he ask of us, and what are the rules and laws that are built into our heart, and the history of the church.  There wasn’t any course on spirituality, which there probably is today, nor was there a big emphasis on scripture.  It was more about church doctrine rather than going to scripture, which was probably typical of the church before the council.  The scripture was the work of the church to interpret what it meant, and it would tell us what it meant.  And we were not necessarily – certainly if you go back in history not too long ago, we were never encouraged to read the Bible, as Catholics, on our own, because we would be too prone to misunderstanding it.  And there’s a little bit of wisdom in that, also not much trust in human nature, but the danger is, what scripture is, it’s such a strange, wonderful piece of literature and truth and wisdom and infused words with Spirit.  And one of the things that it reveals is a God who revealed himself slowly over time, and a God who was presented to, let’s say Abraham and to Moses, when he was guiding the people, is not fully who he was, because there’s no way to understand God the Father without understanding Jesus.  And Jesus is the final piece, the final keystone that holds it all together, and it’s not until you see God incarnate in a human being that you begin to understand who he is.  And who he is, is so radically different than what a story from the Old Testament might imply.  In the Old Testament it seems he was more likely to be someone who was angry when we failed, who was judgmental, who had a short fuse, who lost his patience, who often wanted to destroy everybody because he was so frustrated with their hard-heartedness, their egos that wouldn’t change.  All of that is in there.

The frightening thing about being a preacher and a teacher of scripture to the people –  and that’s what a homily does.  The word homily means a reflection on scripture.  Sermon is a religious topic in a talk, but we were taught after the council, no, it’s got to be a homily, and the homily has to go to the scripture and dig into it and break it open and make it real in terms of today’s world.  And that’s what I struggle to do, and it’s such a strange thing, because if you are not sensitive to trying constantly to stay with the fullness of the message through Jesus, you can come up with a God that is really scary.  And many people do, and you know that fear is one of the greatest motivators that human nature has.  So it’s easy to see, if I were a religious leader and I wanted to get the people to stop doing something, I would tell them, “If you don’t stop, you die.  He’s going to cast you into hell.”  And yet in the New Testament, you see Jesus so clearly making it so – making sure that we see who he is, and he is forgiveness, and he is never, ever intending to condemn, never.  He is not condemning people to hell.  People are condemning themselves by their actions to hell, but his intention always is not to punish the sinner but to save him or her, to transform them.  And so you can see so beautifully in the ministry of Jesus his servant heart.  He wants more than anything to create for us a world that he has intended us to have, and it is supposed to be good, wonderful, life-giving, not painless, not easy but wonderful.  

So I want to start with this set of readings, because it seems that to understand it properly, you need to have one thing onboard, and that is an understanding of who God is in terms of what is he doing with you and with me.  What does he long to see change in you and me?  It’s not to get us to stop sinning.  That’s a byproduct, and what you need to then understand, if you’re going to respond to this intention of God, you need to have some clue or some kind of sense of who you are, what really satisfies you.  And then you would hear very differently, I think, this set of readings particularly, because it strikes me that the first reading is saying something very, very clear to the heart.  In fact, most all the things that Jesus teaches, when he teaches us about our nature, he’s going to rely upon our heart to know what he’s talking about.  The mind has a really hard time accepting someone else’s insight, someone else’s way of seeing when it feels it sees already exactly what is, and it’s patterned this life after all that it thinks.  And so when you’re asking somebody to change what they think, you’re really in many ways saying, “I want you to change and be someone you’re not.”  And if that person you think you’re supposed to be is your full identity, it’s like someone saying, “Well, I want you to die.”  That part of you dies, and that’s why we have as the core of what this transformation is about is a thing called crucifixion.  Something has to die, and what Jesus was doing, it seems to me so clearly, when he accepted the plan of the Father, that he would have to give up his whole ministry and his desire to change the world, and as a man and as an ego, he had to have a lot of plans that went way beyond those three years.  When he found out that he was going to be asked to leave it, when it was just taking root – it was just like these seeds he planted in the human race were just beginning to germinate, and he felt he had to nurture that. And the Father said, “No, this is all I need from you, and I want you to surrender to this.  And I want you to teach them something about the way I work, and the way I work is I need you.  I create you, because I need you to be an instrument of saving people, helping people, feeding people, freeing people from shame and guilt and fear.  That’s what I need you for.  That’s what you’re made for.”  So in a way, it was asking Jesus to stop what he was doing, even though he just began, and surrender to a plan that was bigger than he was.  And the ego had to resist that, and that’s why he said no two times before he finally said, “Okay, Father.  If this is really what you want, then I’ll do it, because I surrender myself to you, because I know the only thing you would ever do would be for me, for my work, for my intention.”  And he said yes. So we need to basically understand that what God is intending to do is move us from an ego-centric part of our being that is able to create a world, and when we create it, we’re in it.  That’s what’s so scary about the brain.  If it’s the world is a frightening place, it is frightening to you.  If you see it as a challenging, wonderful catalyst to help you grow and change and develop, then that’s what it is, and one is stressful and frightening and hard on us.  The other is natural, and it brings about peace.  So we have to get those two things in sync.  So it means we have to develop our heart and tame a little bit the mind.  They’re both so essential.  

