SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Leviticus 19:1-2, 17-18 | 1 Corinthians 3:16-23 | Matthew 5:38-48

Grant, we pray, almighty God, that always pondering spiritual things, we may carry out in both word and deed that which is pleasing to you.  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.

Spirituality is a very interesting word, and when someone says to you they’re spiritual, one of the things you might say, “Well, what religion do you belong to?”  But the two are not necessarily always connected, and that’s because, when you are a spiritual person, you are open to that which is unseen by the eye, unable to be understood in the mind, but you’re open to things that go beyond that.  You’re open to mystery, things that are hidden but active in making differences in our life that we can’t see them or name them exactly, but there’s this whole world of influence and awareness that a spiritual person is open to.  And so to ponder spiritual things is one of the most crucial things about being a spiritual person, to sit and meditate, imagine, wonder.  And what you’re asking to wonder about with this set of readings is something really wonderful.  It’s about being holy and being perfect. 

In the Old Testament, the Lord is saying to Moses, “Tell them that they should be holy.  Be holy, because I am holy.”  So what he’s really saying is the beginning of planting a seed inside of people that make them realize that the things that God asks you to do are not the things that he wants you to do but the things that you actually want to do if you were in touch fully with the spirituality of your life, meaning you understand who you are and why you’re here.  And it is so clear through Old Testament and New Testament.  The primary role that you and I have in this world is to take care of one another, not to take care of in the sense of doing what they should be able to do for themselves, not that kind of indulgent care but simply worrying about being interested in, wanting them to be in touch with what is real, what is true.  And we spend a lot of times in our relationships antagonistically.  We’re working against each other.  You want one thing; I want something else.  I hate you for what you are, and you hate me and that sort of thing.  And what God is saying, way back in the lowest level of consciousness that we may have been in for ⎯ in the beginning, we were in a lower level of consciousness.  He’s saying, “Look, you have to be careful.  Don’t take revenge.  Don’t have a grudge against people.”  It’s telling you what to do.  The New Testament is different.  The New Testament isn’t so much interested in you doing things but being aware of who you are.  

It's interesting.  The word kind, be kind and merciful. Kind is an interesting word, because we think, well, it means being sympathetic and nice and friendly and easy to be with.  But think about another way we use the word kind.  It’s a class of people.  It’s a certain thing that has a certain quality.  What kind of medicine is it?  What kind of medicine is it made up of, or what chemicals is it made up of?  So I just want to think if there maybe is a really interesting, unnoticed, connection between being kind and merciful, because if kind is about who we are, what type of being are we?  There are a lot of beings that are similar to us.  We come and actually evolve from chimpanzees.  You look at a chimpanzee, and some of their gestures are exactly like we are.  You’ll recognized, “Hey, that looks just like Harry over there, the way he’s doing that.”  But it’s interesting.  There is something about our lower nature that is animalistic.  It's very self-centered.  It’s protective.  The minute it feels danger, it might try to either run away or to attack.  All those kind of things are pretty natural to the human nature that we started off with, so to speak, but it evolved, continues to evolve, continues to change.  We are more aware of the kind of person we are today than we ever have been before, because we’ve been through the insanity of things that we’ve done to each other that don’t make any sense once we look back and see what we did.  It’s true of war, the insanity of war, and yet we’re in a war right now.  We’re not in it, but we’re watching a war.  And hundreds of thousands, over 300,000 people have died in the war between Russia and Ukraine in just one year.  How insane is that?  How much does that go against what our nature really longs to see human beings doing, growing, evolving, changing, caring for each other?  There’s such a really dramatic difference between what we see in Ukraine and what we see in Turkey.  In what’s happened there, you see people, individuals working day and night in the freezing cold, hoping and praying just to find one more person alive, and days and days when they should have given up, they were still working, still finding someone.  And there would be a cheer for the people and applause.  “We’ve found someone, and we’ve kept them alive.  We brought them back into life.”  What a different image of an action on the part of human beings. 

So when we look at the gospel and even the reading from St. Paul, we’re seeing something different.  We’re not being told what to do, but we are told who we are, what kind of person we are.  What Paul says so clearly, “Do you not know who you are?  You are a temple of God.  God dwells in you.”  You haven’t made him in you.  You haven’t earned him being in you.  He is in you, and anyone who works against that presence of God, which is your nature evolving into who you really are, whoever tries to destroy that, which is the source of your becoming truly alive and vital to the world, if someone gets in the way of that, they have destroyed something very seriously and are doing something destructive.  So it’s about opening your eyes and seeing clearly what it is that God has made you to be, who you really are, and I love the idea that we started this whole set of readings with be holy, and then we end it with being perfect.  

So how do you be perfect?  What do you think perfection is?  Well, it would be wonderful if it could be just the opposite of evil.  If perfection is nothing in us that ever is doing wrong ⎯ we learn from our mistakes.  We learn from the things that we do that are wrong.  We learn from watching human beings destroy each other and then watching them save each other and say, “Which one do we want to be a part of?  Which one do we want to see happen?”  It’s amazing how we are engaged in becoming who God has called us to be.  To be perfect is to be simply who  you are, to be perfectly human, which means that we have a weakness.  We will do evil.  We will do things wrong.  We will sin, but at the same time, we have within us this presence of God that is dedicated, that we belong to, and he belongs to us.  And he wants us to become who he intended us to be, and he is winning the battle.  If you think the world is worse than it’s ever been, think again.  It is better than it’s ever been.  It is more conscious than it’s ever been.  It is less violent, believe it or not, than it’s ever been.  Today we know everything that goes on in the world.  We’ve seen everything that we trusted in be broken open and see corruption somewhere in it.  All of that makes us think the world is worse.  It’s not, and it won’t be worse.  It won’t be worse, because there is this promise of a presence of God within you, that you are his temple, and that presence of God takes a lot of energy to resist.  But you can slow it down.  You can be one who doesn’t choose life in this world, but if you are the ones who choose life, you’re not just choosing it for yourself.  You’re choosing it for the world.  Be perfectly human, just as your Father is perfectly divine, but know that your human perfection depends upon the Father’s perfection.  And when those are together, there is every reason to have a spirituality that sees the world as moving, growing, changing, evolving, becoming more what it’s intended to be, and we’re moving in the right direction.  If we don’t feel that, there’s a darkness, a heaviness that makes dealing with issues that we hear that are tragic too much to bear, but tragedy brings about change.  And there’s something about an awareness of the presence of God that gives you a strength that goes so beyond your human nature.  Sometimes we think our human nature is supposed to be enough, but a truly spiritual person is grounded in something beyond themselves, and that person we’re connected to is everything.  Everything belongs to us if the Spirit is within us.  Amen.

Father, your presence within us is our greatest hope.  It is the thing that awakens in us an ability to go beyond our human nature to be in service to those in the world in ways beyond our imagining.  So bless us with an awareness of this inner grace, and let it grow and flourish and bring about the changes in the world that you long to see.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.