6th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Sirach 15: 15-20; 1 Corinthians 2:6-10; Matthew 5:17-37

VIDEO

“What matters in the end
is not what you do
but what is in your heart.”
That sounds nice, doesn’t it?
It suggests that God 
is not concerned
with our obeying God’s Law,
as the scribes and Pharisees 
seem to have thought,
but with our intentions.
God will not judge me
on the basis of what I have done
and what I have failed to do—
through my fault,
through my fault,
through my most grievous fault—
but on what I intended to do,
what I hoped to do,
what I wanted to do.
And the message of our Gospel today
suggests that this is, in fact, the case.
What matters is not what you do
but what is in your heart.

But here’s the bad news:
Have you looked into your heart lately?
Have you seen what’s in there?
Have you tried to do something about it?
It turns out, it is a lot easier 
to control your actions
than to control your heart.
Despite our moral struggles,
most of us manage to avoid 
committing murder or adultery.
But how many of us 
avoid anger or lust?
How many of us have souls
that are free of jealousy and irritation
and prejudice and greed
and pride and pettiness?
Even if we want to be free of these things,
they seem firmly lodged within us.
What matters is what is in our hearts,
but what is in our hearts can be pretty ugly
and seems pretty much beyond our control.

What matters is what is in our hearts
because it is our souls, not our bodies,
that lie at the root of our failure
to live as God would have us live.
St. Augustine criticized those Greek philosophers
who held that it was the body that corrupted the soul.
In fact, he said, the opposite is true:
“it was not the corruptible flesh
that made the soul sinful,
but the sinful soul
that made the flesh corruptible (Civ. Dei 14.3).
It is the soul that turns us from God,
the source of all life,
and toward ourselves;
it is the soul and its passions
that lead the body into acts of anger and lust,
that lead our hands to steal,
our ears to listen gladly to gossip,
our mouths to speak lies
or words of cruelty.
Jesus says, to have righteousness 
that surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees,
and so enter the kingdom of heaven,
it is not enough to present 
an outward appearance of goodness;
we must possess a goodness that goes
all the way down.
Paul tells us that “the Spirit 
scrutinizes everything, 
even the depths of God.”
And if the Holy Spirit can scrutinize the depths of God,
surely the Spirit can scrutinize the depths of my soul.
I may fool some people with my pious actions,
but I cannot fool the Spirit of God,
who sees into my heart.

This all seems like pretty bad news.
But here is the good news:
the Spirit scrutinizes 
not in order to condemn,
but in order to convert.
The Spirit’s comes into our hearts
to teach us the hidden wisdom of God,
the wisdom that we must have 
in order to choose life over death,
good over evil,
to enter the kingdom of heaven.
The Spirit dwelling within us 
is the New Law that teaches us
how to walk in the ways of God
not only in our outward actions
but in the depths of our soul.

But if this is so,
if we have received God’s Spirit,
why is it that our hearts are still beset
by anger and lust,
by jealousy and irritation,
by prejudice and greed?
What is the Spirit waiting for?
Why is the Spirit so slow?

Perhaps the Spirit works slowly
because the human heart is a delicate thing.
In theory the Spirit could convert us
in the blink of an eye,
cracking open our stony hearts,
rooting out our anger, 
lopping off our lust.
And people do sometimes undergo
dramatic interior conversions.
But in many hearts 
the weeds grow amid the wheat,
the evil is entwined with the good,
and so the Spirit works within our hearts
like water dripping on a stone:
slowly wearing it away bit by bit,
smoothing out its roughness over time.
Our anger slowly abates,
our lust gradually lessens,
we grow in compassion and mercy toward others
as we experience God’s compassion and mercy
shown to us. 
If we cooperate patiently with the Spirit,
the wisdom of God works on us
in ways hidden and mysterious,
in a life-long process by which
we learn to lean on God
and not rely on our own strength.

“What matters in the end
is not what you do
but what is in your heart.”
And thanks be to God
that what is in our hearts
is the mercy of God, 
for the love of God
has been poured into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us: 
slowly, patiently teaching us God’s hidden wisdom
so that our hearts might become like Christ’s heart
and we might live our lives as he lives his,
for the praise and the glory of God.

