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

1 Kings 19:9A, 11-13A | Romans 9:1-5 | Matthew 14:22-33

Almighty, everliving God who, taught by the Holy Spirit, we dare to call our Father, bring, we pray, through affection in our hearts the spirit of adoption as your sons and daughters that we may merit to enter into the inheritance, which you have promised, 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 time we’re living in is an amazing, amazing time.  The coronavirus, the worldwide pandemic has changed everything, and if there’s one simple thing we can say about the change is that we have stopped our normal routine of doing and being in places and around people to a much more solitude life, a quieter life.  For some it’s been a great, great hardship in terms of income, others not so much, but in either case, whether it’s the struggle we’re having to survive or the struggle just to adjust to something that’s so different, we’re all being changed.  And I’m convinced in the depths of my heart that this is essential and that it’s about a new awakening.  We needed time to stop, be quiet, reflect and hopefully open our eyes to see things that we have not been able to see because of the pace we live or the anxiety that we struggle with all the time.  I’m amazed in my own life – and it may be true in yours. At the beginning, it was really, really hard, and somehow it’s gotten easier.  I’m kind of surprised, because I thought, “It’s going to get worse and worse.  I’ll be more and more crazy, because I can’t spend time with people.  I’m not good alone, and I’m great – I’m a very social person.”  And it was extremely hard.  Somehow now it’s – I’ll tell you what I felt.  It’s like there’s a stillness that I discovered in me that likes to be still, that wants to be still, maybe not as intensely as we have to now, but my life was very, very full.  I kept it full on purpose so that I wouldn’t have to think about that much, I think, to be honest. 

So one of the things it’s made me do, as a priest who is engaged in trying as best I can to interpret the wisdom of this God who has revealed himself to us and has given me a gift, a voice and a mind that can explain things, and so I try my best to use whatever talent I have to try to convey the truth.  I think you know this about me, but I can’t talk about something unless I have experienced it.  I can’t be convinced, or if I do talk about it, it’s probably not as effective as those things I talk about that I absolutely know in my heart are true.  I will have to say to you that I really can say that I have very much doubted my God, and the doubts that I have of my God that cause me anxiety I can fill in with lots of activity.  So what have I doubted?  His existence?  Absolutely not.  That he is the only God?  No, I’m convinced of that.  No, what I think I have not opened my heart to is who he is and what he wants to do, how he can do it for us.  Our egos are amazing things in our world.  It’s like a part of us that really does like to be isolated, in the sense of I am the cause of who I am and what I do.  When it comes to spirituality, nothing could be further from the truth. 

So let’s look at this set of readings, because one of the things I think it’s about is about the issue of doubt, doubting that God is who he says he is.  So I want to go to Paul’s passage.  Paul is feeling great pain in his heart over the fact that something happened to him that has not happened to his friends that are Jewish, that are running the temple.  He sees that what he was shown is so important, so valuable, and they refuse to look at it, and he, Paul, had such a profound experience of seeing something that the rest of the Jewish community didn’t see.  The Israelites couldn’t believe that God was who he was, that he revealed himself to be something so different than they expected.  They were used to a God that had power over people, and now they are being told this God is not interested in running people’s lives, making them do things, frightening them into being better than they are.  But no, it’s about some mysterious way of entering into them and saying, “I accept you.  I love you exactly as you are, and nothing that you can do can come anywhere near what I can do through you, for you, with you.  Please let me do that.  Please let me enter into you and be a source of life and strength for you.  That’s all I want, and I have a disposition towards your sins.  I don’t even see them.  I don’t even pay attention to them, because I’m not interested in your past.  I’m interested in the present, you living, knowing that you are loved and protected, safe, that you have purpose and meaning.  That’s all I want.  Let me do that for you.”  It happened to Paul on a road that he was walking to Damascus, and what happened was he had this experience of Jesus speaking to him about, “Why are you persecuting me,” because Paul would have had to think that this Jesus was like so many other false prophets.  He was just there, and he was saying something about God that couldn’t be true, and now he sees this God, man, Jesus in his resurrected form in some kind of vision.  And his response bodily is he goes blind for three days.  And Jesus tells him he’s to go to Jerusalem and to preach, and then before he goes on that journey, he spends three years pondering, wondering, reflecting and becoming a different man.  It wasn’t an instant conversion by any way, shape or form.  It took time.  That’s one of the most exciting things about life.  It gives us the time to grow and to understand who this God is, and the interesting thing that I want to stress is that the God that reveals himself in Jesus is not a God of power, force, enormous strength and judgmental and angry easily.  That’s what everyone thought gods were, and that’s the way God revealed himself at first, because he wanted people to realize he was like the gods they were worshiping, only he was going to reveal slowly that he was quite different.  And very slowly, over the whole Old Testament period, he gives sign after sign that there’s something hidden that you will find that has been hidden from the beginning, the mercy, the love, the patience, the care, the presence of God in your life. 