So let’s look at this first reading.  Because it’s from Isaiah, it’s a long time ago.  Isaiah is one of those books in the Bible that probably, if you could only read one part of the Old Testament, it would be the best, because it’s always predicting the things that Jesus is going to bring into the world.  And so there’s this image of God the Father that is radically different than, say, the story about Moses and the law and the tablets and God being so frustrated with people that he wanted to kill them all and Moses talks him out of it.  That’s one God.  Seems very different than this one, because Isaiah is saying, “No, this God is making a promise to you.”  But maybe he was implying to the people, “This promise is not yet fulfilled, and it won’t come until the Messiah comes.  But what I’m promising you is every single thing you need, everything you want to live your life as fully as it was intended to be and experience the peace and the joy and the enthusiasm that comes into someone’s life when they’re so – their life is effective.”  That’s what we want, and he said, “What I want you to do is believe that whatever it takes for you to do that, I’m giving it to you.  So don’t think that you have to go out and get the things that you need to be able to live this kind of surrendering to reality and to my will and to my ways.  No, I have covered all that you might need to do in order to evolve high enough to be able to see this message.”  It’s called redemption.  He did it for us.  So these images are so beautiful.  There’s, “Don’t work for anything.  This is all there.  It’s all a gift.  All you have to do is be thirsty.  All you have to do is listen and come to me and listen.”  It even says, “To come to me heedfully,” and I think what that means is the part of you that can heed, listen, can hear and understand this relationship that God wants to have with us and the presence of what it brings to us is only through the heart, because the heart can know without figuring it out. The mind has to be able to somehow be able to figure things out.  I think you know enough about the difference between the brain and the heart.  They’re made as the perfect partnership, but they operate very differently.  The mind, as I said, needs proof and needs something that it can say, “Okay, this makes sense to me, so I ‘ll believe it.”  And since the mystical world is what God is calling us into, you’ll never understand how it works.  It’s angels, saints, miracles.  How do you explain that to the mind?  You can’t, but the heart?  The heart just takes to it like, “Yes, of course.  I know this works.”  And true, the heart will have experience after experience that affirms what it believes, and so there’s a way it’s sort of giving you proof but not the same, the brain.  The brain is different.  I think the most interesting thing about the brain is how it resists someone else’s power over them or even with them.  God never wants to overpower you, but he wants to empower you.  Empowerment means new insights, changes, radical changes.  That’s hard for the ego, easy for the heart. 

So the first thing, you’ve got to make sure in this journey, this spirituality that I teach and the work that we’re doing together, you have to understand there’s nothing you do to earn it or to work for it.  Vatican 2 made a profound statement when it said, “Holiness is the right of everyone who believes in God,” holiness.  In the ‘40s, ‘50s, the word holy meant a kind of person that wore a long, black dress if they were a woman, and a black suit and a white, little collar – to us, the only ones that were holy were the hierarchy and the priests and the nuns, because they gave up their life, and they didn’t take – they were pure.  They were sort of separate from the world, and that made them holy.  And nothing would be further from the truth.  They were – could be holy, but it’s not the only way you do it.  In fact, it seems more exciting to me, though I don’t take anything away from those kinds of strict ways of life, but just to be engaged in everything with this wisdom inside of you is wonderful.  So once you have it, Paul goes on to say, “Look, nothing that’s difficult, nothing that’s hard is going to separate you from this, this gift.”  And it’s funny, because you look at Old Testament.  If God is taking care of their needs, they believe in him.  If he doesn’t make their life comfortable, he loses it.  So that’s what this is referring to.  Don’t base your faith in God in terms of your comfort level.

But then the gospel, which is so beautiful and so wonderful, so intriguing, what’s Jesus teaching when he’s there?  John the Baptist has just died.  He must have been extremely reflective, and he goes away to be quiet and be by himself, and of course the crowds come.  He needs solitude.  He needs to be away from the world, but the world cries for him.  “Come.  Feed us.  Feed us.  We’re hungry.”  And so he does, but he says something so powerful.  “I will feed you.  Don’t worry, but I won’t be with you always.  So what I’m doing is I am promising you that I will dwell in each of you, and my indwelling presence will be food to everyone around you.”  So the story is so powerful when you’re looking at it.  When Jesus said, “I can feed all these people with a miracle, 5,000 with another 3,000 women and children, a piece of cake.”  “Well, do it.”  “Well, no, I’m not going to do it.  You’re going to do it.”  What does that mean?  “You can do anything with me inside of you, and the most important thing you can be – food to your brothers and sisters.”  What kind of food?  Energy, life, stress lessness, goodness, modeling a way of life that makes so much sense that, when we’re in that way of life, we’re so comfortable and so at ease and so safe.  That’s the gift of being who we’re intended to be. 

Father, your goodness, your generosity, your mercy are so far beyond our mind to comprehend, but our heart understands.  And when we live in that atmosphere, in that environment, in that comfort of that sense of who you are, we find ourselves feeling so much less stress.  It is stressful times for us, this virus, how are economy is going.  So please bless us with a conviction that all of this somehow has purpose and meaning and is going to bring us to a place of abundant life.  And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.