25th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Cycle A 22-23

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 55:6-9 | Philippians 1:20c-24, 27a | Matthew 20:1-16a

Oh God who founded all the commands of your sacred law on love of you and of our neighbor, grant that, by keeping your precepts, we may merit to attain eternal life.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

Religion is a very, very interesting entity.  The way I first learned about it was when I was a young man getting ready for first communion.  I understood very clearly the beauty of what the Eucharist said to me.  It was something very, very special.  I’d only seen my adult friends ⎯ my parents and my older brother could go.  I couldn’t.  It was very exciting, the first communion thing, I think, for most of us who received it.  It was a special, special moment, graduating into the adulthood of ⎯ well, the beginning of your adulthood as a believer in this religion.  When I think about it, I look so clearly into my own self and what I have struggled with in my own religious practices, but I remember clearly, in the beginning, it was so simple and so easy to grasp.  God was a conditional lover.  He loved those who did what he asked them to do, and sin was our big separation from him, because when we didn’t do what God asked us to do, he would punish us by separating himself from us.  I took that to mean ⎯ that just became part of my psyche.  I just always knew that was what I was doing, trying to please God so he would love me, and I realized, after being ⎯ reflecting as long as I have over the scriptures, that that is not the goal of what God wants from us, not obedience, especially not blind obedience.  There’s no act of love that isn’t really free.  What he wants is our love, not our obedience, and so when I’m thinking about the whole notion of how my own religious life evolved, I realized this evolution of who we are and what we’re here for is a constant, constant, wonderful process to be engaged in.  And not only are we individually engaged in it, but religion itself is engaged in it, because human beings are creatures that evolve.  We’re not the same as we were at the time of Adam and Eve or the time when Abraham called a people together and formed them as a community following a particular God that had a particular, beautiful way of dealing with people and calling them into freedom.  All of that is a sign that we continually are engaged in this evolution, and what I’m seeing now is, even though that early church was so comforting to me, and I just had made a big decision not to ever do anything wrong, because I didn’t want to be separated from God.  So I had ⎯ my spiritual journey was set.  I knew what to do: just don’t do evil things, and this whole thing works, and you go to heaven.     

Then I listened to Isaiah in the first reading.  Seek God.  He wants to be found.  He doesn’t want someone to tell us about him.  He wants us to find him.  And Isaiah was 700 years before Christ, and when you think about it, there’s a lot in here that sounds like New Testament.  But it was the Old Testament, and it did talk about a God of forgiveness.  But the thing I find so interesting in this passage is he’s saying, “You know what?  Please understand the ways of God are so much more than we could ever have thought or even that we could easily accept.”  It's an incredible plan that God has got for each of us, and it’s mystical.  It’s mysterious.  It’s wonderful.  It’s frightening.  It’s comforting.  It’s so much more than just doing what you’re told, and so I want to try to open your heart and your mind to what this evolution has led us to at this point, because I see so much now in religion itself, great conflict over the direction, it seems, that we are following under the direction of Pope Francis.  But I don’t want to focus so much on just that, but it seems that there is a great anxiety with a certain number of religious people that, if you take away this simple code of performance, that everyone does the same thing, everyone believes the same thing, everyone makes moral decisions in unison with everybody else, when that is threatened, it seems that they’re terrified that they’re not going to have a religion to go to anymore, that everybody will be doing just what they want to do and all this kind of stuff.  But I think it’s so fascinating how these readings seem to me to say we never do move backwards.  We always move forward, and there is definitely something more about our relationship with God than simple obedience.  It’s a relationship.  It’s intimate. It’s a call to be part of what he is in this world, to participate in the same ministry that Jesus had, Jesus, a man filled with this beautiful divinity of God but absolutely, totally just like us.  And I think more than anything else, that incarnational event has so many meanings and such purpose.  But the one that I think we haven’t looked at closely enough is that it is an invitation for you and for me to believe that we can have that gift of God in our hearts, and through that presence of God, when we align our will to his will, we can accomplish things like Jesus accomplished, making people whole, freeing people from darkness.

So look at the gospel, and I think it really does underscore what I’m trying to say about merit.  So it’s about Jesus telling his disciples another parable, and now, this is to the disciples, so it’s got ⎯ it’s a little bit more important than say ⎯ well, I would say this: he spoke mostly parables to his disciples so they’d ponder it, because it was always about more than they could possibly understand at that moment.  And so he’s just telling them about a person who owns the land, and he wants to hire laborers.  And he hires them all at different times of the day, and when it comes to payment, merit comes into the picture.  The workers realize that the master is going to be giving ⎯ he’s giving the ones who worked an hour the same pay as us.  Well, he couldn’t possibly do that, because they don’t merit it.  They didn’t earn it.  And he does just that.  He gives everyone the same, and they’re furious and upset.  And I love the fact that he’s saying, “Are you worried about me being generous?  Are you worried about me wanting to do what I want to do?  Why do you want me to do what you want me to do, what you expect me to do?  Am I not free to be my own man?”  But the thing that I love most is the way it ends.  Those caught in meritocracy, those who think that they are the ones who are the cause of God’s love for them, they’ll be the last, because the ones that will be the first were the ones that were hired at the end.  So it’s so beautiful that he’s saying, “Those that work in merit are not where you need to be now.”  That’s about the past.  That’s the last.  That’s the misinterpretation ⎯ not the misinterpretation, but it’s the thing that we mostly go to.  It’s what I was taught, but to think that God is not about merit and he loves me, when I am absolutely not working at what I thought he wanted me to do, being perfect and being free of sin, it’s a totally different image of God.  He says, “No, Don.  I’ve loved you from the beginning.  I’ve not ever not loved you.  I am there for you whether you or good are you are bad.  Whether you deserve it is not the issue.  What counts is how much I love you and see your value and see your worth.  That’s what I want you to teach people to be.” 

And so I look back at the second reading.  There’s this beautiful image of what I believe God is trying to teach us today, and it’s not what we’ve always been taught, but it’s always been given to us to teach.  And we’re now just discovering it, I think, but look at the way Paul looks at his life.  Now, he’s redeemed.  He has been lifted up out of a level of consciousness that would fit a child who can only understand how to act if somebody tells him too and then punishes them if they don’t.  He’s a whole other generation in a sense.  He’s the beginning of our generation, and what he realizes is, he said, “I know something now about me.  I have this gift.”  He did miracles.  He raised someone from the dead, and he’s saying, “If I stay here, believing the way I believe and God working through me as he’s working through me, I’m magnifying him in my very essence, my very being.  I’m making God more present to people.”  And he’s delighted with that, and yet he’s so in love with the God that gave him this gift that he said, “I’d like to just be with him.  I don't know which one is better.”  Well, it seems he chose, in a sense, to stay, because he didn’t ⎯ he didn’t take his own life.  He remained in the flesh and was a great benefit to the teaching of Jesus.  I long to be a benefit to the teaching of Jesus.  I want you to understand how exciting and how different the religion that we’ve been called into is intended to be.  It’s an incredible gift, incredible responsibility, and it will never be greeted very openly by people who are caught up in merit.  Amen.

Father, open our hearts to understand the mystery of your love, the mystery of the dignity that you give to each of us in inviting us to be partners with you in the salvation of the world.  What a privilege, what an honor and what a great mystery, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.