24th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Cycle A 22-23

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sirach 27:30—28:7 | Romans 14:7-9 | Matthew 18:21-35

Look upon us, oh God, creator and ruler of all things, that we may feel the working of your mercy.  Grant that we may serve you with all our heart.  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.

People have asked me if God created evil.  It’s an interesting question.  Evil is a real part of who we are in this world and how we are to live in this world.  We have rules and laws, and there’s a part of us that resists doing that.  And so the only way that I could answer that question, did God create it, he allowed it for sure, but when you look at what he gave to us, something unique that he didn’t give to any other thing that he created is this amazing capacity to make our own decisions, to be free, to be free of the yoke of the law.  So when I grew up as a child, I learned the lesson early that, if I became a bad little boy and I did something wrong and I didn’t go to confession, that because of that one thing I didn’t do correctly, I would be sent to hell.  So I grew up, as a young Catholic boy learning about my faith, that God had, in way, a short memory.  If I did one thing that was against his rule, against his law, I severed his relationship.  The only thing in that that is the truth is that, when we fail, we fail what we believe is what we should be or what we should do, when that happens, we do feel somehow we’ve severed something.  We could say we’ve severed our own sense of wellbeing about ourselves. We’ve put ourselves almost at odds with who we just were when we did that, and we feel shame, and we feel confusion, and we get angry at ourselves.  Or we really do feel that, when we’ve done something wrong, God does pull away.  

It's the opposite.  When you sin, you do something that is against your very nature, who you are, who you are meant to be.  Sin is in the world not as a test to see where we are and then be accepted or rejected.  No, we’re always accepted, as a sinner, as a saint, whatever you want to say.  God’s love is never diminished.  In fact, I would say, if I used an image of parents and children, when a parent sees their child in trouble, they give them more attention and more care than a child that seems to not have any problems.  God is deeply affected by our sin, and his instinct is not to punish, not to condemn but to somehow heal, embrace.  And the way he does that healing, when it comes to our sins, is the way he planned it all.  Let me say this about the old ⎯ the Old Testament is much more focused on sin.  In the Old Testament, you see a God who, when sin is there and people don’t respond to the prophets, he will destroy all the sinners.  It's a real clear indication that God wants obedience to his way of life, which we learn in the New Testament is simply our human nature.  Laws were established to help us get a sense of who we are and what makes us fulfill or what robs us of our inner connection with ourselves and others.  It is sin that’s the problem.  Yes, we’ve got it, but if you look at the way God responds to sin, it is the most beautiful model of how you and I are supposed to deal with our own sins and the sins of those who sin against us.  And the answer is not, “Stop it.  Don’t ever do that again.”  No, it’s forgiveness ⎯ forgiveness.  

Ninety percent of what Jesus teaches in the New Testament is on one theme, forgiveness, and why would he at that point in his revelation of who God is, why at that point was he able to say to us, “Don’t try to destroy every part of you that might lead you into sin.  Don’t think sin is the end of your relationship with me.”  No, he wants something radically different.  He wants you to know that his response to your sin is not revenge, get back at you or any kind of major punishment.  He wants you to learn.  He wants you to experience sin for what it is, and that means that we are, in the act of forgiveness, saying we allow sin to be part of this process.  Don’t expect yourself not to sin.  Don’t work to not sin.  Work to learn, from every sin you commit, something about who you are.  Your own consciousness is the reason we’re here, to grow into a greater union with who we are, to become fully ourselves.  That’s essence, and you don’t get there by being told what to do.  You get there by experiencing what actions produce when you realize that the thing that you might think is going to be good for you, at the cost of someone else ⎯ if you think that’s going to work for you, okay, that’s the wrong way to see it, but who’s going to change you?  What’s going to change you?  The experience of doing it is what changes you, experience of seeing how you feel, the shame you might feel, the disappointment you feel, to see the separation that happens between you and other people when things are done in a way that is totally self-centered.  One person I love saying this. We never do get past a sin by willing it and forcing ourselves to have a resolve that we’ll never do it again.  He said, “No, we outgrow our sins.  They just become stupid.  They become what they are, nonproductive, promises that can never be fulfilled.”  That’s the reason forgiveness is so essential.  It’s so that we can sin and learn and change and grow.  

It's not the way I learned about sin.  It’s not the way I began my spiritual life, and maybe in a way ⎯ you know that, when we’re children, we have to be told what to do, but the beautiful thing about the way I believe God works with us on this planet while we’re here is to slowly reveal to us the fulness of who he is and what he’s here to do.  He is in our life to help us to be transformed into who he made us, beautiful, beautiful process.  Is he worried that at times we’ll be far from that and we’ll be doing things that are horrendously awful, and is that going to mean that he’s going to say, “I’m not having anything to do with you anymore.  I’m cutting you out of my life.  You’re not going to be with me after this life”?  Those were all the things that I was taught that were motives for me not sinning, but to know, when I sin, he feels for me, the reality of what I’ve chosen and he reveals to me what that really is, that’s the work of the Spirit, to open me to the fulness of my potential for consciousness at this moment in my life.  And I can see and know in my own life, things I thought were absolutely not a problem to do at all, I know now were so potentially destructive to me and to the people I love.  I didn’t decide that I will not do that anymore, because I will not to do it.  I don’t do it, because I don’t want to do it.  I don’t find anything in it that makes any sense to me.  We turn away from sin, because we see it for what it is.  You can’t see it for what it is unless you forgive yourself for having done it and you pay attention to what your actions produced.  Sin is based on a lie that what it wants you to do is definitely never going to produce what it promises.  God, on the other hand, says, “I want you to experience and grow through your weaknesses.  I’m there with you the whole time.  I feel the pain that you’re in.  I want you to feel it so that it is the training tool that God has given you.”  Sin is necessary, because it is the greatest teacher, and without that teacher, or without responding to sin as a teacher, we end up wallowing in shame and anger, bitterness toward ourselves or toward others.  The secret is to embrace it for what it was created to do: draw us closer to God, to each other, to seeing and feeling the beauty that each of us are.  Amen.

Father, our weaknesses, our bad choices are so often the burden that we carry.  Even though we believe you forgive us, we still carry the shame.  Free us from that so that we can see the value of our mistakes as tools that draw us closer and closer to who you call us to be.  Give us patience and radical forgiveness, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.