The 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time: Cycle B 23-24

The 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Samuel 3:3b-10, 19 | 1 Corinthians 6:13c-15a, 17-20 | John 1:35-42

Almighty everliving God who govern all things, both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times.  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.

It’s hard for me to believe that it was 60 years ago that I felt that I would like to be a priest.  I don’t think I understood at all what it would be like to be a priest, but I knew somehow it had something to do with doing something that seemed valuable but, most especially, I felt would be helpful.  I think if I look at the way I came into the world, I think it was that I came in and looked around and said, “Is there somebody here I can help?”  It’s just the way I am, the way I’m hardwired, and what was happening at that time, which I had no idea was happening — no one really did, but in 1959, John XXIII said he was going to call a council to breathe new air into the church, to open the windows and let the Holy Spirit enter.  So it was like he realized that the church had been, in a sense, closed to so many things that they needed to open their hearts to, and that’s a pretty good description of what is true for all of us and for all institutions.  We get a certain understanding of the way things are, and then we don’t change.  We just defend the position we’re in, and we fight those who think differently, and we protect it by trying to not let anybody else take away what we believe to be true.  We’re not as open as we should be. 

So one of the things that was so powerful about the things that were opened in the hearts of believers through the Vatican Council, which is what he called it, is that we were called, all of us, to be holy, and that was not something that was just for a few, not just for monks and for people that go off into the desert or into a monastery.  But holiness is everybody’s right.  It is what God died on the cross to give to us.  He longs to be the source for you and for me to become the people we are called to be, and what we have to do in order to do that is enter into the world of holiness.  Another word for that that I like to use is mysticism.  Mysticism, we’re all called to be mystics, not just a few of us, all of us, and what’s a mystic?  Well, the best description I can give you of mystic is in the first reading, Samuel.  If you look at the context of this reading, it’s really interesting, because it says a lot about what maybe was in the heart without maybe realizing what was in the heart of the leaders of the church, particularly John XXIII, who realized, “Something is missing in this institution.  We’ve got to get it back.  And it was there in the beginning, but we’ve lost it.  We’ve become too rigid, too legalistic, too closed to new ideas.”  The thing about a mystic is that they’re the ones who have the capacity to know that God is in them, with them, for them, and they listen to him.  They listen to God.

I remember once having a priest share a story with me where he said, “Somebody in the parish came to me and asked me to do something, because, they said, God told them to do that.”  And he kind of laughed, like, “God doesn’t speak to people like that.”  Oh yeah, he does.  He does.  I’m not saying that a parishioner can come and say, “You’ve got to do this, because God told me.”  No, but for a person to believe that they have received a personal revelation from God is absolutely, rock bottom, Christian spirituality. 

So let’s look at the story of Samuel.  Samuel had a special birth.  His mother was barren for a long time.  She went and prayed in the temple.  Eli was the priest of the temple.  He was also a judge, one of the judges of the Israelite community, which is — the judges were basically kind of military leaders.  They protected Israelites from all their enemies outside of them.  He was also a priest, but anyway, Eli sees Hannah and thinks she’s drunk, because she’s mumbling these prayers.  And basically she said, “I’ve been begging, begging God to give me a child.”  And Eli says, “I believe he will.”  Eli must have felt that God had spoken to him to tell her, “Yes, you’ll have a child.”  She calls him Samuel, brings him back to Eli, and he’s now growing up in the temple.  And he’s asleep in this story.  He is in the temple asleep.  I think that’s so interesting.  My image of the church before Vatican II was pretty much asleep in many areas.  And so he hears a voice, and he thinks it’s Eli.  So he gets up each time and goes and asks Eli what he wants, and Eli is wise enough, old enough to realize, “Well, God is speaking to you.”  And so this is what’s so beautiful about it.  This man, who is listening and having God call him, he hears this voice, and what he’s realizing is that, “This God has an interest in me listening to what he has to tell me personally.”  And that response that he had was so perfect.  “You’re speaking.  I’m listening.  I’m listening.”  That’s a mystic.  To believe that God speaks is one thing, but to listen to him and then to add, “I’m your servant.”  So a true mystic is one who believes that God speaks through situations all around them, that you are open to listen to what he’s saying, to interpret it and then to do whatever it is that you’re invited to do.  That’s, to me, the hidden mystery of Christianity.  That’s everybody’s right, to have this happen to them.  It’s what we should all be aware of, sensitive to, open to, and we need to give, then, God the time to speak to us.  We need to be still.  We need to have a reflective life.  We need to be reading things, not just on the surface, but looking for symbolic meaning behind things, not to an extreme where we’re following every little whim that comes along.  No, we’re saying, “You, God, long to say something to me, and I want to hear it.” 

