The 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time: B 23-24

The 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ezekiel 17:22-24 | 2 Corinthians 5:6-10 | Mark 4:26-34

Oh God, strength of those who hope in you, graciously hear our pleas and, since without you mortal frailty can do nothing, grant us always the help of your grace that in following your commands we may please you by our resolve and our deeds.  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.

We’ve entered ordinary time, the time when we simply reflect upon one of the evangelists’ reflections on what it was like to know this God/man Jesus, and so this is the year that we focus on the Gospel of Mark.  So we’re going to look at his view of this experience with this God/man Jesus, and when you think about it, the responsibility that we have to each other as a church, as a believing community is to witness the truth of who God is and who we are and what we’re here to accomplish.  If you go to religion for something, you say, “Well, I’m going so I can have a relationship with God,” or, “I go to be forgiven for my sins,” or, “I go to learn more about the mysteries of my faith.”  No matter what focus you might have or what you’re looking for, the one thing that the heart longs for more than anything else, as well as the mind, is truth.  Healthy religion shares the truth of who we are and why we’re here and who God is, and when you get a number of people living out of that truth, they witness it to one another, and it grows, and it is more and more fruitful and more abundant.  So my prayer is, as we go through these many Sundays of ordinary time coming up, we will grow in our understanding from the witness of this one man, Mark, the evangelist, and to enhance whatever is in the gospel, we have these other two readings.  You know how it works.  They are chosen because of the gospel.

And the first reading is interesting, because I’d like you to put this whole set of readings in a context.  What is God’s role in your life?  What is it that we’re asked to turn to him and ask for, or what is it we’re asked to have a strong, strong conviction that he will do something for us, He will be someone for us?  So this first reading is about, in a way, the work of God in the Old Testament.  What does God do for his people?  Well, one of the things, he gathers them together, and he wants them to follow his rules and his laws.  That’s important, and they were at such a level of consciousness that they had to be told pretty much what to do.  The Ten Commandments, the best user manual for human nature, basically says you have a God that is real, that is true.  You need to spend time with him, and you have his power dwelling in you.  Never use it in vain.  Never use it in a way that is destructive, and for goodness sakes, take care of each other.  That’s very simple advice, and that’s exactly what God longs to enter into our life to help us to achieve. 

So the question is how much of what we do is what we asked for in the opening prayer, the grace, his help to enable us to do what we’re here for, to achieve what we’re here to achieve.  And it’s interesting.  There are two forms of, I guess you might say, faith or religion.  One is called deism, and one is called theism.  And theism is a good description of Christianity.  Theism is a belief in one God and that this God is very powerful and very much engaged in the work of guiding us through this journey on this plane that we’re living on so that we can accomplish the task that we’re here to accomplish, and we can’t do it without his grace.  So theism believes that God exists and that God is intimately engaged in everything going on in the world.  And deism is like that, does believe that there is a God, but it doesn’t believe that he has anything to do with what’s happening.  He is completely neutral as far as the way the world is going.  Whatever it is that you’re engaged in, it’s up to you to figure it out, how to get out of it or how to make it better, and he just is pretty much of an absent landlord, an absent father.  And you say, “What’s attractive in that?”  Well, the thing that’s attractive in it is you don’t have to believe in something that you can’t explain, that you can’t prove, but it’s impossible to listen to the Christian message without realizing that God has revealed himself as not only someone who cares about how we live but recognizes how impossible it is for us to accomplish the things we’re here to do without his intimate, personal attention and his presence within us.

So this first reading is from the Old Testament, from Ezekiel.  It is about the role that God has in the life of the people that’s, you might say, their political life, life on this planet as it is in a way that humans are in charge.  And the interesting thing about the image of the cedar is that that’s the different kingdoms, and if a kingdom fails and falls apart, he takes the top of it off and clips it and then plants it somewhere else, on a higher level of consciousness, let’s say, a higher place.  And then it grows into a new kingdom, a new political system, and as those systems go through, as they all do, good times, bad times, times when they’re very, very fruitful and very effective and other times when they all fall apart, what God is saying in the Old Testament through this prophet is, “Look, I’m the one that’s in charge of all that.  I can make a kingdom flourish, or I can let it fall apart.”  If you need to have in your history right now, the human race, you need — this group of people needs to have a calm, protective government, that’s what they need at that time, and that’s what God has prepared for them.  And then if somehow they need something more that tests their resilience and their trust, they’re going to go through a horrible experience of abuse and tyranny, and what God is saying in the Old Testament is, “Look, don’t think this is all just happenstance.  I am in charge of the way the kingdoms of the world are affecting you, and I’m careful that they are always there for you for what you need.  Sometimes you need comfort.  Sometimes you need challenge.  Sometimes you need to be at ease.  Sometimes you need to be in pain.  I’m in charge.”  Amazing.  How does that work?  I have no idea.  If he’s in charge of everything, then we’re nothing but puppets?  No, we’re absolutely free to choose whatever we want, but in some mysterious way beyond our imagining, everything works for the good of each of us.    A pandemic, a time of peace, prosperity, a time of horrible war and conflict, all of those, he knows exactly what’s happening.  He allows it.  He allows it to the point that it’s just perfect for us.

