The 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time: B 23-24

The 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Amos 7:12-15 | Ephesians 1:3-14 or 1:3-10 | Mark 6:7-13

Oh God, who show the light of your truth to those who go astray so that they may return to the right path, give all who, for the faith they profess, are counted Christians the grace to reject whatever is contrary to the name of Christ and to strive after all that does it honor.  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.

 One of the blessings that I have been given as a priest who is called to preach and to teach the wisdom of the scriptures is that, in my generation, I’ve been able to read an Old Testament reading every Sunday.  That was not true before I was ordained.  It was always an epistle and a gospel, but it’s given me an opportunity that many priests in prior generations did not have of preaching from both Old and New Testament.  And it’s so clear to me that you really can’t understand one without understanding the other. 

They’re two parts of one message, and the dramatic change that happens from Old Testament to New Testament is the change that I believe happens in every believer who goes through a particular period of time where I would say they move from partial understanding to what I would call the fullness of understanding of what this relationship with God is all about, because for most of us, we begin a relationship with God, in a sense, earning his attention, his blessings, his graces by doing what we’re told and following the rules and regulations.  And typical of most everything in human nature is we strive to do something where we’re in charge of the accomplishing of it, and we do well for a while, and then we start to wane and lose our focus.  And we’re going in a direction that is not really who we are and what we really want to do or become, and we start experiencing what you might call suffering, pain, isolation, depression, darkness, whatever.  And then we go through that dark time, and then somehow someone comes along at the right moment, a prophet voice, and said, “Look, this pain you’re in is caused by these issues that you’re not seeing clearly or these lies that you are following and thinking they’re going to provide what they’re supposed to provide for, but they can’t.”  And so you have this moment of awakening, and then you go through a conversion, and then you grow.  Over and over and over, though, it comes back to the same thing.  The weakness seems to overcome the strength that we normally have as human beings, and that’s the Old Testament.  Over and over again God is giving people what they ask for, a land of milk and honey, a journey to freedom, a place where they can finally find the kind of comfort that they want from a system that is created for them, but that system often fails them.  And so whatever, they lose their direction, and a prophet voice rises.  And so we have, over and over again, the period of time in the Old Testament where they prophet was the key.  He was the speaker of truth.  He would come along and say, “Whoa, this isn’t working, and you don’t know it’s not working yet.  And soon there will be a disaster, and so I’m warning you, you ought to change.”  And most of the time people didn’t until they went through the suffering, and then they changed. 

That sounds a lot like my early years as a believer.  I’ll do what I’m told.  I do it, because I don’t want to be punished, but my intention to do it is not really grounded in something that is so rock solid that I can endure the temptations to go off on the wrong path.  So called back again and again and again.  But then comes the New Testament, underscore the word new, something radically different.  Instead of, as it was in the Old Testament, that we’re working very much on improving ourselves, performing well for God and getting his blessing, instead of that being the focus, the thing shifts, and now all of a sudden, instead of we being afraid of the face of God, who might be very justly condemning us, we’re looking at a new face of God in the person of Jesus.  And to see his face, see his look, how he sees you, how he sees me, if we follow the set of readings, it’s always going to be a very transformative moment.  There’s a phrase that I love, that when the disciples kept being confused about Jesus, who’s talking about God, they didn’t fully realize he was God incarnate.  When he was talking about God, they got confused and kept saying, “Well then, show us the Father.  We don’t understand this one you’re describing.  The God you’re describing seems different than the one that we’ve all been taught.”  And it’s so interesting.  When they say, “Show us the Father.  Show us the Father,” Jesus looks at them with love, compassion, understanding.  He said, “This face you’re looking at, this is the Father.  This is God looking at you right now, loving you as you are, wanting you to believe in something.”  And the thing you need to believe in is who you are in this incredible, miraculous thing that the New Testament issued into the world, and that is redemption, grace, forgiveness.  It changes everything, and the way it changes it is by changing the focus from our performance and whether or not we’re good enough to earn God’s merit to God looking at us and saying, “Look, the whole issue is not about you doing something for me, but now I want to do something for you.  I, Jesus, the man filled with divinity, knows what humanity needs.”  We don’t need to be challenged into becoming well-disciplined machines doing the right thing.  No, we’re destined to be loved, to be understood, to be embraced and to be told that something has been given to us.  Something amazing has been given to us that was never possible before, and so let’s look at this image that we have of this voice, the voice of God speaking through Jesus, different than the voice of God speaking through a prophet, because this was not just another prophet.  He was the Messiah, the one that would come and change everything, and what he changed is a system, turned it completely upside down.  And from you no longer being asked to focus on your performance, you’re being asked to focus on your goodness, not a goodness that you accomplished but a goodness that’s been won for you by God incarnate, in Jesus, called redemption.  What does it mean?  Well, it’s a transformation of who you are and particularly your image of yourself, because what redemption says is that, “There’s not one thing you have done in the past, nor anything you will do in the future, that could limit my love for you.”  You are forgiven, made new, and the shame and the fear and the anger that a life of performing creates is transformed into a kind of sense of being valued and being safe and being at peace, because in such a simple way, you’re loved as you are, and you’re seen as beautiful.

