TWENTY-SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME 

Sirach 3:17-18, 20, 28-29 | Hebrews 12:18-19, 22-24a | Luke 14:1, 7-14

God of might, giver of every good gift, put into our hearts the love of your name so that, by deepening our sense of reverence, you may nurture in us what is good and, by your watchful care, keep safe what you have nurtured.   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.

This set of readings has had a big impact on me as I’ve prepared for these words I want to share with you, because they seem, for me, to be something that is focusing on the essential thing God wants from us as we live on this earth.  What are we here for?  When I grew up, I realized that God had given me my life, and he gave it to me, gave me to my parents, and then I was challenged with doing what all parents ask.  And then the church and religion just underscored it.  Be a good boy.  Be obedient.  Do what you’re told.  So it strikes me, or it struck me then that I thought, “Well, religion, this work that I have with God, is pretty simple.  It’s binary.  It’s easy to understand.  There are things you do.  There’s things you don’t do.  You do the right things; you are rewarded.  You do the bad things; you are punished.”  And that was just as clear as it could be, and that got so ingrained in my whole psyche that that’s what I really have always fought against, is that kind of world, because when you do what I’ve done for 55 years, go back to these stories over and over again, as many of you have done, you worry about yourself.  And if you’re sane or insane, you worry about how well you’re doing, and you seek help.  You go to a place that helps you with your codependency.  I went to the Meadows.  You go to therapy for 15 years.  I was in Jungian analysis.  All those things were there, because I was indirectly, maybe not even realizing it — I was seeking self-knowledge.  And there must have been something deep inside of me that was questioning the simplicity of the Old Testament and the way I was taught that God reacted to me as a human being struggling to do the right thing.  And he was always — it was always somehow under the law — the law.  It’s so interesting.  The law, which is based in justice, is a normal part of the evolution of human beings.  Let me go over some of those principles, because they’ll fit into what I’m trying to say and maybe give you a guide to what I’m trying to get to.   

When we are born, there is only one concern we have, and that’s ourselves.  We have no really even sense of other people.  In fact, it says it’s a while before the child even realizes they’re not part of their mother.  “So now wait.  I’m out here in this world, and there’s — oh, there’s nobody but me.”  So I scream.  I cry.  Anything I need — it’s all about my needs.  It has to be that way, and that slowly evolves and turns into somebody who begins to find other people in the world and be drawn to them and have relationships with them.  And then the concern of this child, who represents our earliest consciousness, is that we have two things to worry about: ourselves and the people that are close to us, me and my people.  Then the next evolutionary stage is when people begin to live in communities together, in towns and villages, and each of them decided they could do a certain thing to contribute to the well-being of the community.  So some were farmers.  Some were herdsmen, raised sheep or whatever.  So in that world, they needed something to help guide them in their relationships.  So there was a need for some kind of rules and laws, justice, and so that was the moment in human evolution when the law was proclaimed in the Old Testament to the Israelites. 

If you listen carefully to the reaction of these not-yet-very-sophisticated human beings to being told what they must do — you would think they would say, “Oh, thank you.  This is so helpful.  The Ten Commandments, they make sense.  They’re all about my relationship with God.  They’re about our relationship to each other.  It’s all about justice in a sense.  There’s right, and there’s wrong.  It’s binary.  What could be harder to understand?”  But when the law was proclaimed in the Old Testament, by a prophet or by a patriarch or someone, the people would weep and cry.  He said, “Stop weeping.”  What was the weeping about?  It’s about something in human nature that we all have is that, when we’re put under pressure to be able to be acceptable to someone by our performance, there’s anxiety, because there’s something in human beings that know, from the very beginning, that we’re not anything like people in control of what we do.  We can’t be controlled by the law.  We’ll break it, absolutely.  So the tears was something that was obviously a sign that, “Don’t bind me to a relationship with you, God, that is based on my performance, because I’ll fail you.  I know I’ll fail you.”  And that living in shame and guilt is something that most people have done most of their life, because that’s often the way that other people treat us, parents, friends, family.  “Perform in the way I want you to, and you’re my friend.  Don’t; I have nothing to do with you.”  Get rid of toxic people in your life.  So at that point, something had to shift, and then what shifted in human beings is the development of something that went beyond the community and this God who is demanding.  There is a longing inside of them, not just to perform to please God, but to become someone, and that’s the beginning of what we would call fuller consciousness or becoming who we are meant to be: human beings who are not simply bound by a law but a deeper longing inside of us to achieve something that we have been given as a destiny.  Happens when you’re in your 20s and 30s. 

I remember being at the University of Dallas when I was a young student.  I was a sophomore, 150 years ago, and basically what happened there is I was thinking, “What do I want to be?  What do I want to do?  What’s my destiny?”  I wasn’t thinking about destiny.  I was thinking, “What’s my job?”  And then it came to me.  “I don’t know.”  But the only thing that was attractive to me at that time was maybe something that gave me a certain sense of value.  “Ah, the priesthood.  They’re all valued.”  And something that maybe would give me a sense of being able to help people.  “Yeah, that’s perfect.”  So there I was, drawn to a position of esteem and a position of power to be able to share my gifts with other people.  Not a bad beginning, but in the process of living for 55 years in that role, I found two things to be extraordinarily interesting.  Finding your destiny is not the same as finding your job.  I took on the priesthood as a job.  That wasn’t bad, and I spent all my time basically, in 43 of those years, being a pastor or assistant pastor.  And I was good at it, and I was able to get things done.  I was more preoccupied with doing the job I had than looking into myself, and then I retired at 70.  And that’s when things began to change, and I began to see something very different, that God is not calling us into a role where we should succeed so that we are honored, have esteem not just from other people but even from yourself.  “I feel good about the work I do, because it’s successful.”  All that, that’s very normal and healthy.  There’s nothing really wrong with it, except it’s got to move beyond that, and the moving beyond it is this entrance into the journey’s most essential thing.  When we talk about what am I here for, it’s not about doing a job.  It’s about becoming someone, and the thing you’re asked to become is a man filled, a woman filled with divinity, an awareness of the awesomeness of God, the God that we prayed to in the opening prayer, saying, “God, please give me everything I need in order to be the person that I’m called to be and bring people into the peace of your kingdom.” 

