23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time: Cycle C 21-22

TWENTY-THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME 

Wisdom 9:13-18b | Philemon 9-10, 12-17 | Luke 14:25-33

Oh God, by whom we are redeemed and receive adoption, look graciously upon your beloved sons and daughters that those who believe in Christ may receive true freedom and an everlasting inheritance. 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.

It was 12 years ago that I stopped pastoring a church.  I had a wonderful parish called St. Joseph’s.  I was there for 15 years, and we did a lot of things together, built a school, and it was a wonderful, wonderful way of spending those last 15 years.  And I’ve been in other wonderful places, but when I stopped all the work that goes along with running a parish, I had more time to sit and reflect.  And I continue to do my homilies on the radio, and one of the things that began to dawn on me, two things that I had never really spent enough time pondering and wondering, and they really changed the way I read the gospel and listen to the story of Jesus and understand what it is that he was trying to do, what he was trying to accomplish, what he was trying to change in the hearts of the religious leaders.  He came to change a way of seeing God, and when he tried to change the temple, which was the place where people learned about God, they hated his message.  It wasn’t just like, “No, he’s wrong.  He’s one of those crazy new guys that came along.”  There had to be a million people that thought they were the Messiah.  But they didn’t write him off like that.  They couldn’t, because of who he was and especially because of the miracles, but nevertheless, it was something in them that was angry at him, at Jesus.  And the anger was because Jesus had nailed them on the exact mistake they were making, and somehow, deep inside of them, there was a truth, a wisdom that God places in every single human being.  And somehow, when Jesus accused them of keeping God in that temple place where they and only they could put people in touch with God and dole out God’s forgiveness, if people paid the right amount of money or gave the right kind of sacrifice — in other words, they had this God, in a way, hidden from the people and owned by the temple staff, if you think how crazy that is.

So one of the things that helped me understand more about how this story unfolds was to realize that that was the key thing that Jesus came to do, to change the mind of the church, not individuals, not the people in the streets.  They could understand what he was saying, and they were witnessing, I think, back to the temple what Jesus was trying to say about the temple.  And his miracles made it impossible for them just to write him off.  So they had to do something a little more dramatic.  They had to execute him, and it just seemed so bizarre that the God who created the Jewish people, formed them into a people, gave them the temple, gave them his presence in a certain way through prophets and through this arc that he dwelt in, all of that is what killed Jesus.  And so there’s something.  We need to look at that carefully, because it means that one of the places we need to be sure we’re reexamining and reexamining again, our notion of who God is and how God works in our life.  Jesus came to change our vision from a moralistic vision of following regulations, rules and laws, and when you follow those rules and laws, you were rewarded.  Now, that’s what people needed in the beginning.  It makes sense. 

So when I realized that this was the work that Jesus had, then the other thing that made me so interested in the stories of Jesus is that he was fully human.  And I’ve known that intellectually.  Yes, Jesus was a human being.  But I’m almost embarrassed to tell you this, that at times, when I’d be preaching, and I hope I didn’t say this out loud too often — I used to say, “Well, when it came to the end of Jesus’ life, he knew exactly what was going to happen of course.  He knew he was going to save the world by dying on the cross, and it happened Thursday night.  He was arrested Friday.  He was beaten, and then Friday and all, he dies, and then he rises. And he knew all that was going to happen.  So he was like, “All right, I can go through this horrific shame of the cross, because it’s going to be so beneficial to the world.”  I don’t think he thought that way.  Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense that he sat there in — or knelt there in the Garden of Gethsemane and begged God, “Please, take this away.  I don’t want to do this, anything but this.  I feel like a failure.  I feel I didn’t do my job.”  And he had to be filled with some kind of shame.  In fact, there’s a great line where it said he actually accepted the horrific shame that the cross made him feel, a failure.  So if he’s here to tell the church and the world that religion that focuses on laws and rules, commandments — you follow the rules and laws, and then you’re blessed — that you’ll never find God.  So that’s what this set of readings is about.

What do you find if you do not focus fully on just rules and laws and reward and punishment?  You focus on God in you, with you, for you.  It’s called wisdom — wisdom.  That’s the thing that God invited Jesus to come into the world to give to the world, because once he redeemed us, he entered into us, and when God entered into us, he was both our Father, our creator, but he was also intimately engaged in us, so he’s incarnate God.  He lives in human beings.  He’s always longed to live in human beings.  He’s always been here.  And then the impact of that indwelling presence is a thing called wisdom, and it’s this way of seeing the world so radically different than a simple black and white, right and wrong world.  The right and wrong world is founded in your mind and your will.  You understand it.  “If I do this, I get rewarded.  If I don’t do it, I get punished.”  That’s clear, but it’s not enough. 

