The Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time - Cycle A 2019-2020

Ezekiel 33:7-9 | Romans 13:8-10 | Matthew 18:15-20

Oh God, by whom we are redeemed and receive adoption, look graciously upon your beloved sons and daughters that those who believe in Christ may receive true freedom and an everlasting inheritance.  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.

Having been a priest for over 53 years, it seems clear to me that I do not have the same images of the role of the church that I did when I began my ministry, and what I pray that has happened to me is that I’ve evolved into a greater understanding of who God is and who I am and what we’re here to accomplish.  And to me, always any position that one takes, where they have authority, they have great power, and that line that’s in the gospel, is also in the readings last week, is a really powerful one, very hard to understand fully, because it’s easy to misunderstand.  And that is one has the power, the power to be able to bind on earth, and whatever they bind on earth is bound in heaven.  Whatever they loose on earth is loosed in heaven.  It might sound as if you’re giving a human being the power to determine whether or not someone is saved.  Excommunication would be the way that some people would mind – some people imagine binding would be binding someone to a regulation that excludes them from the community, and if you lose someone from that, you bring them back into the community, and the church used that tactic for centuries, especially during the Middle Ages to achieve what they believed were something good.  They would excommunicate a king or a whole country, but the danger in that is that it seems that it gives to one person the authority that only belongs to God.  No one but God can exclude someone from the kingdom of God, not so much because they don’t have the power, because they couldn’t possibly know enough about the person to make that kind of judgment.  So the shadow of the church is often this image of they are in charge of your life, and they will tell you whether or not you are acceptable to God.  And when that is done with the thing these readings focus on, it works.  When it’s not, it’s a disaster.  So let’s look at, again, these readings.  They are powerful. 

The first thing that we understand from Ezekiel, a long time ago he was basically telling the people that they have, as believers, a responsibility to one another, that if someone does something wicked and you just let it go or worse, treat them as they were treating someone else, do something wicked to them and condemn them, if you do that, you might be responsible for their death.  But if you take time to warn them or try to show them the truth and they still refuse, then you will not die for their guilt, but they will die for their own guilt.  It’s an amazing statement from way back when, but it’s a kind of legalistic formula, saying you have a responsibility to protect people from themselves and what they do to themselves and what they do to others.  You have a responsibility to your brothers and sisters, which is something that is intrinsic to one of the most basic qualities that the gospel calls us to – love – love. 

So Paul comes in and says the whole essence of Christianity is to enable you to grow into the nature that God has created in you, and every human being is made to be an imitation, a reflection of God.  And God is love so that within every one of us there is this seed, this beautiful thing that longs to grow into fullness, and it’s called care, compassion, empathy, love.  And so the beautiful thing about Paul, he’s saying, “Okay, when you look at all the rules and laws that we have in the Old Testament that demanded certain actions from people, when you boil it all down, you don’t have to have rules and laws anymore.”  You just have to have a person whose heart is ignited, awakened to the role that it has of being the container, the holder of God’s divinity, and when God’s divinity is inside of you and when you allow it, it gives you the freedom to act in accord with your nature.  I think it’s so interesting.  For most people and for me, at many times, I was so worried about breaking a law, because I thought if I did that, I would be condemned by the church, by a priest, by a righteous Christian.  So often what I did was try to be good, because I didn’t want to endure the rejection that would come with being bad.  That’s a motive, but it’s a very selfish motive.  It’s not based in the good of other people.  It’s based in our own good.  If there’s one way to talk about love, it’s to talk about a shift, a shift between I am the center of my life to you are the center of my life, in the sense that my role here in this world is to be a conduit of God’s mercy and God’s forgiveness.  And God’s mercy and forgiveness is a combination of this beautiful thing called love and justice – and justice.  It’s clear.  If you look at the history of the church, you can see where God dealt differently with people in the Old Testament than he did in the New Testament.  He told everyone in the New Testament that the obligation that God has, when he dwells in another person, is to be able to free them from the way evil insidiously causes other people to do evil.  When you’re a low level of consciousness and you’re all about yourself and someone has done something wrong, particularly to you, instead of saying, “I would love for this person to see through what they’re doing and notice that they’ve caused pain that’s unnecessary.  They’re causing themselves pain.  They’re on a journey that’s going to end up in a disaster, and I want so much to save them.”  Instead of that, we often have this thing called revenge, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and we want to do the same thing to them that they did to us.  It’s a normal human, lower-level of conscience response.  You do evil to me; I’ll do it back to you.  That law that said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was trying to tone it down so at least, if you did that to someone else, you wouldn’t do more to them than they did to you.  So if they plucked out one of your eyes, you could pluck out one of theirs but not two.  So that was kind of the beginning of this growth in consciousness, that there’s something intrinsically important about being an agent of bringing something to people that frees them from evil.  It’s called truth, but truth to take root inside of you needs to have a conduit, a way of getting to you.  And the way it gets to you is through a loving intention – a loving intention.