So we see in this first reading, Jeremiah, one of the prophets who is speaking often of God, and Jeremiah was one who would often get into major conflicts with followers of other gods.  They would have contests to see which god was the greatest, Baal or the God of Israel, and always the God of Israel outdid the fake god.  And it’s kind of interesting to see all of that happening.  What’s happening is that slowly they’re beginning to realize that all of the gods, there is this God of Yahweh, and to start off your relationship with him, you have to believe that he is not just the strongest God but the only God, the only source of truth.  And the truth in that first reading is so beautiful.  God had manifest himself for centuries.  All gods did, through thunder, lightning, fire bolts, tornadoes, volcanoes, and when they’d see this, they’d know gods were angry, and they would change their life.  He would send plagues and drought and all kinds of things as a way of saying, “If you don’t pay attention to me, I will rob you of everything you need for life.  You won’t exist.”  And that image in this first reading is that he’s not in those powerful symbols, but he’s in a whisper.  And what’s a whisper?  A private message to the one whose ear you are close to.  “I want you to know this.”  And that’s who he is.  He’s a God who whispers intimately into our ears, lying next to us at night, talking to us, sits with us during the day, talking to us, walks with us when we’re doing the work, talking to us.  And he has something so powerful he wants to say.  “I’m here.  I’m with you, and all I want is for you to allow me to enter into you so I can do the work that I know you long for me to do.”  But your ego is such a resistance that you’d rather do it yourself, and you feel like you want to earn it.  And that’s the original sin.  “I want to be in charge of what I’m doing.  I want to be the one that decides things, how I’m going to be saved, how I’m going to do my work.  I don’t want somebody else telling me something that doesn’t make sense to my mind,” until you can evolve enough to not depend solely on the mind but on the heart.  The mind is a place that understands things that are logical and practical.  The heart understands mystery, and the mind has a hard time with mystery.  It just doesn’t grasp it, because it can’t prove – it has no proof that this is real.  And if your mind has been thinking one way and you have something that happens and you don’t know how it happened, you tend to dismiss it without examining it carefully.

So look at the gospel.  When you see Jesus has just spent time with his disciples and performed an incredible, mysterious thing – he fed maybe 15,000 people with a few pieces of fish and a few pieces of bread, and they were still, I’m sure, thinking, “What was that?”  And so he sends them away, and he goes up to pray.  I’m sure he had a lot to say to his Father.  This is one of his most famous miracles, and he knew he’d be remembered for it, I suppose.  But anyway, he’s talking to his Father, and then he decides he’ll go out and join his disciples.  And he comes walking on the water, and of course their mind sees a human being, glowing, walking on water, and what do they think?  They didn’t say, “Oh, look.  It’s Jesus.  He can do anything.”  No, they said, “It’s a ghost.”  And then he said, “No, it’s me.”  And Peter is just so classic as a character.  He just jumps in and says, “I can do it.  I can do it.  I can do it.”  So he said, “Okay, if it’s you, give me the power to walk on water.”  And he said, “Okay, I will.”  So Peter starts walking on the water, but his mind says, “Wait, wait.  You’re walking on water.  That doesn’t make sense.  The wind is too strong.”  And fear enters in, and he cries out – and this is the most beautiful part of this gospel – “Save me.”  Immediately Jesus stretches out his hand and says, “Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt?”  Now, the God of the Old Testament might have done just the opposite.  If a god asked you to do something and wanted you to do it, and that’s all Jesus was asking for is that he would believe, then a false god would have said something like, “You of little faith,” and you drowned.  He would just say, “Okay, you don’t believe me?  You’re dead.”  He’d walk away without any care or interest.  That’s not Jesus.  It’s not the God that Jesus reveals.  His every moment is directed towards saving, and everything that happens – this is the most important thing I want to say.  Everything that happens is for us, a pandemic, a setback, a painful situation, having to deal without the things that give you comfort, that give you a sense of security.  He’s got to be the security that holds us all together.  He is our security, and he promises nothing will destroy us.  So we are invited to say the thing that Peter was able to say.  Whenever we’re in these situations, we would say, “Truly, truly you are the Son of God.  You are the one that saves the world, and you will save me.”  And we will somehow, through whatever pain and suffering, which means accepting things that are beyond our understanding – when we accept them, they become 50 times, 1,000 times more insightful.  That’s our challenge, to listen and to believe.

Father, you’ve given us an almost impossible task for a human being, and that’s to trust in something that’s so beyond our understanding and logical way of thinking.  And it’s difficult for us to surrender to the beauty and the wonder of who you are.  So bless us with a kind of humble heart that doesn’t have to be in charge, that isn’t demanding to understand fully but can surrender to things that don’t make any sense to the mind but just feels so life-giving to the heart.  Release us from stress and from worry and fear for they destroy the very nature of who we are and keep us from the joy that you have intended us to experience in this life.  And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.