The 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time: B 23-24

1 Kings 17:10-16 | Hebrews 9:24-28 | Mark 12:38-44 or 12:41-44

Almighty and merciful God, graciously keep from us all adversity so that unhindered in mind and body alike we may pursue in freedom of heart the things that are yours. 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.

So often I go back to the Old Testament, to the book of Genesis and the story of creation and look carefully into that relationship that God had with Adam and Eve, and it’s fascinating what you learn from that.  You see something so fascinating, human beings, nature in conflict with the generosity and the love of a God who created us and wanted to do everything he could to care for us and give us all that we longed for.  And one of the things that I learn from that story is, in one of the stories of creation, when God created a man, after he created the man, he realized something.  It’s not good for a man to be alone.  I just want to start with that theme.  It’s not good for us to be alone, and it’s interesting.  When I think about the image of communion, union with other people, I can’t imagine my life without relationships.  I can’t imagine what it’s like to not have someone to listen to me when I’m trying to figure something out that they can see and show me what I’m missing.  I can’t imagine what it’s like not to have the feeling of giving somebody something that they didn’t have before.  It makes you just feel so good, and so it’s so clear that there is this flow of life that goes between us.  And it’s so fascinating that we’re living through something so unique these days with the pandemic, and we’ve been separated from so many normal ways in which we communicate with others.  It’s had interesting impacts on all of us.  One of the things, I think for sure, we might feel a little crazier than we normally feel, part of the lack of balance, but the other thing is that there’s just something — something so natural about leaning on someone.  And yet there’s a part of you and a part of me that often feels that we should be autonomous, able to handle things on our own, to be strong, to be self-sufficient.

Listen to that first part of the story in the gospel when Jesus is talking about the things that people really don’t find attractive, even though the people that are engaged in them think are terribly attractive, and that is, when somebody has a sense that they have a position of power, some control over life, they have money or talent or whatever it is, good looks, and they act as if they have this sense of being without need.  They are the source of everything they need, and they want people to acknowledge it and give homage to it and pay attention to it and thank them for it.  And yet it’s so clear that that’s not really part of our human nature, the core of our human nature.  The core of our human nature is designed to be in relationship with other sources of strength and power and to use that strength and power within us to be able to do something for other people.  That’s what it means to be born into the likeness of God, and Genesis tells us that’s true, that human beings are the only creatures that God created that are like him.  And that doesn’t mean we just look more like him than other people.  No, our nature, the fullness of our nature — animals have a wonderful nature.  They can have a nature that’s committed and faithful and, in a way, life-giving to other animals, but there’s nothing quite as complete or full as human nature, because it has the potential to evolve and grow into something so like a god that the model we have for this is the Savior, Jesus, who achieved the ultimate goal of what it means to be a human being.  And that was to have this relationship with God that is so intimate and so close that we call him God, we say he’s God.  Jesus is a human 100 percent and a God 100 percent.  I love repeating that over and over again.  I think I said it last Sunday, and it’s simply because it reminds me so much that whatever is at the heart of this relationship with God goes beyond the mind, the binary world of it’s either this or that.  No, it can be both.  Quantum physics teaches us that.  Things can be both matter and spirit at the same time.  Well, how does that work?  I don't know, but it works.  

So what I’m trying to get to is a very simple truth, is that we are never comfortable being not enough, and yet our nature tells us we are not enough.  And when that nature tells us that, there’s something truthful in it that we need to embrace and take in, and so we look in the scriptures for images that give us some sense of who we’re becoming, what we’re engaged in.  And you see these two women, one in the gospel, one in the first reading, widows.  Widows had no resources of their own.  They were dependent upon the goodness and kindness of other people, and in the first reading, we know that story well.  I believe that you do.  It’s the story of this widow who was alone and needy, and Elijah comes and favors her and even promises her that she’ll have a son.  And she has the son, and she relies upon Elijah.  And then Elijah comes back to her and asks her for something, and she doesn’t have anything to give.  She’s absolutely empty.  “I have no food to give you.  I was just going to take the little that I have, the little that I am, and I was going to basically surrender to the fact that I don’t have enough, and I would just die.  I would just cease to exist.”  We don’t cease to exist sometimes when we don’t think we’re enough.  We just cease to produce anything life giving.  We lose energy.  We lose self-worth.  We lose a sense of we have something to accomplish, to do, and we can do it.  We can do it.  We can do it.  That’s the thing we want to say over and over again, and yet the truth is, unless you can embrace the fact that you’re not enough and that we, the we, can’t do it, not as individuals doing their own thing.  But the failure of faith is when we say we, God and I, can’t do it.  Then we’re in trouble, because we don’t have the faith we’re supposed to have. 

