25th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Cycle C 21-22
TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
Amos 8:4-7 | 1 Timothy 2:1-8 | Luke 16:1-13
Oh God, who founded all the commands on your sacred law, upon love of you and 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.
The gospel ended with an interesting comment or statement about service. There’s something in human nature that is meant to serve. We can either serve God or serve mammon. We can either serve ourselves or serve others. My point is I think mammon is a really interesting word, because you look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and it says it’s another word for money. But then if you read on, it talks about in medieval writings, mammon was considered to be the devil, evil. It was basically focused totally on itself, and greed was a major part of it. So I think to myself, in this spiritual journey that you and I are sharing, we may not have a lot of problems with money in that sense of using it to make money off of people in a way that’s unfair and unjust, though we do see a lot in the world today of corporations somehow falling into that trap of making sure that they can get as much money as possible for the least amount of product, and that’s kind of considered good business in some ways. But I want to talk about something not so much about money, dollars and business or shekels or grain. I want to talk about another kind of mammon.
It’s a kind of spiritual mammon. It’s when you put yourself in a situation on your spiritual journey, and you’re looking at yourself carefully. And no matter how hard you try to find in your life things that are good, you keep coming up with the things that are wrong, keep focusing on what’s wrong. If you focus too much on what’s wrong, something goes haywire, and the thing that goes haywire is there’s this thing in human beings that, when they’re criticized, when they’re judged, they cannot just think about themselves as somebody doing something wrong, but they can consider themselves as something’s wrong with me. It’s called shame. So the idea of being judged is really risky. If we’re going to do self-judgment, we have to be filled with mercy and understanding. That’s exactly what we find in the person of Jesus, so compassionate, so understanding. He lived on this planet with us. He knew what it was like to struggle as a human being. He knew that in a way — not that God doesn’t know these things, God the Father, but nevertheless, it was an experience that we have of a God learning what it’s like to be human. And it increases his capacity for empathy, care and desire to see change, not condemnation.
So I want to talk about spiritual pride. I guess that’s what I’m talking about, that we can get ourselves in a position where we’re never really good enough. Remember the rich man who came and said, “Look, I do everything, everything right.” And Jesus looked at him and smiled, actually looked at him with love, saying, “This is great. You’re really trying, but you’ve got one problem. Why don’t you give up everything you have and then come and follow me?” And I think the man thought it was about his money or his wealth, though he didn’t really talk about that. He just said that he was very, very, very good. So I think what that lesson is, is that there’s something in us, when we focus too much on being good, being perfect, being without stain of sin or whatever we do, it more likely comes about where we can’t do the job as well as we thought we should or could do, and we get worried about performance and all of that. That’s what he was asking the rich man to let go of, all of his possessions — possessions. So interesting. Performance can become a possession, meaning how I perform is exactly how much I’m worth, and by performance, I mean living out your life in the midst of other people. It doesn’t have to be giving a homily. It can be just being a parent, being a friend, being something, but if you’re looking too much at the performance part of you, you’re going to run into a real difficult problem. And that’s where it gets into something I would call spiritual pride. Let’s look at it more carefully.
Now, we’ve only been listening to the Old Testament every Sunday for the last, I don't know, 55 years. Before that, as you well know, or those of you who are not Catholic might not realize, but we were only listening to a gospel and an epistle, just 52 of them for the entire year. It’s easy to see, when having that small of a source to preach from, that maybe homilies became routine. They knew them by heart, and probably they were more likely to then just give good advice or teach things that the church was teaching about sacraments and about laws and rules and things like that. So I wonder about the depth of the preaching before we had the Old Testament, because it has changed my mind so much about this whole relationship I have with God. And it even has been, I think, in a sense a worrisome thing to me if I can’t integrate it correctly, because there’s something so clear about how upset God is when we do things wrong.