The second reading talks about being called to something, and the call is not to Mount Sinai, which is the law, but to another mount, to Mount Zion.  And Zion is the place of the party, the festival.  Everybody gathered together, and they’re being told that they’ve been saved.  It’s a group of losers and lovers, and they’ve been there just celebrating, because God took them from where they were and brought them into a place they knew they were accepted and loved as they were.  You have to have that sense of being valued and loved and safe if you’re going to go on this journey of finding yourself, because what you find is not necessarily the most attractive person in your imagination.  Sometimes you’re going to face things about you that are just anything but things you are proud of.  But he invites you to a place where you let go of that judgment, and you embrace the fullness of the mystery of forgiveness and mercy.  And your heart is changed, and in the midst of your awareness of your faults, you find peace, and then you share that peace.  That’s your destiny: to be a person walking on this planet, resonating something out of your heart, out of that place where God dwells, and you’re not resonating a judgmental God who’s looking for sin and, once found, condemns it and then demands the person change.  There’s a lot of Christians out there that find that a very comforting way of imagining their work on this planet.  Here to point out sin, tell people to stop it and control their behavior.  And it leads to anxiety.  But this God is calling you and me into a place of peace that is so different than anything that that kind of mentality would create.  Demanding, judgmental, binary-world laws and rules are devastating to that part of you that is truly you, and knowing that you have to face its dark side before you can ever embrace the fullness of what it is makes the law an obstacle and not a blessing, not something that helps.

Now, listen to a line that’s from Hebrews.  I didn’t read it, because it wasn’t part of the readings, but this is my — when I read this, it was explosive in my imagination.  This is the author of this book telling people who they really are called to be in this world.  The line goes like this: “Strive for peace and everything that is holy.”  Holiness is wholeness, consciousness, becoming everything you are, fullness, authenticity.  Strive for that without which, if you don’t do it, no one will see the Lord.  What?  No one will see God?  I know that, when I talk about the fullness of what we’re called to be — a fully-evolved person is realizing they have a gift, and the gift they perfect, and they work on it.  It’s not the job, but it’s their very person, their authenticity.  And they work on that, and when it gets to the level of being truly what it was intended to be, you are a light to the people around you without you ever saying a word about religion or God or faith or hope.  They feel it.  They just feel it.  They feel peace. 

Do you know what it’s like to be someone who lives in a binary world of right and wrong and they’re telling you all night long all the things they hate and all the reasons why they think the world is going to hell in a hand basket, and they’re judgmental?  And what you’re feeling from them is nothing but fear.  Wow.  You are here to resonate a peace that can only come to you when you realize what you’re called to, not a tough, black and white, binary judgment but a place of celebration, a banquet. 

So now look at the image in the gospel, because this is what I hope pulls it all together.  Who would be most likely — since I entered the priesthood in order to get some esteem, who would be likely to be a person who would be caught up in this idea of, “I love being seen in places of honor?”  Not the servants that are there at the banquet but the Pharisees and the scribes and the ones that are — the ones that have that position of authority, and they’ve used that position of authority, unconsciously perhaps, to give them a sense of value so that they really need that to be fed, because it doesn’t work.  You can’t get your value from something outside your very being.  You have to get it through being someone.  So they were just doomed.  But listen to the way Jesus does this.  I think it’s just sweet almost, in a sense.  He plays on their pride.  “Hey, when you go to a banquet, I know you want to sit in the front seat.”  He’s not condemning that.  Notice there’s no condemnation.  “You shouldn’t be here.  If you’re that way, you’re no good.”  No, no.  It’s just like he’s filled with understanding and mercy.  He said, “Well, it would be better if you didn’t do that, because if you do take that front seat and it’s not yours and you have to be sent to the back, it’s really embarrassing.”  Then he says something that’s so fascinating.  He’s working on their stuff, and he says, “Banquets and all that, banquets usually are all about the people that are there, the important people.  Well, how about imagining the world differently?  It’s not about you being in a banquet, which is honoring authority and control.  No, it’s a banquet of people that are poor and lame and blind and crippled.  Those are the people that long for your resonance of peace and goodness and acceptance.” 

And the Psalm is so beautiful, because, “God, when you are who you are, you create a home for us, a building, a place that’s safe, and we feel comfortable and not afraid, and we feel valued and all of that.”  And then he’s saying, “If you understand that that’s the dwelling I’m creating for you, if I’m in you, I want you to create a dwelling for me that you invite people into and not people that are going to look up to you because you did it, or somebody that you’re going to get invited back to, but no, some place where you can be celebrating a reason for being in this world, your destiny, by being a source of God’s healing, loving, accepting person to those who don’t have it, to those who are crippled by their own shame and guilt, the lame who never quite stand straight, because they don’t think they are able to on their own, those that are blind and don’t see the truth.  And you know what?  If you do that, even though you’re not doing it for repayment, you will be repaid enormously.  You’ll be the fullness of who I created, and nothing feels better than that.

Father, your patience with us, your goodness, your kindness, your longing to be there with us, never demanding that we perform for you but that we join you in performing together the gifts that you want to bring into the world is such a comfort to us.  Bless us with a deeper awareness of this and free us from those things that cause us anxiety and worry and pain.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.