Jesus said to his disciples, “I have to give in to evil.  I have to allow these people to do these terrible things to me, and in response to that, I will love them, and I will forgive them.  And it will radically change them, but if I do what you ask me to do, if I do what the crowd jeered at me to do – “Hey, if you’re Jesus, if you’re the Son of God, come down from that cross –” they didn’t say this, but it would be clear in the minds of those who saw what was happening and knew how evil it was – “And destroy all these people that are trying to destroy goodness and life.”  And yet he does the opposite.  He has patience.  He knows somehow that the reason people have this side to them that is more toward revenge than it is toward transformation is because they don’t see, they don’t understand human nature.  They don’t understand what we’re doing when it comes to our spiritual life.  Spiritual life is not necessarily limited to any particular religion.  It doesn’t even require religion to be there, through religion can be an amazing asset and sometimes not an asset if it doesn’t teach the truth, but what’s beautiful about the truth is it’s already in you.  You already know it, and so we have this need to awaken our true nature.  And what’s interesting about that is that we have two things going on.  We have a conscious intention, like I might say to myself, “I see what happened in this family.  It’s horrible.  Someone did something horrible to this family.  I want them to realize what they’ve done, to change their ways.  I want them to not necessarily be punished, but I want them to see the light.”  That’s a really positive intention, and you can say it out loud and know it’s right, and still you have something else going on, which is an unconscious intention.  It’s based in your DNA that you learned when you were a child.  If you learned in the family that the only way to deal with those things that were not appropriate or right was to condemn the one who brought them there and exclude them from the family, if that’s what you grew up with, it’s just like you’re hardwired that way.  So how do you get out of that hardwired stuff and be able to just engage in the nature that God is awakening inside all of you?  Well, you have to be given something – given something.  You can’t do it on your own.

The unconscious, when it’s strong, will override the conscious.  It’s like you decide, “I’m going to stop a bad habit.  I’m going to stop smoking.  I’m going to stop overeating.  I’m going to stop not exercising.”  You say to yourself consciously, “That’s not good.  Yes, I will definitely start exercising and cut my diet out and stop smoking.”  But there’s something unconscious in you that says, “No, I deserve anything that I can get out of this world.  If it’s pleasure, I earned it.  I deserve it.”  If that’s your unconscious intention, you’ll never, ever change.  So what you’re asking for then is an awakening, an enlightenment to see that your unconscious intention is not going to produce what it promises, because you say, “Okay, if I’m going to indulge in all these things, I should be having a good life.  I enjoy it.  I enjoy smoking.  I enjoy drinking.  I enjoy all this stuff.”  None of that’s wrong unless it’s in excess, but still it’s so fascinating to me that we can have an ideal of who I should be, but unless we take serious time to reflect on who am I really, what do I really want most, and when it’s, “I want to live in the truth.  I want to live with the truth that’s in heaven, and it’s also made to come to light on earth.  And I want to be a person that brings that truth into people’s lives.”  And when you go into their life and tell them, “Hey, what you’re doing is destroying you,” and the intention, the deepest, clearest intention is, “I want you to be freed of everything that robs you of life.  That’s all I want.  I’m not interested in making you feel bad about what you did.  I’m not interested in punishing you.  I want you to change.”  And there’s some mysterious way in which that intention called love does something that nothing else can do, not any rule, not any law, not any threat of punishment.  That’s the secret of this whole thing that Jesus is trying to awaken in you and me, the possibility of transforming the world, and when you do it with another person, when two or three are together, another way to say when a community is filled with this kind of intention, which should be the church, it’s really powerful. 

I know, when I walk into a room of friends, I know when I’m in the company of people that are lovers, and I can walk into another room, where I don’t know that many people, or maybe I do know them, but I know I’m not in a safe place.  As you grow into your sensitivity to this quality that is so intrinsic to our spiritual life, you’ll notice when it’s not there, and it’s frightening.  But the delight is, when it is there, it’s so life-giving. 

Father, sometimes we misunderstand your teaching.  We’re not really conscious of who you are and what you’re longing for within us.  I thought forever it was perfection you wanted and you hated our sins, and now I see your compassion, your empathy goes so far beyond that kind of judgment.  And all you long for is life, full, rich, joyous for all of us, and yet we choose something less.  Bless us with openness of heart.  Bless us with a new consciousness of who we are and why we’re here so we can experience this joy of your kingdom, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.