16th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Cycle C 21-22

SIXTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME 

Genesis 18:1-10a | Colossians 1:24-28 | Luke 10:38-42

Show favor, oh Lord, to your servants and mercifully increase the gifts of your grace that, made fervent in hope, faith and charity, they may be ever watchful in keeping your commands.  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.

I want to begin with an image in the reading from the New Testament, the reading in Colossians with Paul, and one of the things I want you to feel with me is Paul was truly a Pharisee.  And he was very much in tune with the thinking and the beliefs of the temple at the time, the place that Jesus made clear was not somehow connected at all to its roots of what it was intended to be.  It had become not a place of life and growth and change but a place that robbed people of something.  I would say it robbed them of the beauty and the fullness of who God really is.  And so we see this figure, Paul, in this story having gone through the most extraordinary thing.  He went through an experience.  Think of this man who was dedicated to the rules and laws of the temple and was very actively working to destroy Christianity wherever he found it, into the sense of killing people that were following Christ.  And then he has this experience of actually encountering Jesus, and he feels that he’s been spoken to by this figure.  He has been spoken to by Christ, who said, “I want you to be my servant.  I want you to teach and preach what I have come into the world to tell the world.”  And he summarizes it in such a beautiful way when he said, “The mystery, the glory that we all hope in now is the mystery that Christ is in you, in me.”  Now, think about that image.  For a hardened Pharisee, for him to say and to realize that this radical shift from the temple being the only place where God dwelt to now God incarnate in this figure Jesus is the God that is the God in the Old Testament tabernacle, but now he’s in everyone and that everyone — the presence in everyone is an intimacy.  And the intimacy engaged in the experience that Paul had was it spoke to him.  Christ, God incarnate in Paul, spoke to him and changed his life forever.

So this is a strong, strong image of the New Testament, the new way in which God is working with his people, but everything in the New Testament is founded in the Old Testament.  Everything that we see there is rooted in a core teaching, and let’s go back to the first reading then and look at that, because it implies something so clear about who God is and how he wants to relate to those creatures, those beautiful creatures that he made in his own image and likeness, how he wanted to relate with them.  And he wants to have a relationship with them.  He wants to be engaged in their life.  I don't know if you know what a deist is, but a deist is a person who believes in God but doesn’t believe at all that God has any interest in what’s going on in the world.  It’s like he created it.  It’s the easiest way to understand something as mysterious as how this world came about.  It was some divine figure that did it, but then a deist basically feels that then that was it.  He’s gone, and we’re on our own.  And I don’t ever — I haven’t ever met anyone that said they were a deist, but I  have met people, when I talk to them about the intimacy that God longs to have with them and is interested in what’s happening in their own personal lives or in the lives of the people that are with them, and I talk about God’s concern for them and the struggle they’ve got.  And they sometimes look at me and say, “Well, he’s not interested in that part of me.  He’s too busy.”  I remember that one line somebody said.  “God’s too busy to worry about my life.”  No, how can you say that the God who lives inside of you is too busy to pay attention to the place where he dwells?  He’s engaged in your life and in my life.

And so the first reading goes back to the beginning of the Old Testament, and it’s clear that God, from the very beginning, wanted to have an intimate relationship with human beings.  And so he comes into the life of this man, Abram, and he changed his name to Abraham.  And he starts talking to him, and he does it through angels, these three men who came to appear near his tent.  And he invites them in.  They’re clearly images in the Old Testament of God’s messengers coming to him and saying something to him about a promise that God made to Abraham that’s now going to be fulfilled.  So there it is, God entering into human nature, wanting to tell that person something about their future, about what God is engaged in their life to achieve.  There’s a ministry that Abraham had, and what was he called to do?  He was called to do the most amazing thing: to form a people, and to form this people to follow this God.  And you know the story.  It’s much more complicated than I can go into right now, but think of Abraham of the beginning of God revealing who he is to you and to me and to the entire human race.  “I want to be engaged in your life.  I need you, some of you to do certain things that are really important, and if you’ll listen to my messengers —”  And the thing that’s so beautiful about this first reading is the enthusiasm that Abraham has for these strangers that are walking by.  He insists that they come in, and he feeds them.  He feasts them practically, makes this great dinner.  It’s just an image, I think, of what is in human nature that we long for and want to create, a hospitality inside of us for God’s plan for us.  The patriarchs were all that way.  Moses was then called, and his work was to free people from slavery.  Then Noah comes along.  His role was to save the goodness that was in the human race by God destroying all the evil people in the world and saving just him.  But look at these three major patriarchs and what they’re saying about who God is.  God enters into your life to call you into a community of other believers and to lead them from slavery to freedom, which means to lead them from the overpowering rules and regulations of religion to an intimate relationship with God, and then somehow to bring the goodness that is in every human being — and sometimes it’s just a little spark left inside of a — what looks on the surface like a corrupt figure, and God enters into that tiny spark of life and builds it up and saves it and transforms it.

