TWENTY-SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Amos 6:1a, 4-7 | 1 Timothy 6:11-16 | Luke 16:19-31

Oh God, who manifests your almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy, bestow, we pray, your grace abundantly upon us and make those hastening to attain your promises heirs to the treasure of heaven.  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.

If you’re like me and many of my friends, you look at the world today, and you become nervous and uneasy, because it seems that the very thing that is so important for human beings to be with each other is truthful and caring and supportive.  Instead of seeing those things manifested, at least in the news, all we hear about is conflict, division, separation.  One person’s lie they are saying is true, and the other person is saying, “No, it’s not.”  And it’s back and forth and back and forth.  So it seems to me that there’s never been a time when the message of the gospel is more needed, and yet there seems to be a number people, more than I feel comfortable with or feel good about, and that is so many people are leaving, at least, I know, the Catholic Church.  And they’re saying, “I don’t know why, but I just don’t find anything there for me anymore.  I don’t feel anything supporting me.  I feel things are being asked of me that I don’t want to do and maybe don’t understand.” 

So one of the things that I’ve been doing, as you’re well aware — I’ve said this many times — I now preach from the Old Testament, as all priests do, along with the New Testament reading and the gospel.  And I sometimes — I’m very excited to do that.  The stories in the Old Testament are so valuable in understanding exactly what redemption means and what Jesus came to do that was so radical, but even the readings today I feel something that’s there that I think bothers people and keeps them away if it’s what’s preached.  And that is this God of ours in the Old Testament is not happy with human nature.  He thinks it’s a mess, and the mess we’re in is the mess that will always be the tension in a good human being trying to be who God calls him to be.  And one is that we’re there for other people.  That’s the main message of the gospel.  God dwells in you so that, through you, he can minister to his people.  He’s not asking you to be what they need.  He’s asking you to have something toward them, to feel something toward them.  It’s a part of us that’s the most beautiful part of us.  It’s often represented by the heart, and that is compassion and empathy, to feel with our brothers and sisters the pain that they’re in but not  — and this is so important — but not to feel the obligation that what they need is your responsibility and your responsibility only.  I’m afraid that comes across so much in the Old Testament that it’s so easy to preach on it, because it has such a fearful impact.  And if you’ll notice, news stories that are the ones that are the most engaging with people is the ones about things going in the wrong direction.  Life is awful, and people listen to that and want to know why.  What’s going on?  Whose fault is it?  And they blame somebody.  Well, the problem with the Old Testament is you see often God using language and stories that really do underscore that he is not happy, as I’ve said, and the first reading we’ve just listened to is one of those.

It’s describing what I think is often the way we are when we’re very young and have just come into an awareness of who we are, and we’re free, away from all rules and regulations, and we get very, very self-centered in terms of comfort.  We love great food.  We love great parties.  We love music.  We love wine and scotch and bourbon and tequila, and we do everything for ourselves.  And when God points that out, which is nothing other than our lower nature — it’s who we are when we first come into the world.  It’s something we have to grow out of, but you have to be in it before you know you have to grow out of it.  So you begin to feel this kind of self-centeredness, and as you evolve more — I’d say it doesn’t happen until your 30s basically — you begin to feel the emptiness of that.  And the emptiness of that is what God is trying to talk to when he talked to the people in this first reading from Amos.  The prophet was talking.  He’s saying, “Look, this is not going to feed your soul and who you really are.”  But rather than go into all that, they just say, “If you continue to do this, if you feel no empathy about things that are collapsing all around you, then you’re going to be kicked out of this thing.  You’re going to be lost and rejected, and you’re going to be empty and condemned.”  That’s what it seemed to feel that it was saying. 

Then you look at the gospel, and there’s a really strong image of what I think sometimes is the image that God — that we think religion is supposed to be.  And that is, if we have a good life and everything works, then that’s not good, but if we have a bad life and everything’s bad, then we’re going to be saved, or we’re going to reach where we need to be.  Now, think about that for a minute.  It’s too much emphasis on us, on our ego and what we do.  The thing that God wants more than anything, anything else, is for us to be transformed, remade, a new person.  That’s so clear in the New Testament, but in the Old Testament — I mean in the New Testament, but in the Old Testament we see this, now, this story.  We had one story about how selfish we are when we’re having a good time.  So I guess religion is against good times, and now this one is a rich man who has everything he wants, compared to a poor man who is not just poor but has this horrible life of a beggar and sores, and it’s a miserable life.  And somehow, the one who has the miserable life, we are told, is favored by God, and the one who has the rich, full life is not favored by God.  It looks like God is not only against parties and having a good time, but he’s against any kind of success that the world promises us.  And that’s just oversimplified — oversimplified, because this whole story is about openness to realization of who you are, and when you see the part of you that is self-centered, self-focused, completely tied up with yourselves, meaning you’re at a very low level of consciousness, there’s a sense that there’s something really wrong with you.  You’re bad, and God hates you and won’t take care of you and won’t do anything for you.  It seems like throughout the Old Testament God is saying, “I’m irritated by you.  You don’t realize it.  I’m trying to break through.  I’m trying to get you to listen to me.  The life you’re choosing is ending up as destructive.”  So the only way God can work with people on a much lower level of consciousness is saying, “Look, if you’re all about yourself, then I’ll tell you what you’re really worried about.  I know you’re worried about yourself, so I tell you, if you stay in this self-centered role, you’re going to have nothing.”  And it’s depressing, but here’s what’s so beautiful.  This situation, which is so clearly in the Old Testament before a very important event called redemption, God doing something radically different, it’s — that whole moment of Christ coming into the world changed the entire Old Testament, in a sense.     There’s so many passages in the Old Testament that fit so beautifully who Jesus is and what Jesus came to bring, but he came to bring you a new creation.  He’s going to make you — awaken you to what God intended you to be, a compassionate, understanding and caring person. 

