EIGHTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME 

Sirach 27:4-7 | 1 Corinthians 15:54-58 | Luke 6:39-45

Grant us, oh Lord, we pray that the course of our world may be directed by your peaceful rule and that your church may rejoice untroubled in her devotion.  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 very interesting set of readings to me, because it seems that we are talking about things that are not necessarily the classic things that you think of that religion is drawing you into.  It almost feels like these readings are written by a therapist.  He’s concerned about your well-being.  He’s concerned about your growth and your integration, becoming a person of authenticity, integrity.  

So I was reading the reading from Corinthians.  That last paragraph really struck me, and it said we should be devoted to the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord, your labor is not in vein, meaning if you do God’s work, which is certainly something that we have to produce something on our end, meaning trust, openness, receptivity, honesty.  But the real work of the work of the Lord is God working through you, working in you, being a part of you, and that’s what I think he means when he talks about when the corruptible is clothed with incorruptibility, the moral clothes itself with immortality.  We have a human nature.  We all know our human nature.  It’s got a selfish side to it.  It’s got a kind of primitive thing it goes back to over and over again, and that makes total sense to me.  We don’t evolve and grow into a totally different person.  We grow into a person that has a kind of integration of the old and the new, the selfish and the selfless.  And so this work of God that is giving us a taste of divinity, a presence of divinity in our very being, we can rely upon that.  We go to that, and it has a wonderful potential to lift us beyond a kind of self-centered selfishness into other-centeredness.  And that other-centeredness is always, always concerned about the well-being of another person.  It wants the other person to become everything they’re intended to be, everything they long to be.  

Paul also talks about what it is that, when people are not in the right relationship with each other, something is raging.  Some enemy has entered it.  It’s called sin, and the power of sin is interesting.  It comes from rules and laws.  And I don't know whether you feel it this way, but sometimes we can have regulations in our way of seeing ourselves or the way we expect other people to act or to do their thing, whatever it is.  And it’s so interesting to me that there is this kind of power of expecting things to be a certain way that would be our own set of rules and laws that get in the way of our being in union with each other, because sin comes from rules and regulations, having to be someone you’re supposed to be, expecting other people — they should be who they’re supposed to be.  And if you want a real understanding of the effects of sin in your life, there’s always going to be separation.  Separation, and that separation, when it comes to our relationships with each other, even our relationship with ourselves, is that whole issue of judgment.  We talked about it last week, and it’s again in this set of readings.  Stop judging. 

Isn’t it interesting that of all the things Jesus has said about what we need to be, the one thing we seem to just have such a hard time paying attention to — because in my experience, religious people can be the most judgmental, the most critical, the most always evaluating other people’s performance, or we even — as a Catholic priest, growing up after Vatican 2, it seemed like I entered into a church that initially, back in — that would be the mid-’60s — was divided between those who believed this new ideas — the new ideas of the council were so wonderful and exciting, and others felt they were detrimental to the regulation way in which they understood religion.  And there was always this tension, and it was always you were judged.  Are you a pro-Vatican 2 or an anti-Vatican 2?  It was crazy, and it’s always been that way in my life, it seems.  I’ve entered into the world of religion at a time, at least within the Catholic Church, that there’s always this division.  And so when I’m thinking about this way of imagining people should be a certain way — imagine that as a kind of rule in our psyche.  We say, “Okay, this is the way people should act.  This is what it means to be Catholic.  This is what it means to be Christian.  This is what it means to be a good person.”  If we have those set regulations in our mind, then we can’t listen, can’t listen to another person without judging them, and the judgment immediately sets up a separation.  We’re somehow looking down on them, or if we happen to judge them as much more intelligent, much more well-read or well-formed in what they are talking about, we can feel that they’re elevated above us, and we feel separated that way.  

But if you can imagine the real work, the real work of the gospel in your heart and in my heart is to be connecting to people, to be connecting, not judging, not evaluating but listening to them, paying attention to them, wanting something in your own mind — I’ll call it your intention — that they become fully who they’re intended to be, and you listen not with judgment but with interest and curiosity.  I’ve tried to do this, and it’s interesting.  I think like a lot of people, I can be competitive, and especially if somebody else is talking about maybe their spiritual life or their work, or they’re talking about another priest’s work, and I can start comparing myself to them and feeling, “Oh my God, they’re better than I am,” or, “Oh, I’m so much better than they are.”  All that stuff immediately sets up a division, and the last thing that God’s work is engaged in is dividing us.  It’s always drawing us into each other, and so if we play with this image of judgment as a sin that is there for causing separation and isolation from people — and I think it’s interesting that Paul goes on to say that the sting of death is sin, and I think — I don’t know if this is what this means, but it’s fascinating to me to think about it.  Does that mean that the thing that really frightens us about our death is whether or not we’ve sinned or not or whether or not we’re really forgiven by the God who says he is filled with forgiveness?  So there it is again.  Sin is division, division between human beings and division between ourselves and a God who said, “I’m here to save you.  I’m here to forgive you.  I’m here to accept you.”