So the first reading is so beautiful, because it’s saying, “Look, we human beings try to sit down and figure out how to do this thing called religion.  We sit down and try to figure out how to do everything.  We worry about all kinds of things.”  I love the two examples.  Our corruptible body burdens the soul.  I’m aging.  I worry about aging.  I worry about health.  The earth and shelter weighs down the mind.  The place we have in the world, we worry about it.  Is it good enough?  Are we doing a good job?  We have all these concerns about the things of the earth, and even if we try to grasp those, we don’t do that well.  So if you’re going to be in this story like Solomon — that’s the story of — it’s Solomon’s prayer we’re listening to.  He’s saying, “I need to rule and guide the world, and what I’m going to do, I need something besides my brain and my instinct — and my logic.  I need instinct.  I need wisdom.  I need that thing that only you can give me, a way of seeing things differently than simply black and white, a way of understanding that the thing that God calls me to is not to be a disciplined human being doing what I’m told but to be a human being radically opened to the presence of a living God inside of us, guiding us, awakening us, solving problems that can’t be solved by logic.  So I pray for wisdom.”

The image in the second reading, it seems interesting to me to be part of this.  I don’t want to leave out the Psalm.  The Psalm is saying, “God, when you come to us and your wisdom is in us, we are prosperous.  That gives us peace.”  Figuring things out, being in charge of my life, making it work, that’s satisfying, but there’s something about the peace that only wisdom can give, when you know that everything is as it needs to be, and you surrender to everything.

So in Paul’s reading, we just have this interesting story about a man that Paul meets in prison, and he was a slave, a servant.  And that image of slave and master is the temple.  It’s the world we often live in in a black and white, moralistic religion.  We’re the slaves to the rules.  If you follow the rules without having to think much about them — even though they don’t seem to fit the situation, we do them anyway, because we want the reward.  So he’s talking about how wonderful it is when a relationship changes between master and slave and it’s a heart connection.  Paul says, “I send you my heart when I send this man to you.”  Where does God dwell?  In your heart.  He doesn’t want a relationship with us where we’re working for a reward, afraid, terrified of the punishment, living in the brain and the will.  No, he wants a relationship.  He wants to be inside of us, living inside of us, incarnate inside of us, and what flows out of that is this mysterious thing called the Holy Spirit — the Holy Spirit. 

So now let’s go back to this last week in Jesus’ life, and this is why I wanted to stress so much the humanity of Jesus.  This has been a tough week in his life.  He’s been going through all kinds of things.  He just had a breakdown, let’s say, at the temple.  He’s been trying to reach the people there.  So the same week that he was arrested is the time he went into the temple, turned over all the tables and screamed out, “This whole place has become a business.  It has nothing to do with my Father.  It’s not opening your heart to the wisdom God wants.  It is making you slaves.”  He did that, and then he also found a fig tree somewhere, and he wanted figs on it, and it wasn’t there.  And he got mad, and he cursed it.  You can read that story a lot of ways, but what it reminded him is, “My ministry that I came into this world to do, I’m not sure I’ve done it correctly.  I’m not sure I’ve finished it right.  Maybe I should have done something different.”  If I don’t think that way about my Jesus, I don’t find him resonating inside of me, listening as attentively as he does to my own frustrations that are like that.  He understands human nature not because he’s smart enough to do it but because he was fully human.  And so he yells out at these people, which I think is so interesting.  The Ten Commandments was the biggest thing that they were given.  The Ten Commandments, because of the temple and the way it developed, went from ten rules and laws to 613 rules and laws.  So you can kind of say they overdid the law part, but he said, “Look, unless you hate your father and mother, your children, your own life, unless you hate that, you can’t be my disciple.”  And what’s he saying when he says all of that?  Unless you pick up your cross and follow me, unless you think what it is I’m asking you to do — it’s like you don’t build a house without having the right stuff.  You don’t go into a battle without knowing what you’re up against.  We’re up against a radical change in the way we see possessions.  It’s what he says at the end, possessions.  What were possessions in the Old Testament?  If you followed the law, you had multiple possessions.  You were rich.  You were healthy.  You were strong.  God only gave good things to the people that follow the moral rules, and they became judgmental, exclusive from other people.  It went to the dark, dark side of religion. 

Now, if this sounds like it only happened once and then God fixed it, you know what I’m trying to say.  This is the shadow of all religion, of all spiritual journeys.  Our journey is not a journey toward perfection, performance, reward, punishment.  That doesn’t take anything more than a good, strong will and a pretty smart mind.  No, we’re made for wisdom, a mysterious knowing and experience, something that is beyond anything that makes sense logically, but it lives inside of us, an incarnate God inside of you and inside of me.  And what we resonate out from that union is wisdom.  Another word for wisdom: love.  Another word for love is this incredible desire we have to not do anything more than be servants, servants, to serve other people, to be there for other people.  The focus is not on me but on those I can love and care for.  That’s the transformation that God is asking you and me to go through, and it’s not easy. 

Father, your life, the life you had when you walked this earth as one of us, is filled with hope for all of us, because you showed us what it is that we’re engaged in as we work with you, saving the world, changing the world, bringing people closer to the essence of who you are in them and who they are with you.  Bless this ministry.  Bless my words.  Bless all of us who speak this truth that we may penetrate hearts, awaken them to the joy and the prosperity of a life of service.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.