I don't know if you’ve ever had the experience of somebody walking into a room, and they look different to you, and you have this insight, and you say to them, “Hey, what’s going on?  You look different.”  And they sort of look down, maybe a little embarrassed, and then you ask the question.  “Are you in love?”  It may not be so much that they’re in love, but let’s just say they feel there’s the potential and a reality of being loved.  And when you’re loved — I mean loved not for what you do, what you can do, what you will do, what you didn’t do, all that, no, not based on any kind of performance or anything like that.  No, you’re loved, because the person who sees you knows you and knows that there’s something in you that is destined by God to be developed into something beautiful, something effective, something that reflects this incredible, creative, loving God.

St. Paul’s reading that we just had is just amazing to me, because it took me hours to just take it phrase-by-phrase and kind of understand what he’s really trying to say.  But what he’s saying is so radically new and different that even the way he said it isn’t that clear.  It’s almost like he’s saying it because he heard it, not because he’s experienced it yet.  But here’s what Paul is revealing about this person Jesus, that he comes into the world and reveals that the Father is calling you by your name and telling you that this thing you are is filled with the potential of a wholeness that was created there by God, and God’s glory, God’s joy, God’s greatest pleasure is doing something for you that enables that thing that you are to become everything it was intended to be and for you to delight in it, because that’s his delight if that makes sense.  When God sees what he creates performing, when you look at nature and it’s in its pristine springtime, when you look at a sky when it’s filled with the warmth of a color that means dawn, whenever a creation is performing exactly as it was intended to be and one is perceiving it as it is and sees it as beautiful, you get a glimpse at what does give God pleasure.  Yes, I guess he would be pleased, at least I thought he would be pleased if I worked as hard as I could and suffered and went through all kinds of agony forcing myself to be the person he wants me to be.  Maybe that would please him, but nothing would please him more than for me to know how much he sees in me that is so beautiful and good and wants it to flourish, and when it flourishes, he sits back and is absolutely delighted.  And it’s a gift.  It’s not earned.  Why is it it’s so much easier for us to earn some kind of attention or affection from someone than to feel that we have it by just our very nature, that they see us, and they’re in awe of who we are, and they honor it by somehow the way they look at us?  That look, when you’re loved, it’s incredible, and if that’s what the New Testament is about, and it’s as radically different as it could be from the Old Testament, then that’s where — well, that’s, I guess I’m saying, that’s what I get excited about in my work as a preacher or a teacher, is how can I teach this — and I think it’s the only way I know I can teach it, is by having experienced it, and that’s true of all of us.  But when you are called by God, awakened to your own talents and beauty, see them as what they are, a gift, see them as beautiful, knowing that they can be of value to other people, that you want to share them with someone else, and when you’re doing that, that experience is the richest experience we can have as human beings, being blessed by God’s grace to become who we are.  And when we do that same kind of blessing to someone else and we see them develop into who they are, then we’re in the kingdom.  Then we’re doing the work, and that joy that comes from being loved as completely as God loves us and turning around and loving another human being in a similar way and watching the changes in them that you’ve experienced yourself, being fully accepted, it’s amazing.  And I think to myself how much time we spend in working on our appearance or our performance or our possessions as finding a sense of value, and nothing is as valuable than [sic] who we are. 

If God created you exactly as you’re intended to be, if you look exactly the way he wanted you to look, if your talents and weaknesses are exactly the balance that he wanted you to have, if all of that is really true, and I do believe it is, then it’s up to us to believe in it and trust in it and not try to compare ourselves to other people or strive to become more than we are, that we’ll only cease if we see the beauty of, I’ll call it, the ordinariness of it all.  The ordinary beauty of everything is so spectacular with the right lens on our eyes.  We can see it as it is.  So the challenge always is different than we thought.  We’re not here out of fear of punishment to straighten out our act, force ourselves to be who we’re supposed to be.  No, it’s about repentance.  Repentance has to do with regret.  It’s regretting the doubts we have about who we are, the doubts we have in the beauty the people that God has placed in our life — that we don’t have the right vision, that we don’t know that the grace of God that we’ve received, once it takes root in us and we find ourselves conscious of who we are and the gift that we are, that then we’re empowered to do the same for other people.  Again, that’s the kingdom that God came to establish, and it just slips through my fingers when I try to hold on to it.  But it comes back in moments, and it feels so good when I can feel that I see someone else that I’ve seen a million times, and I see them, and they just are overwhelmingly beautiful.  Or I have somebody that looks at me or says something or whatever, and I feel that same kind of love coming from them.  That’s grace, the grace that calls us to wholeness, fullness, joy, everything the kingdom promises, but it’s not what we expected.  And that’s what often lies hidden.

Father, you have revealed through your Son the fullness of your plan, that your desire was not to discipline us into being obedient subjects but to be partners with you, in a sense, lovers with you, that you were longing from the beginning to have a role in our life where that which you created would come to its fullness, and you would see the beauty of your creative love. So bless us with the acceptance needed to receive this great gift and to let it do its mysterious, transformative work and make us into not only all that you intend us to be but all that the people around us need us to be. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.