Funeral for Alan Bauerschmidt (1927-2023)

Readings: Isaiah 61:1-3; Romans 8:14-19, 34-35, 36-37; John 6:37-40

Death is a catastrophe.
It ends a world:
an irreplaceable and unique set 
of experiences and events.
In my father’s case, it has ended an experience 
of deprivation in the Great Depression;
of sacrifice and struggle in the Second World War;
of years of hard work at everything he put his hand to;
of thousands of books read;
of scores of jigsaw puzzles finished
and genealogical puzzles untangled;
of days tending blueberry bushes and Gerber daisies,
swimming laps in a pool and playing bocce,
watching the stock market 
and predicting an imminent crash;
of a lifetime of loving my mother, 
and then my brother and me,
and then six grandchildren.
All of those experiences 
are suddenly vanished from our world,
leaving behind a gaping void.
And so we mourn.

Oh, we can say lots of things—
true things—
that seem to suggest we should not mourn:
death is natural, a part of life;
everything happens for a reason;
the dead live on in our memories
and in our hearts;
death is the entrance into eternal life.
But all of this 
is just whistling past the graveyard.
None of these things we say,
true as they may be,
change the fact
that death is a catastrophe
that opens a void in our world.
And so we mourn.

Some people ask, “Was it sudden?”
To which I can only answer,
well, it took ninety-five years;
but, yes, it was sudden.
It was sudden because every human life
ought to last forever, 
yet for some reason does not,
and this is a catastrophic truth about our world.
Over 166,000 people die each day,
nearly two every second,
but that doesn’t make death less catastrophic.
It simply gives us some idea 
of the scale and scope of the catastrophe.
And so we mourn.

Pascal pointed out that our sense 
of the catastrophic character of our existence
is a sign that something has gone wrong.
We are, he says, fragile reeds that snap and break,
but we are also, when we are not distracting ourselves,
thinking reeds, aware of and outraged at our fragility.
Our sense that even ninety-five years are too few,
that even one death is too many,
points us to a truth:
we are made for something more,
we are meant for something greater.
Pascal writes, “For who thinks 
he is unhappy not to be king
other than a dispossessed king?” (Pensées S149)
Like royalty sent into exile,
we sense the wrongness of our state,
the height from which we have fallen,
the treasure that has been taken from us;
though, also like many a ruler sent into exile,
we know deep down
that we bear responsibility for our state.
For we human beings 
have turned from the source of our existence,
rejected the love that called us out of nothingness,
squandered our inheritance
and fallen into the catastrophic abyss of death.
And so we mourn.

But here is the funny thing about Christianity:
without denying our fallen state,
without ignoring the abyss into which we fall,
we believe that the love 

that called us out of nothingness,
has pursued us into that abyss;
we believe that the Word 

through whom all things were made
has taken flesh and dwelt among us
and entered even death’s exile,
to fill the void of nothingness
with the light of eternity.
We all fall into the catastrophic abyss of death,
but there, in the very heart of the catastrophe,
we find Jesus:
binding up the broken-hearted,
proclaiming liberty to those 

captive in death’s exile,
giving us garlands instead of ashes,
and the oil of gladness instead of mourning.
We find Jesus, 
from whom nothing can separate us:
neither death nor life, 
nor things present, 
nor things to come, 
nor height, 
nor depth.
We find Jesus, 
who loses nothing 
that his Father has given him,
but raises it up to eternal life.
And what the Father has given him is us:
he holds in his heart each of our lives,
in their irreplaceable uniqueness,
so that none of it is lost.
We mourn, because our loss is real.
But Jesus loses nothing;
Jesus loses no one.
The thinking reeds that snap and break
will be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.

Faith commits us to the truth of this reality,
though it is for now hidden from our sight;
faith turns us back 
to the love that has loved us into being
and plants us in the heart of Christ.
John and I are, by vocation if not disposition,
quite public about our faith;
it is sort of in our job descriptions.
Our father was not.
But he was nothing if not faithful—
the world’s most reliable man:
faithful to his family,
faithful to his labors,
faithful to his God.
He spoke to me once a few years ago
about how he imagined heaven:
it would be a place where he would find 
all those people he had lost
to death’s catastrophe:
family and friends,
all those people from whom 
the fabric of his life had been woven,
all those people whose lives 
were so meticulously documented
on his genealogical charts,
even those who had faded from his memory,
but whom God remembers.
I pray he will also find jigsaw puzzles
and Gerber daisies.
And I pray that he will find all of us,
loved and treasured 
in the heart of Christ.