3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time: Cycle C 21-22
THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
Nehemiah 8:2-4a, 5-6, 8-10 | 1 Corinthians 12:12-30 | Luke 1:1-4; 4:14-21
Almighty, everliving God, direct our actions according to your good pleasure that in the name of your Beloved Son we may abound in good works. 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.
One of the things that has happened to me as a priest is that I was ordained at a time in the church history that was phenomenal, and that was the Vatican Council. For about every hundred years, as an average, the church has gathered its leadership together to analyze and look at the way in which — what direction the church is moving and where things were developing. And from the beginning of that history of the church, the majority of the time since the time of Christ that there’s been councils called to crush a heresy, somebody trying to decide whether God was — Jesus was a God, or was he a man. That was one of the first major council decisions that were made, and they decided he was both human and divine, which I love that answer, because it sets the tone for everything that is being revealed by God. And that is its mysterious quality. It’s not a simple black and white, right or wrong religion. It’s filled with this mysterious thing called wisdom, which is a both/and kind of way of seeing the world. It is a — it takes into account the old and the new of the whole story of salvation history in a beautiful way.
So having grown up at that time, one of the things that happened that changed a lot was that there was a great emphasis placed in the Vatican Council, second Vatican Council, and that was the emphasis on the individual, the individual’s conscience, the dignity of the individual and how the church had to look at herself to make sure that the things that she was teaching were there to enhance the life of the individuals in their own experiences. It was a wonderful shift away from a stress on the institution to a stress on the individuals in the institution. How is the church teaching and preaching to the people, and how are they responding? And there’s a tension there. There’s always been a tension between two different focuses. One we see in the first reading of this set of readings, and it’s where religion becomes an authority, outside authority that is based on their position. And your relationship to them is subservient, and you are listening to everything they tell you, and you follow it, not because you understand it or believe it necessarily but because you’re told to do it. You’re not only told what to do. You’re told how to feel about what you’re doing.
And so in this first reading, which is so beautiful, when Ezra the priest is bringing a law before the people — and the law was basically the Torah, the teaching of the core of the Old Testament. The Torah is the core, I guess, of what it is that Jesus initially came to teach his people. And it’s a law, and it’s a beautiful, powerful way of describing what’s right and what’s wrong. And the interesting thing about the way it’s described in this, it’s a long process to read this law, from early morning to midday, and the other thing I find interesting is that image of the person who’s proclaiming it is elevated and in a position of more importance, and everyone is bowing down to the ground and listening. And the most interesting thing to me is that then they begin to weep. They’re listening to all the things that they should be doing, and their human nature must be very much racing in their heads, saying, “I don’t do this. I haven’t accomplished this. I’m not that good yet,” or whatever. And I think it’s interesting. When Ezra notices that they’re all weeping, he says, “No, no. This is really wonderful stuff. You’ve got to trust in this. This is giving you knowledge that you need to have. You should be rejoicing.” And I think it’s interesting that, if the first reaction one has to being held to a higher code of behavior is sadness, there is something that’s hopeful. If you say, well, if you don’t know what it is you’re called to, that’s even more frightening, but if you know what the core of who you are meant to be is this, and it’s out of your reach, you’re in a better position than if you have no idea what’s right and wrong. So just imagine. What we have in the Old Testament is this wonderful tradition of giving people wisdom, and the best way to describe that wisdom is in the Ten Commandments. But there’s still external rules and laws outside of what we would say — it’s not so much that it empowers us to do it but tells us what it is.
But then the New Testament comes along, this beautiful, beautiful way of describing the mystery that is proclaimed in Jeremiah where it’s clearly stated that there’s coming a time when this law that you’ve listened to, that’s outside of you, that you’re going to follow because of the authority of the people over you is going to shift its focus. And it’s going to no longer be outside of you but inside of you, and what God had promised through Jesus, and then Jesus says it himself, is, “I’m going to write this on your hearts, write it in your mind. It’ll be in you. It’ll be part of you. You’ll know these things.” That’s the most beautiful thing about the Judeo/Christian tradition. You have to understand it first as a regulation and rule that is outside of someone, and your obligation is to follow it or be destroyed. The New Testament is no, it’s not as black and white as that. It’s no, you can be given this beautiful wisdom, this piece of information that you need, that you know who you are meant to be, but then you’re adding to that the most extraordinary gift of the New Testament, and that’s redemption, that every time you fail, every time you mess up, it’s not punishment but forgiveness, compassion, understanding. It just makes everything so radically different than the Old Testament, but still there’s this tension in institutional churches that I still find. The Vatican Council to me so excited me that now the focus was not so much on what the church is demanding but on the response of the people, and is what the church demanding correct? To even have the church ask itself that question back then was phenomenal and hopeful, but it’s always still a tension, a tension in this thing we call our faith, our religion.