And then you see in the second reading another image of the way God works with his people, and in that old-time system in the Old Testament, one of the things that’s clear is that there is a relationship with God that’s under the law, and you must perform and keep the law in order to have God’s favor.  That’s definitely Old Testament stuff, and yet the New Testament it’s radically different.  Instead of a law being the core of what — that connects us to God, following his rules and laws, no, it’s now receiving and accepting his forgiveness, his love, his presence, living in us on a daily basis.  The New Testament is so new, so different that it’s often never fully embraced, because we hang onto the old, because it makes sense to the mind, not to the heart.  The heart loves the image of being loved and being forgiven, but listen to Paul, because Paul did not ever experience the physical presence of Jesus.  He had a vision, and he worked with this vision in his heart, and he worked with Jesus working in him.  But the interesting thing about what he’s saying there, if you listen to the words carefully, he’s saying, “We live in this world, and when we’re in this world, we’re separated from God.  And that’s painful, to be separated from God.  So we look forward to dying, but we don’t really want to kill ourselves.”  That’s what he’s saying, because we need to stay here.  We need to work with whatever it is, but basically it’s clear that what Paul is simply saying is we’re here to perform in a way that pleases God, and when we finish with our performance, we go to heaven.  And then we’re going to be judged, and we get rewarded or punished.  Now think about that.  That is not New Testament.  That’s Old Testament, separated from God and being judged at the end.  New Testament, God is in us.  God is with us, and when it comes to the end, we go, and we present to God our faults, our weaknesses, and he says, “Oh, by the way, someone has already come here ahead of you, and they paid for all your debts.  It’s somebody who died in Jerusalem.  Do you know him?”  Amazing.  We live in a world — if we live in the world that God has intended to live in, there is great joy and peace, because we’re not being held to the responsibility of our failures.  We’re being held to a relationship that we have to trust in where God is there for us, and one of the things that Jesus did that has always been God plan, he reveals to us that we flourish in an atmosphere where we really, truly believe that we are safe and that we are loved and we are valued.  That’s the gift of God’s presence within us.

So we look then to the gospel, because now what I’m trying to do is put you in touch with how it is that God is engaged in your life in an intimate way.  We are theists, not deists.  We believe that God has a role in our life, and so how would we describe that role?  And then Jesus gives us the image, a parable, a parable about how it is that he is engaged daily in your life and in mine.  Well, let’s see if I can dig deep into this parable and awaken it for you, because it’s beautiful.  What it’s saying is basically in your life, in my life, God has planted a seed inside of you.  It is your true self, your authentic self.  It comes in the form of an undifferentiated, unconscious form.  You’re a baby.  You come into the world, and you don’t know anything.  But when you’re not fed and you’re not safe, you scream, and you cry.  That’s that low level of consciousness where we need definitely to find a place where we’re safe, and then as we grow older, we realize that we need very much someone to be there for us.  And if we don’t have someone who loves us — first, people have created a safe place for us, and then we’re loved and honored.  And then as that evolves and we grow into maturity, we discover something in us, the seed in us that now is safe and loved and feels like it has value.  A creative force is in us all, and then we have this awakening.  The Spirit awakens us to our gift.  What is it that is in me, that has been there from the beginning, that God wants me to develop?  I know that if I develop it and I use it for good, I will find joy and happiness in my life.  So the image of this field is — the field is you and me, and the seed is this gift of God, that unique person that he’s created each of us to be.  And how it grows you don’t know.  How is it that I evolve from this whiny, little baby screaming to an altruistic, loving, giving person who creates something so valuable to other people and gives it away with the simple joy that I’m doing something that brings me joy?  Because when I’m loving and saving and healing, I’m the happiest I could ever be.  That evolution, how does it happen?  Well, through all the weird things that go on in your life, but there is always the promise that it will happen.  You will grow and develop this seed that is planted inside of you.  It’s not — you didn’t create the seed.  You didn’t create that unique thing that’s you, that you need to believe in and trust in and develop and give whatever gift you have away.  You didn’t do that.  That was a gift from God, but you, your consciousness is in charge.  And what a thing that God would give each individual a role in the communities they live in that is integral to the work of saving everyone and bringing everyone into the truth, and he gives us complete freedom whether to use it or not.  And what a tragedy when we don’t, and it’s often because we’ve never found a place where we’re safe.  We’ve never found a place where we’re loved.  We’ve never found a place where someone gave us value.  If we count on other people to do that, it’s pretty risky, but if you understand finally and fully, as a full-blown theist, God is engaged in your life, and he wants more than anything else for you to not only survive but develop and grow and become who you are.  And he is so dedicated to that that nothing in the world, no absence of love and no other problem is going to keep you from it.  That’s the trust in a God who is engaged daily in your life, and that’s what makes life so much different.  And there is such a thing as religion that has peace, joy and love instead of shame, fear and anger. 

Father, your goodness and the intimacy that you long to have with us is beyond our imagining.  It’s so difficult for us to understand this, because there’s a way in which we don’t feel worthy, but in another sense, there is a kind of frightening part of being so close to someone so powerful that somehow we won’t survive or that we’ll lose our individuality. So bless us with the capacity, which would be your grace, enabling us to embrace something that goes beyond our mind but yet feeds and nurtures and awakens our hearts to a life of true service.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.