And so that’s what this, I think, this gospel or the second reading is about.  It’s about, when you realize that you’re here to pursue all these things — devotion, be patient, be loving, be gentle.  But the key thing in that second reading is you have to make the noble confession in the presence of many witnesses.  So it’s basically — the question there is you need to come to a point where you’re self-aware enough to know that you’re going against your nature, and doing that is leading you into destruction, and you’re open at least to see it for what it is.  And you hate it, and you regret it, and you don’t like it.  That is you’re ready to make the noble confession.  It’s what draws somebody from a congregation to an altar call.  It’s what calls people in the Catholic Church and communities that are heavy in the beautiful area of rituals. Baptism seems so, so crucial.  In fact, for years, centuries, the church said if you weren’t baptized Catholic, you couldn’t be saved, and that’s oversimplified.  Of course it doesn’t mean that.  It means that, unless people go through what baptism represents, they can’t find life. 

Just think of it that way.  God wants us to enjoy and engage in this life in the way he intended us to do it, and when we don’t, there’s a dark darkness to our life.  Let’s not focus on heaven and hell.  That’s there, and they’re real.  But focus on, when we’re here, God wants us to be engaged in something that gives us life.  And so how did Jesus do it?  What is he asking us to make a noble confession in?  What’s interesting about this gospel also, because I’m thinking about how many times you read something and it makes you feel guilty just by reading it, when Timothy says, “Look, hey, I charge you with keeping the commandments without stain or reproach,” that means do everything right.  There’s nothing more devastating to a person who’s struggling with selfishness to say, “Not only are you selfish, but if you don’t stop being selfish, the result is I’ll condemn you, because you have to do it perfectly.”  It’s called performance anxiety.  Then I went back and read that sentence, and it doesn’t say to keep the commandments without stain or reproach.  It says, “Keep the commandment without stain or reproach.”  What is the commandment that we’re called to believe in, trust in?  When Jesus looked at the law with its 613 rules and people said, “What is this all about,” Jesus would say, “It’s about love.  It’s about empathy.  It’s about compassion for your brothers and sisters.”  And when you grow through your self-centeredness, when you see it for what it really does and you see the dignity of who you are, then you’ll start to change.  And so what did Jesus have to do to save everybody?  He came first and foremost to empower you.  That’s one thing.  Well, maybe not foremost but one of the things.  “I want to empower you, because when I ask you to do these things for me, to be there for other people, I’m not asking you to do that on your own, out of your own energy.  I’m going to dwell inside of you.  I’m going to live inside of you, and I’m going to give you this ability to do this kind of caring and compassion.”  And it doesn’t mean fixing a problem.  It means understanding it and feeling one with the person.  That’s what they need.  They don’t need to be fixed.  They need to be understood, and they need to face the fact that they’re doing something to themselves.  And the last thing they need is to be condemned and judged.  So what does Jesus do?  “I forgive all of your sins.”  All the times you look back and say, “I was so selfish,” he says, “I overlook that, because I know inside of you there’s this potential for doing something.  So don’t ever feel like I’m condemning you, judging you, demanding that you be perfect.”  And that’s what religion sometimes comes across as, and it’s why you don’t want to sit there, when you already feel guilty about who you are, being told, “You are who you are,” without much hope, other than your will to make yourself better. 

The mind and the will is never going to change us into who God wants us to be.  It’s going to be our hearts, and if you’re going to be a compassionate, understanding person, the only way to start that is to see through your selfishness and then to recognize you’re loved, loved, loved and forgiven in spite of that.  All he wants is for you to change and grow, and he’ll help you do that.  That’s so different than being judged and condemned and set back, cut out, because we don’t use our will enough, and we don’t use our mind enough to figure out this is logic.  “Don’t do bad things, because you will get bad results from God.”  It’s not true.  God in the Old Testament pointed out why sin is so destructive, why selfishness is a dead end, and the only way out of that is to stop judging yourself and others for what they’re not and try to feel the pain and suffer it with each other, because that’s the transforming gift of God’s grace, to use his presence to be changed into a new person.

Father, we find always your preference for the poor.  Sometimes we think that’s about money, but it’s really about a disposition that we should have naturally of knowing that, without you, we are not able to do anything, become close to who you want us to be.  The ego doesn’t like to be dependent.  The heart loves it.  So please, God, bless us with an understanding of who we are and what we need, and let us trust in you as we trust in ourselves.  Both is essential for a new life, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.