And it’s so interesting that, if you look at the gospel, in the Old Testament and New Testament together, you look at salvation history.  You see over and over again people who have an experience of being called to do something really extraordinary, really wonderful.  The prophets had that.  Jesus had that as a man.  So many times a prophet had that in the sense of wanting very much to convince people of something that they couldn’t see, and they often used the power of God to convince people that what they were saying was true.  And miracles were performed by these men, these prophets, but the stories of prophets are fascinating, because even the prophet Elijah, who was very, very much aware of God working through him, at times he lost trust in God.  And the one that I love the most is Jonah, who when God said, “All right, I will empower you to go to this town, called Nineveh, and you will warn them that something terrible is going to happen.  I’m going to give you this gift of conviction.  Your voice is going to be filled with such authority and power.  You’re going to walk through this city.  You’re going to tell them, ‘You have got to change, or God will destroy you,’ and they’ll listen to you.  And that’s because I’m in you, working through you, and you and I together are so effective.”  And he did it, and he didn’t like the answer.  He didn’t like the response.  Imagine, he was filled with God’s strength to accomplish something, but he himself didn’t want to see it happen, because he had a different attitude than God did and wanted people to be destroyed when they didn’t do what God wanted them to do.  And so he walks away, and he doesn’t want to serve God anymore.  

Isn’t that fascinating, this difficulty we have with dealing with our weaknesses and our powers?  And that’s what I really want to talk about for a minute.  How do you balance the two?  Look at Jesus, how he saved the world.  How did he make up for all the sins of the world?  Some people think that God was such a vengeful God that he needed some major sacrifice to be made.  Somebody would have to suffer so intensely, because God suffered every time we sinned.  So he created his Son, and his Son had to offer his life as a sacrifice to make up for all human beings’ sins.  That just doesn’t make sense to me, and it’s not good theology.  No, when God entered into the world in the person of Jesus, he wanted to teach us what he wants from each of us, and this God/man Jesus is the model of what it means to be fully human, God dwelling in us, working through us, enabling us to accomplish the goal we’re here for.  And the way he did that in Jesus is he had Jesus to a point in his ministry where he knew that he was in trouble, that there was something not functioning very well.   He could feel that his miracles had probably caused more of a stir than he really wanted in terms of angering those who were in authority, because they didn’t have any way to discredit him when he was raising people from the dead, giving sight to the blind.  What are you going to do with somebody like that?  Say they’re crazy?  Well, how do you talk about craziness when they’re so darn effective?  And so Jesus must have known that things were getting really scary for him, and he was going to maybe be not so successful in the way he hoped to be successful.  Think about it.  Jesus as the man wanted to be successful.  He wanted to do the job that God gave him to do, to change those people at the time that were lost in their lies and misconceptions of who God is.  He wanted to do that.  Otherwise he’s not fully human; he’s just playing a part.  No, he was fully human, and so when he was in that Garden of Gethsemane, what he had to feel is that, “I don’t want to do this.  I don’t have enough in me to do this.  I’m scared.  I’m so afraid, and I don’t want to be seen as a fool.  I don’t want to be seen in the eyes of the people that I love and I’m trying to convince — I don’t want them to lose hope.  I’ve given them all kinds of hope that I’m going to be the one who saves the world, and I’m going to look to them as somebody who failed.”  And yet he says yes.  He says, “Okay, I’ll do that.”  He didn’t say it right away.  He said no once, and then he said no again, and finally he said yes.  