So let’s look at this image of the gospel, because I think it’s really a beautiful way to imagine how we have to be careful in our way of listening so that we don’t end up in judgment, and we don’t end up in separation and isolation.  But the image is there’s something that we’re supposed to do if we’re involved in this work of being authentic and integrated, and that is some self-reflection.  You can’t grow unless you take time to understand your story, your background, who you came from, those early years that formed you so intensely in terms of things that are what I would call your default.  We respond to situations because of the way we were trained to respond in the family of origin we have, and then we grow up in a city, in a certain place.  We have certain relationships.  Some of those are very positive.  Some of those can be negative.  We can engage ourselves in people that are life-giving, and unfortunately we can be the victim of people who suck life out of us.  You have to pay attention to all of that in order to understand who you are.  And why is that so important?  Because when Jesus is talking to his disciples, he’s putting on a therapist hat, as I said earlier, and it seems like what he’s saying is, “Look, unless you look at your own stuff, unless you have self — examine your life and you recognize there are things in you that are there because of the negative things that have happened to you or the patterns in which you’ve grown up, unless you can realize that there are things that block your ability to see and to hear and to connect with people, unless you know that and face those things, you’re going to do the most classic things that all of us do.”  When you have a really irrational response to somebody’s, let’s say, imperfection or maybe their self-centeredness or whatever it is that they’re proclaiming without even realizing it in their speech, and you begin to see it and feel it, if you’re filled with judgment and it’s a rational, intense judgment against them,  guaranteed that thing that you can’t stand in them is the very thing — it’s the beam in your eyes, the thing you have not looked at.  What a real tragedy it is to be caught in that kind of system where your reactions to other people are based on some kind of repressed understanding that you’re supposed to have of your own faults.  So isn’t it interesting that the only way you can begin this wonderful work of connecting with people through the way we speak, through what we say — if you’re filled with judgment about those things, you’re not going to get very far in terms of learning about both who you are and who the other person is. 

And there’s something about your heart, this thing in the middle of your chest that is filled with divinity, clothed with divinity, and it’s there that you’re going to find your intention.  The intentions you have in a relationship with a human being, is it to evaluation them, judge them, become better than they are or evaluate whether they’re better than you are, whatever, are you going to be in that game?  Are you going to get free of that and enter into relationships with people?  And we do it by listening attentively, and when we listen with intention and curiosity and wonder about who they are, maybe what they’ve been through in their life, and we’re not filled with judgment, there’s this wonderful feeling of oneness, unity, connection.  That’s what we long for the most.  When I think about it, the pandemic has been such an interesting experience, but I know that I can be in a funk for a couple of days when I’m by myself, and I pick up the phone, and I talk to somebody.  And all of a sudden, I feel this energy coming, flowing into me, and maybe it’s flowing back to them, I hope.  And there’s that dynamic that is where grace operates in communion with another person.  So you can feel why Paul is saying what he’s saying, and also Jesus, what he’s saying, he’s trying to get people attentive to the way in which we communicate.  And if we understand that the heart, where God dwells, is interested in reaching into the heart where someone else dwells and wants to give them some kind of wisdom and insight into who they are, how we listen is amazingly affected, because we listen without judgment, with curiosity and maybe even then sometimes with sadness or a kind of, I don't know, longing that they shouldn’t have gone through what they went through that caused this problem in them that makes them so judgmental or makes them so bitter or makes them so negative.  If you have this compassionate thing moving between you in conversations, then those conversations aren’t just information passing back and forth, but it’s grace, this mysterious thing we’re clothed in that is different than our corrupt nature.  It is filled with incorruptibility.  It is filled with an energy that enters into another person and gives them some kind of hope, even though you haven’t corrected them, haven’t told them that they’re overly judgmental, because sometimes if you attack someone for their weaknesses and they’re not willing to look at their weaknesses, you’ve only made those weaknesses stronger in them, because they feel like they’ve been attacked.  And their self-centered ego part of them says, “No, no.  I’m not going to let you attack me.  I will prove it to you that I am who I am, and I’m going to stay with who I am, because that’s who I am. Blah, blah, blah.”  Defensiveness.  

Now, to be free of anything that separates us from another human being is a grace that I long for, and I know you long for it deep inside of you, because the heart that God has created in us, that has been given whole and complete, that has been perhaps damaged in our past, still longs for this kind of integrity and authenticity.  I want to be a source of life to the person sitting across from me.  I don’t have to think about that all the time.  I just have it as a fundamental intention.  I want to be with people, and somehow because I’m with them, I want to receive something from them, and I want to give them something.  That’s the work of the Lord, and it’s not about preaching Jesus.  It’s not about quoting scripture.  It’s not about — certainly not about correcting and judging that other person, but it’s all about paying attention to the intention that’s in your heart.  “I want to be connected.  I’d like to be a part of who you are.”  It may be in a 10-second, 20-second interchange between two people, and it may be in a lifetime of spending time together.  But the intention is the same, and when you’re dealing with the work of the Lord, you know what?  It doesn’t have anything to do with quantity or even a necessarily quality.  It’s just that, if it’s his work and it’s coming through you, you’ll know that it’s going to bring life.  Amen.      

Father, we strive always to please you in what we do and how we act, how we speak.  So let us always trust, most especially, in your ability to give us everything that we need to go beyond our human nature, to go beyond our brokenness and backgrounds that keep us perhaps from being fully authentic.  We trust in you.  We open our heart to you.  We ask you to fill us with you.  We have every confidence in the world that we can be exactly the person you intend us to be, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.