And so what I think we hear next, in the gospel, is something very profound.  We’re seeing Jesus revealing to the world and to particularly his disciples the way this whole inner voice works.  The inner voice comes from God’s presence.  Now, the most exciting and wonderful thing about this figure Jesus is he is God’s presence incarnate.  So he’s the model of who we are to become, and you would think that this teacher, Jesus, who spent 30 years reflecting and working on it, and he wanted to work with some people the way, I think, the church would have at that time and maybe even today, said, “Well, how do we teach this to people?”  Well, we’ll set up a classroom, and Jesus can live in the temple, and then the disciples can sign up and get 12 in a class.  Then Jesus sits there and teaches them what they have to believe and how they should act, their moral theology, dogmatic theology.  No, no.  No, he does the most amazing thing.  When they’re interested in him — and they asked the right question.  “Where do you dwell?  Who are you?  Tell us something about you.”  His response is, “I’m not going to talk about me.  I’m going to show you.  I want you to see me.”  Now, compare that to what was told centuries earlier to the man in the temple.  He’s sitting there, and he’s told, “Listen to me.”  Now Jesus says to the disciples, “See me.  Watch me.  Pay attention to me, because I want you to understand something.  I want you to see something that I am going to manifest for you, because that is exactly what you are going to be asked to manifest.  And what is it?  What did Jesus do?  How did he do the work that he was doing?  How did he convince anyone?  Well, first of all, he didn’t convince them thoroughly.  After John got it, the disciple John — but most of the disciples didn’t, couldn’t fully grasp what Jesus was trying to teach them.  And what was he teaching them?  “I am the model of who you are to become.  You all are to be people who are filled with my spirit.  My spirit is God in me, divinity in me.”  So our challenge is how do you believe that God is truly in me and is manifesting himself through me, not necessarily by teaching me what to say or even what to do but empowering me to be someone.  We are the presence of God.  If we believe that God is in us, then his presence is in us.  If his presence is in us, then it’s going to be like the presence of God in Jesus, and what was that like?  Everywhere he went, he healed people.  Wherever he seemed to do anything, it was so effective and powerful.  He just willed to do something, and it happened.  Even when he didn’t want to do it, it happened.  So here’s Jesus saying, “The power of God is in you as it is in me, and it has the ability to do things beyond anything you could do with words or your will or whatever.  Just trust that you are God’s presence.” 

And that’s what Paul is then talking about when he talks about the body is made for something beautiful, something wonderful, something moral.  What is morality?  Morality goes beyond the law.  Morality is a kind of ethic, a wisdom, an ethic that knows in this situation, this is what should be done, and that’s what the presence of God does through you.  And I’m not trying to make this into something too weird, but that presence of God in you is so effective that you are not necessarily going to know exactly how it’s working or when it’s working.  And that’s wonderful, because Jesus obviously, as a man, could have gotten caught up in his miracles and seeing himself as the great savior of the world.  And maybe he did get caught up in that a little bit.  He certainly was a celebrity when he entered into Jerusalem at the end of his career, but he was able to not buy into that.  But it was his celebrityhood that cost him his life, because when he became so famous, that’s when the scribes and Pharisees had to get rid of him, because he was too popular, and he was too effective.  And when he raised Lazarus from the dead, that was the killer.  They had to kill him then, but think of it.  What was he manifesting that whole time when he was with his disciples?  He was manifesting the presence of his Father through his body.  So it’s his presence, his presence, not his performance, his presence that changed people. 

It’s the same for us.  That’s exactly the mystery that I’m talking about that a mystic understands.  You are — your body resonates whatever integrity is inside of you, or lack of integrity that’s inside of you comes through your body, and in a way that is almost like simply a frequency.  But at the same time, it’s when people are aware of your intentions and your decisions and your actions, and they’re reading them.  And when you’re reflecting divinity in those actions, because you believe it is in you and believe that he can use you in ways that you don’t even have to understand how and when, you are like the prophet who says, “I am here.  I am listening.  I will do whatever you ask.  I will be used by you in whatever way you want.”  The prophet said, “I listen.”  In the New Testament, the disciples who encountered the incarnate Jesus said, “We will watch you, watch you and see what you’re doing.” 

So that’s what I think Paul is really talking about when he says, “The body is not made for immorality.”  Immorality would be a way of acting that goes against our very nature, our very essence.  The moral choice is the right — as I said, a wise, ethical choice, and when we are making those choices and we witness that kind of choosing in front of people, we are so effective, very effective in achieving the goal for which we came.  We’re here to help.  We’re here to heal one another, and if you work solely on performance and that’s a shadow of any official religious person or in any person that claims to be Christian — “I’m performing moral acts all the time for the reason, maybe, that I want to seem pretty wonderful in the eyes of others.”  That’s like a prostitute, and in that reading, Paul talks about, “Don’t be a prostitute,” when you might think he’s saying, “Just don’t ever get involved in sexuality outside of marriage.”  Well, it’s much more complicated than that.  It’s really saying, “No, look, the intention of you — your intention in sync with God’s intention is that I am in the world to reflect something that is bigger than myself, and I want to give it to the world.  And if I can take time to reflect and be still and listen and allow God to transform my body, then my presence does the work, so much more important than words or actions that are not grounded in truth.  And the mysticism is the great gift, and our hearts, our minds, our whole body needs to be open to receive this gift so we can be that gift in the world.

Father, the life that you’ve called us to is in such intimate closeness with you. It’s beyond our imagining. We’re not worthy to have you so much a part of everything that we are, but you promise that that is your will. That is your desire. So bless us with a kind of humble, open, servant heart. We can receive these ultimate gifts, share them with others and know that we are simply the instruments of your love and your healing and your incredible power to change the world. And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.