So God is speaking to us.  That’s his plan.  That leads us to the gospel because — it’s one of my favorite gospels.  I don't know why I love it so much, because maybe I’m a lot like Martha, and I’m not so much a Mary.  But when you take seriously the gospel and you want to do what it’s calling you to do, one of the first things you can think about is how you have to minister to other people.  Depending upon your background and your family of origin and your psychology, who you are as you come into the world — some of us come in as real strong helpers, and if we’re not helping somebody, we think something is wrong.  I’m certainly one of those people, and when you’re in that mode, you’re constantly working to make sure that you’re doing what another person needs.  You worry about it, and you’re stressed about it, and it’s a lot of work.  And I think there’s something in this story that I love talking about, because it’s almost like God is talking to all of us who are caretakers.  And he’s saying, “Look, be careful.  Don’t make life this struggle of trying to figure out how to take care of people or how to answer their needs or what you need to be for them or what you need to be for whatever role you have in the world.  Kind of relax and listen to me more.  Be still and let me talk to you.”  An image of God wanting time with us is so crucial, and I look at the world today, and I see so many things that create anxiety and worry.  If we’re the kind of person that wants to always make the world a better place, we look at it, and it seems like the whole thing is falling apart.  Every institution that we’ve ever looked to, to kind of help us and give us support, thinking that we’re all working together to make the world better, every one of those institutions has been turned upside down.  And what we see inside and underneath the core of some of those institutions is corruption, impurity, imperfection, and whether it’s politics or religion or medicine or pharmaceutical, whatever it is, there’s this anxiety that there’s something missing in the world that’s going to take care of us.  And that makes us even more anxious about taking care of everybody.  Now, think about that as a stress and a worry.  And if you’re not worried or stressed about the way the world is, then you haven’t been reading the newspaper, and maybe you’re smart.  But you look at what’s going on, the violence in individuals that have this power to walk into a school or into a parade and to just kill indiscriminately without any conscience, without any — this is frightening, to think about evil in the world being that literally present.  And it’s like where are we safe?  Where do we find a place?  Whenever there’s a gathering of people, should be looking over our shoulders, looking for someone that looks mysterious or looking for somebody in a building up, looking down on us, wondering if they have a gun.  All that anxiety, and the answer to that is to be still and listen to what God wants to say to you.

And this is what I think he wants to say, because I want to hear it, and I want to feel it.  But he’s saying a couple of things really clearly.  See if this helps.  Number one, he’s saying, “I’m concerned about everything that’s going on in the world, and there’s nothing going on in this world that I haven’t allowed to be there.”  There’s no evil in the world that is there without God’s permission, which seems strange in a way.  Why would he allow evil to be present when he says so clearly in scripture, “I have destroyed the power of evil”?  He has destroyed its power, and the only reason it’s allowed is because it has some mysterious role, some mysterious part in the unfolding of what this life is supposed to be for.  And God is not worried about promising a life that is free of stress and pain and suffering as much as he’s interested in a world that has all those ingredients, and he allows them to be exactly what they are, when they are needed for you, for me so that we can be transformed by the world.  That’s his promise.  You’re here for a while, such a short while in terms of existence, and if we’re worried too much about the world having to be the way we think it should be, we’re working desperately to make it all better, we can be so stressed and worried when it seems to be going in another direction, which it’ll always be going in that direction, I guarantee you.    At least in my mind it seems clear that there has been a continual evolution of consciousness, and the world is a better place than it’s ever been in terms of people’s awareness of what’s right and what’s wrong and what’s good and what’s evil.  There’s more consciousness of all that than we’ve ever had before.  So in a way, the world is getting better, but at the same time, it’s not better in the sense of freed from these things that create such anxiety. 

So why are they there?  Because they’re there as a sign to you and to me that we have to be crucified to them.  What does that mean, crucified to them?  Jesus saved the world by accepting not the way he wanted the world to be, not the way he hoped his ministry would end, not the way that we would have liked to see things work for him, where he became this wonderful figure that lived a long life and everyone loved him and he was so effective.  No, it ended in this tragic, horrible rejection of who he is and a loss of the support of everyone around him except just a handful of people that were with him.  And he said okay to that, knowing it would somehow — this act of his surrendering to the world in a way that wasn’t what he wanted but it was the way it was written, and he said, “I will go with that.  I will stay with that.  I will work with that.”  And when he did that, he found enormous peace, and he gave into it, and everything changed. 

How do we give into evil without looking and feeling like we’re neutral to it?  We want it to go away.  We want to change it.  We want to do everything we can, but at the same time, if we’re anxious and worried about it being there, we think it’s somehow our fault if it’s in a circle of intimate friends where the pain is there because someone else caused it or whatever, and we’re supposed to fix it, we’re Martha.  And Marys are people who take time to step back to pay attention and reflect, not to want it to be different but to want it to be something that teaches, shows us, opens us to whatever it is trying to say to you and to me.  God allows things to be as they are, not randomly without purpose, but your world and my world, what you and I are living with and dealing with right now is exactly what God wants us to be dealing with.  And if it causes anxiety and worry, then we’re in the wrong place.  We’ve got to somehow embrace it, allow it, do everything we can to change it.  That’s fine, but not losing hope or losing a sense of well-being, because once we do that, once we’re in that anxious worried about the past, afraid of the future, there’s no peace.  And the opening prayer that we prayed in this liturgy was this promise that we ask God to fulfill, and that is  make us fervent in hope.  And the hope is not that maybe things will be better, maybe these things make sense, maybe they’re there for a purpose.  No, I know they’re there for a purpose.  I know they have meaning.  I know they’re going to teach me something, and if I surround myself with it and allow myself to embrace it, I will find peace, and so will you. 

Father, your presence is a dynamic force.  It is something that’s alive and vital and intensely interested in being felt and heard and understood.  So please awaken in us a receptivity to all that is so that we can take it all in, and then help us to discern how to read the signs of the times, how to read our reactions to those signs so that we can feel the transforming grace changing us, bringing us to a new inner place of peace.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.