FOURTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Zephaniah 2:3; 3:12-13 | 1 Corinthians 1:26-31 | Matthew 5:1-12a

Grant us, Lord our God, that we may honor you with our mind and love everyone in truth of heart.  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 opening prayer sets two goals for all of us who listen to this set of readings: honor God with all your mind; love everyone with truth of heart.  To honor God is to surrender to the plan that God has created for you and for me.  If there’s anything I would long for you to learn from me ⎯ I wish I had learned it much earlier in my life, because it came to me much later in life, and that is that the idea of doing things for God in order to win from him favor is a wasted effort and also not honoring God, not allowing him to be in a relationship with us that he longs to be.  He’s not interested in us being obedient to a set of rules and laws, yet that’s what people needed in the beginning.  And it’s really probably what they asked for.  “We want to know what pleases you so we can be assured that you will be favoring us when it comes to finding our enemies or raising our crops.”  And so they kept asking for more and more rules and regulations, and yet you know, and I know, at the beginning of this whole thing called creation, when God created human beings, he placed them in a beautiful place and longed for them not to get caught up in anything that would rob them of honoring his plan.  And yet they were caught, and they were tempted by this creature.  They were innocents, I guess, in a way, so they were easily misled.  But the idea of eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was it seemed that it was good to do in order to be like God, and if you’re like God, then you can work for him.  It’s like we want to be gods.  We want to be autonomous in what we are able to do for God and win his approval, and nothing is further from his heart.  The truth of God’s heart is he wants a relationship with you and me that is loving, intimate, as loving and as intimate as any human relationship we could ever want or ever long for, and yet we tend to still get caught up in doing things, doing things, doing things.  

So in the first reading, from Zephaniah, there’s something there that struck me, and that is he says, “For those of you who observe a law, you can seek justice, seek humility.”  And then he just says, “Perhaps God may not be angry with you.”  The reason I say that is because, if you create a rigid system of laws and rules and you break one, you have this sense that God is angry, and God isn’t wanting a relationship like that with you.  He doesn’t want you tiptoeing around and making sure you do every single thing right so that he doesn’t get angry, because he's not ⎯ that’s not his major longing with human beings.  It’s not to be their corrector and their judge and their punisher.  No, he wants them to be intimately engaged with him, and that intimate engagement is really fascinating, because it’s not just for us that he wants to be a part of our lives.  But unless he’s a part of our lives, we will never be able to be what we need to be for other people.  In other words, the gift that God’s presence brings to you and me, the capacity to love, to heal, to save, to free, all that, when it comes into us, it becomes this thing that is there not just for us but is for those around us.  God longs for a relationship with us, because it can radically change the relationship we have with each other, and so it’s interesting in Zephaniah when God says, “I will always have a remnant in your midst.  There will always be a people humble and lowly that take refuge in my name, and they do no wrong.  They speak no lies, no deceit in them.  They take care of their people, their flocks, and they are protected.”  So that seems to me that God will promise not necessarily that one set of unique individuals will never fall into the trap of sin.  It just means that there’s always someone around that has this gift within them.  That’s God’s promise.  If he decided that he wanted us to be co-workers with bringing life and light into people’s life, then it would seem that, as he promises his presence with us, he’ll also present ⎯ there’s people around you if you can find them.  You’ll know them when you’re with them, because there’s something that resonates from them that feels so right, so good.  There will always be someone there for you, and it’s your work to be open to them.  

Now, it’s reiterated in the reading from St. Paul to the Corinthians.  He’s saying that the whole notion of God wanting a relationship with us is based in the fact that we are not enough, that we need to be humble.  We’re not the most powerful.  We’re not of noble birth.  We’re not always wise.  We’re not always the strongest.  We’re not always the best, but that is the way God intended us to be so that, when we admit to that, when we realize that and allow him to then do something within us, then we are close to what his message is, because the message of Jesus is to reinterpret the relationship the Old Testament was guilty of producing within people.  And by guilty I mean that they were constantly told they had to be obedient, and they had to do everything that God called them to do in order for him to be on their side in battles or there for them or making sure their crops were raised correctly.  

So we listen to this beautiful prayer.  It’s really kind of a prayer that he’s offering to this crowd, and then he seems to gather his disciples over maybe afterwards, or maybe it was during it.  But it seems like he was almost teaching this to the crowd certainly, but he really needed his disciples to understand it.  So he saw the crowd, but then he calls his disciples close to him, like he’s saying, “Listen to this.”  And the first thing he says is that, “Everyone who understands who they are, for them to know they are blessed, which means somehow in sync with me, in relationship, a healthy relationship with me, they have to be poor in spirit.”  And that simply means that they’re not enough.  Their spirit, human spirit is not enough.  Divine spirit is what human spirit is made to be entangled and intwined with so that we can be the people that the kingdom of heaven is asking us to be, and remember, the kingdom of heaven is not something that’s happening later.  It’s happening now.  The kingdom of heaven is now.  Jesus would say that.  It’s like the whole world continues to be created toward this goal, and we keep moving, moving closer to what we might call heaven or a place of peace, a place of wonder, a place of beauty.  We make mistakes, and we keep trying to learn from our mistakes.  

So we have the reminder that you have to be poor in spirit, and then you have to mourn.  And I think the mourning is everything to do with facing everything in you and everything in the world that isn’t the way you want it to be.  It’s sad that there’s such violence and discord and wars in this world.  And if you can mourn that, you’re blessed, meaning you don’t expect it not to be there, but you know how to somehow suffer it with humanity so that that suffering brings about a new relationship in a situation that will not fall into the trap that causes these conflicts and this pain in the world.  And I love the image of meekness, because the meek are those people who don’t have a clear, perfect answer for everything.  They are not falling into the trap of Christianity that is constantly oversimplified by preachers that just simply say, “It’s as simple as stop sinning.  God is good.  You’re bad.  God will save you if you stop doing what you’re doing.”  Meekness is softening your whole notion of all these nice, neat explanations.  What you have to do is hunger, hunger and thirst for God and hunger and thirst for right relationships with people, and when you do that, you’re going to be filled with this capacity to resonate from your heart mercy, wisdom, peace, all the things promised in this wonderful set of readings.  And then he must have looked directly at his disciples eyes and said, “But you know what?  One day you’re going to be really persecuted for my sake, and you are going to go through something awful.  And they’ll be persecuting you, utter every kind of evil falsely against you, but when you take a stand in this world with this new vision of who I am and what I’m calling them to do, it’s going to be rejected and resisted intensely.”  He doesn’t go so far as to say, “And all of you will be murdered except for one.”  This isn’t something that’s just sweetness and light.  To live the way that the Beatitudes calls us to live is a way to be open to the reality of the world, finding the peace that is your inheritance, but being a peace giver, a lover, a forgiver, and at times, the victim of misunderstanding and even hatred.  God bless you.

Father, your gift of your presence is beyond measure.  Help us to realize the fullness of your message that you long nothing more than to come and dwell within us and resonate life and light and love to those around us.  Give us humility that enables us to do this marvelous work, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.