I love that part of Jesus, because it means that there’s a part of all of us that wants so badly to be able to accomplish the thing that we’re set out to do, and we want to be successful.  And success is so frightening and scary when you think about it.  Success, what does it mean?  Accomplishing what I’m here to do?  That would be wonderful, but it means so much more than that to an ego.  It means being the best, being the best at what we do, being the one who’s better than everyone else, whatever that is, that need that is part of our core human nature that unfortunately never leaves us.  I’m 81 years old.  I’ve been a priest for over 54 years. I still struggle with the same fears of not being enough, not being able to say something that makes any sense, and all that, you’d think, “Well, that would go away with a lot of practice and a lot of confidence.”  Well, I don’t think it’s ever supposed to go away, because it’s when we’re in that moment of saying, “I am not the source of what is going to happen here, but you’re asking me to do it, and you’re saying it’ll be effective.  But I’m not the one in charge of it.”  What better description could I come up with in that that’s what it means to overcome sin?  That’s why Jesus saved the world from sin by giving us an example of the way you do it.  The core sin is the sin of Adam and Eve, the sin of autonomy, the sin of wanting to be perfect, just like God, and we never realize that that’s really what it is.  We always think it’s our human mistakes.  Yeah, our mistakes are not always good.  Sometimes they’re terrible, and sometimes they cause people tremendous pain.  But at the same time, you don’t grow unless you have mistakes, and that’s why God said, “I’ve got to establish a new relationship with you where I’m never holding anything you do against you.  It never harms our relationship, no matter how far you’ve drifted from who I know you are, and I trust that you will be that person one day, or you’ll reach the level that you’re called to reach in this life that you’re in right now.”  

Perfection is not on the table as something we achieve.  What we achieve is not perfection in the sense of being able to autonomously handle every situation and give the right answer to every question we’ve ever been asked.  No, it’s about surrendering to what is, surrendering to the way it’s written, the story that God created with our life.  And I can feel it, in a way, right now, just kind of coming into me when I feel like, if I can relieve myself from the anxiety that I am the source of everything that I do. If I can lay back and let failure happen and realize that very likely, not because of me, but because God pulls away his authority and his strength that flows through me just so I remember it’s not me, it’s him living inside of me, not overshadowing my humanity, not destroying it but never, never making it him.  Does that make sense?  We’re not — if God loves us and says, “I will — you can do all the things I do,” he’s not giving you that human power to do that, though that’s what I would like to do in my lower levels of consciousness, my binary world of either/or, either I’ve got the truth, or it doesn’t exist.  We don’t possess things in order for them to be real.  All of that needs to be let go of, I think.  

Maybe that’s a good description of what it means to be poor.  A woman who gives everything she has away in the treasury is seen by Jesus as, “Well, there’s one that’s got it.”  And when Jesus saw that, maybe he was even thinking about himself and thinking, “I hope one day I’ll be able to do that, give away everything I have, everything that makes me feel good about myself.”  And that’s what he did, and that’s what he’s asking us to do.  But it gets hidden, gets hidden and distorted by the most natural thing, that part that the gospel started with.  People love to be in charge, love to be the one in the room that’s the smartest.  One loves to be the one that gives the best answer.  Isn’t it interesting that people who achieve great heights, whether it’s entertainment or sports or any kind of super award — you’re the best.  You wrote the best novel of the world.  It isn’t fulfilling.  It creates anxiety. “Well then, what do I do next?  What’s the next great novel?”  “I’m no longer the one that holds the world record.”  And there’s great depression in that because — not because you’re not the best anymore but that you’ve put so much energy and time into becoming the best instead of doing that so that you can feel, people can feel God’s grace working through you, God being the source of your greatness.  No, you want it for yourself, and don’t feel bad, because that’s who we are as human beings, and that’s who God loves the most, the ones that can admit that.  Amen.

Father, we are amazing creatures.We have this longing to be everything you want us to be. At the same time, we love to be the best in the room. We have pride, and we also have humility — one is always there when the other one’s there. We’re in tension all the time, and that’s what you’ve invited us to live in. Just give us patience. That’s all I ask, patience and understanding and wisdom. We are harder on each other. We are even harder on ourselves. So bless us with patience and understanding and compassion. That’s what you have for us. Let us have it for ourselves and one another. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.