So if you remember last Sunday’s reading, there was Moses coming down with the tablets, and he saw all the people going back to their old ways, and he was upset, but then God really got upset and decided he was going to destroy them all, kill them all. “I can’t stand these people. They drive me nuts.” That’s God speaking to sinful human beings in the Old Testament, and now we have another passage from Amos. He’s a prophet, and he knows about the corruption in the marketplace. And so he’s saying to them, “This is something you’ve got to stop. You’ve got to stop cheating people. You’ve got to stop using your position to suck life out of people. You’ve got to learn how to help people, not hurt people.” And then he says at the end that the Lord, and this is Amos speaking for God, will never forget a thing that you’ve done. And earlier in the passage it says, “I will never forgive you.” I don't know if you’ve ever had anybody say that to you, but it’s a horrible feeling. “I’ll never forgive you.” So why am I bringing these stories up? Well, it seems to me that, if you read a lot of the Old Testament, you’re going to see this angry, angry God at the beginning. Granted, Adam and Eve didn’t exactly shine as examples of obedience, but they were asked to leave the garden, and it seemed kind of cruel in a way, except I think, if you read it carefully, you’ll see that Eve, who’s motivated actually by wisdom when she made the mistake of following the other creature’s voice. She did want something good, but she made a bad mistake in what it was going to be. And so they’re in bad shape with God, in a sense, and then the two children, Cain and Abel come along. And then one of them — Cain kills Abel, and there’s this evil in that family and things like that. And so you see God responding negatively. He doesn’t forgive Cain. He punishes him with a mark so that he lives the rest of his life alone. So over and over again, these stories — and the one in the time of Noah was when he’s looking at all he’s created, and this is the most troubling one for me when I first read it. He looked at everything he made, all the animals, everything, and just a few lines earlier in the scriptures he was saying how beautiful and how wonderful everything is. And now this same God is saying, “I want to destroy all of them. Kill them all. Destroy them.” What? Why? Because they weren’t who God wanted them to be.
Now, there’s something in these stories that I think have a clear teaching for a very low, low level of evolution of understanding for a group of people who don’t understand their hearts yet. They work solely out of their minds and their wills, and they need to be threatened, and they need to be punished. And so you get so much of that in the Old Testament, and it’s really hard, in a way, not to carry that over, not to carry it into the New Testament without realizing it’s working on me. “God does not like me when I fail. God is disappointed deeply in me.” And there’s something even in the very unsophisticated person. In a sense, when God says that to them, they feel something. One of the most devastating of all feelings, I think, is shame. And so you hear the first response of human beings to having disappointed God is shame, hiding from God. “I’m not worthy. I’m no good. I’m valueless.” That can come upon us without realizing it, not even realizing maybe where it comes from, but it can come from an indication deep inside of us that we’re not living up to what we should be. And it creates this anxiety and this shame, and then shame is the most interesting of all things. It needs to be fed. It needs to be encouraged, and so you find all you do is look at your mistakes.
So then you look at the gospel, and there’s this wonderful story about a man who basically is doing the wrong thing, and Jesus looks at him and says, “You know what? Watch this guy. Watch what he’s doing. He’s doing something really smart, smarter than the people out there that are not listening to me and not trying to do what I ask them to do. I can’t reach them. I threaten them, and they still won’t listen to me. But this guy on his own, with his mind and his will, he comes up with an idea. “I know what I can do. I’m being fired. So I know my life after this is going to be very difficult. I don't know what to do. I can’t dig. I’m too proud to beg.” So he basically says, “I know what I can do. I can use my position now to befriend the people that we have been abusing with our over-inflated invoices, and I’ll make sure that, when I’m let go of, I will be welcomed.” What’s the man doing? He’s not serving his ego. He’s not serving himself. He’s not looking for money. He’s looking for relationship, a relationship. “I want to connect with someone so I will be in a relationship that sustains me.” That’s pure wisdom to a mind that especially is not in any way, shape or form very much evolved.
So then you look at Paul, and he’s giving this wonderful advice. First of all, here’s what he’s saying. “All the time you should be working for someone else, praying for them, doing things in your heart for them.” When you pray, you are intending something for someone, and when you are not condemning, not judging but always trying to give somebody something that will help them see through what they’re doing. When you do the opposite of what God did — and the reason God did it was to prove that it didn’t work. The condemning people and judging people is never going to change them. It only leads them deeper and deeper into darkness or ignoring God, because it’s too difficult. Jesus came to change all of that, and he did it by this: he wants you when you’re at your worst and you’re feeling you’re no good, unlovable. And you own that feeling, and you say, “Maybe it’s because of what I did, or it’s just the way I’m thinking.” And then he looks you in the eye, and I love this part about Jesus, reveals who God really is. He looks in your eye and says, “You’re an absolute mess. You’ve done some bad things, or you’re beating yourself up too much. It’s wrong, but when I see you, I look at you. I love you now more than I ever have, because you’re honest. You’re facing things, and you’re not able to fix it.” That’s real forgiveness. Being loved as you are is essential. Without it, there’s only darkness.
God, the Old Testament is filled with images of a God that is terrifying to so many of us, a God that just looks and judges and condemns, but that was to awaken in us the dramatic change that you have made possible through entering into our life and living in the form of a human being and teaching us what it means to be forgiven, to be loved, to be held, to be safe. Fill us with that awareness. Take away our anxiety over trying to be better. Let us accept ourselves as we are, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.