And there’s two other images in this reading that help in this whole story of what I’m trying to make. In a way it’s the focus of my ministry. I want people to understand there’s this major shift between authority and power over you and a different kind of authority that empowers you. So power over you is Old Testament. Empowered is New Testament. And it doesn’t mean that some people aren’t in a position where they need power over them. They need to be told what to do. They need to be threatened. That will stay always. That’s part of a lower level of human nature. We have to have that, but that’s not all that’s available. And when I see this beautiful image of Jesus returning to his hometown to tell the people that he knows who he is now — and he grew up there, and I consider he was probably thought to be an outcast because of his story. Everybody knew that Mary wasn’t really a virgin — well, they thought she wasn’t a virgin, but she had a child outside of wedlock, and that made Jesus be considered one of the lowest forms of human nature, that he was illegitimate. There’s a lot of teaching about that or a lot of history about that, but nevertheless, the point being that he comes back, and he’s the ordinary human being and maybe less than an ordinary human being, and he proclaims the truth in such a beautiful way, saying, “Look, I’m going to be the one that explains this whole thing to you, not just by words but by my very actions. You’re going to see God in me do something that changes the entire relationship that the human nature has with divinity.” No longer is it about right and wrong, punishment and reward. It’s about this mysterious, mercurial place of wisdom where, in the process of our understanding who we really are and who God is and what we’re here for, we are given the right to make personal, conscious choices. And we’ll be held accountable for those choices, yes, in one sense, but when we make the freedom — we have the freedom to make the choice that we believe in, there’s something radically different about doing that which you believe in versus that which you must or are forced to do because you don’t believe in it. One leads to anger, shame, fear, and that’s the shadow of an authoritative religion that isn’t listening to your needs or your situation or your intention. It’s just laying this sort of — this imprisoning sort of sense that you have only one option here. “Do it this way, whether you think about it — whether you think it’s right or not. That’s all you — you don’t have any rights.” And what a tragedy to see that. Religion falls back on that as a default, and I think individually we fall back on it as a default. Sometimes things are just so, so complicated, and we go back to the most basic rules and laws. And that’s not all bad at all. Sometimes we need to tell some — when you’re in a difficult moral situation, “Tell me what to do. I don’t know what to do.” But then there’s times when you’re in a situation and you know in your heart what you must do, and the law says you can’t. Where are you? And if people follow too much that old system, if they just say, “That’s the only system we have. It’s the only system that we will allow you to have,” then they’ve done something so violent to your very dignity. And that doesn’t make an authoritarian church evil or bad. It just means that you have to be careful of any institution, and every institution has its shadow. There’s no doubt about it. I’m not claiming that any religion is free of an authoritarian override over your conscience, but at the same time, you have to know the fullness of the story.
And the beauty of the story — the second reading, which is one of my favorites, when it talks about, “You know what? A community of believers are made up of all different kinds of people.” And you want all different kinds of people, and you want some people that are very, let’s say, like the attractive parts of the body, their beautiful eyes, their beautiful lips, whatever other parts. I don’t really have to say them, but you use sometimes those kinds of words to describe them. And they’re not that attractive, and they’re not that beautiful. I don't know. Maybe we think that, in an institution where authority is so powerful, that we can create in a community only where there’s beautiful, life-giving Christians. You know that kind of religion where everybody in that religion sort of begins to talk the same and have the same phrases and the same way of seeing things. That’s a caricature of what is truly a believing, faith-filled, God-fearing, God-loving community. We’re on all different levels of goodness, and yet all of us are important. All of us are part of that story.
So I guess what I’m really trying to say in the simplest way, that the wisdom that I’ve learned for a long time, through this period of many years, is just so simple and so clear. We have a God who loves. We have a God who forgives. We have a God who trusts in us. He gives us the best directions he can and says, “These are the things, the principles you need to follow. Now you make decisions, and you do it. And if you fail and you realize later it was the wrong thing to do, you don’t feel bad, because you did the best that you could.” It’s the idea of living with the compassionate understanding, loving presence inside of you that has one fundamental reason for being there: to enable you to become all that you’re intended to be. All that you’re intended to be, and how can you be that without making mistakes? How can you be that way without going through experience after experience of maybe making the right choice or the wrong choice? Each one has an incredible value, but if you don’t live in a kind of open spirit of that, then you have this authoritarian, demanding, judgmental, punishing situation. And just be careful. Be careful of it, because it robs you of a dignity, and you know how angry people get when their freedoms are taken away from them. There’s probably nothing more interesting about the pandemic. When we see people being forced to do something they don’t believe in and they just — you can see this human nature part of us that just says, “I am not going to do something I don’t believe in.” And there’s something in that that’s valid, but there’s something in the promise that we’re given the wisdom to make the right decision that is so hopeful. That’s the reason to rejoice, eat fine foods and drink fine wines. That’s the way to do it. Amen.
Father, you’ve created community after community of believers, and we’ve taken different stands, and different issues, as different religions have evolved, always have been there. So guide us with the enthusiasm that you have promised to fill us with when you say, “I will be in you. I will write my laws on your heart and on your mind. You will know what is right.” That’s our inheritance. That’s such a gift to celebrate. So thank you for the gift of wisdom, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.