6th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Sirach 15:15-20; 1 Cor 2:6-10; Mt 5:17-37

VIDEO

Here we are, once again,
poised on the brink of Lent
and I find myself, once again,
unprepared.
I haven’t decided 
on what, if anything, 
I might give up.
I’ve made no firm plans to take on
any extra spiritual disciplines
or any extra acts of charity.
Like I always seem to do,
I’m stumbling into Lent 
and will stumble through it,
thinking it will probably be okay,
except for the mild sense of regret
that I didn’t make more 
of the opportunity.

This shambling mediocrity 
with which I typically approach Lent 
seems to stand is striking contrast
to our first reading,
in which the wise man Sirach
presents our choice
with crystalline clarity:
fire and water,
life and death, 
good and evil.
There they are before us, 
so that all we have 
to do this Lent
is reach out our hand
and make our choice,
grasp the good.

But my excuse-making skills to so finely honed
that I can even recruit Jesus in the effort
of justifying my own spiritual mediocrity.
If the choice were actually as clear
as Sirach says it is,
I would find it less tempting 
to procrastinate or prevaricate.
But don’t the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel
suggests that it is not simply a matter
of making the right choice?
It’s not so simple as murder or mercy;
I’ve got somehow to root out anger from my heart.
It’s not so simple as adultery or fidelity;
I’ve got somehow to root out lust from my heart.
It’s not so simple as perjury or oath-keeping;
I’ve got somehow to plant truth so deeply in my heart
that I need take no oath in order to be believed.
Rooting out anger and lust?
Planting truth within my heart?
These tasks seem so vast 
that one hesitates to even start.

So I procrastinate and prevaricate.
I say that by raising the bar on the choice
between good and evil,
life and death—
by making it not just about 
choosing to act in a particular way
but about the feeling and being 
from which my acting comes—
Jesus has made things too complicated.
How can I possibly figure out how to live
the days between now and Easter 
so that I root out anger and lust
and plant truth within my heart?
No wonder I stumble into 
this season of conversion we call Lent.

But, if you will forgive me
for making you listen
to me talking to myself,
there are a few things I’d like to tell 
my procrastinating and prevaricating self.

First, self, Jesus is simply telling you the truth,
not providing you with an excuse.
How you act flows from who you are,
and if you want your actions to be different
you have to become, in some sense, 
a different person—a new creation in Christ.
This is, after all, what God really cares about:
not a checklist of actions 
but a heart that chooses life,
a heart that wants so much to live 
that it will die to itself
so that it might live in God.
You procrastinate and prevaricate
not because Jesus has made it too complicated,
but because he has made it so simple
that you have nowhere to hide.
You ask yourself, “what should I do?”
but the answer is clear: die to yourself.
This is the wisdom of God of which Paul speaks, 
mysterious and hidden,
but revealed to us in the Spirit
through the crucifixion of the Lord of glory.
You shouldn’t pretend that the question is too difficult
just because you don’t like the answer.

Second, self, the choice that Sirach places before you
is stark in its framing—good and evil, life and death—
but maybe not so stark in its living out.
God wants your wholehearted “yes,”
by if the best you can manage is 
“well, I guess so”
God can work with that.
You may stumble into Lent,
but at least you’re stumbling 
in the right direction.
Maybe you could stumble into a small act of kindness.
Maybe you could stumble into the confessional.
Maybe you could stumble into a moment of prayer.
Everything else has to be the work of grace.
Perhaps the real discipline of Lent
is not so much giving things up,
or taking on extra spiritual disciplines
or acts of charity,
but letting God drag your stumbling self
all the way from here to Easter.

Finally, self, maybe you ought 
to stop making things so much about yourself
and the steps that you take.
You know, if you let God be the one who leads,
then even your stumbling steps can become
part of God’s dance.
Maybe you need to remember 
the words of Thomas Merton
that you read many years ago
as you were just beginning 
your decades-long stumble as a Catholic Christian:

For the world and time 

are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. 

The silence of the spheres 

is the music of a wedding feast. 

The more we persist in misunderstanding 

the phenomena of life, 

the more we analyze them out 

into strange finalities 

and complex purposes of our own, 

the more we involve ourselves 

in sadness, absurdity and despair. 

But it does not matter much, 

because no despair of ours 

can alter the reality of things; 

or stain the joy of the cosmic dance 

which is always there. 

Indeed, we are in the midst of it, 

and it is in the midst of us, 

for it beats in our very blood, 

whether we want it to or not.

Yet the fact remains that we are invited 

to forget ourselves on purpose, 

cast our awful solemnity to the winds 

and join in the general dance.

And may God, who is merciful,
have mercy on us all. 

 

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.

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

Sean Spicer, the president’s press secretary,
recently commented,
“Part of the reason the president got elected
is because he speaks his mind.
He doesn’t hold it back,
he’s authentic” (Press Briefing, 2/9/17).
I think we can all agree,
whatever we may think of our president and his mind,
that no one could ever accuse him of not speaking it.
And in our Gospel reading today
Jesus seems to commend this practice
of speaking one's mind,
telling his disciples not to swear oaths,
but to “Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’
and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’”

But Jesus is not simply commending
being forthright for its own sake—
being, as they say, a “straight shooter”
(now there’s a metaphor for you),
who lets people know what is on his or her mind.
Jesus is calling his disciples and calling us
not simply to speak our minds,
but to speak the truth.
He is telling us who are his followers
that we are not to swear oaths,
but to let our “Yes” mean “Yes”
and our “No” mean “No,”
because our lives ought at all times to testify
to the truth of the words we speak.

Hilary of Poitier, writing in the 4th century,
said, “Those who are living
in the simplicity of faith
have no need for the ritual of an oath.
With such people, what is, always is,
and what is not, is not.
For this reason,
their every word and deed
are always truthful.” (On Matthew 4.23).
If you need to swear an oath
in order to get people to believe what you say,
to believe not simply that you believe it,
but that what you believe is true,
then, Jesus says, something has gone wrong
in your life as his disciple.
The practice of speaking some words under oath,
casts a shadow of doubt over the words
that we do not speak under oath.
It implies that we are bound to speak the truth
only at some times but not at others.
In a world pervaded by lies and falsehoods, however,
the followers of Jesus are called
to be people of the truth at all times:
not simply to speak their minds,
but to have in them the mind of Christ
and to speak the truth of Christ plainly
in all their words and in all their deeds.

In our second reading Paul says that we speak,
“not a wisdom of this age,
nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away.
Rather, we speak God’s wisdom, mysterious, hidden,
which… none of the rulers of this age knew.”
What is this wisdom, what is this truth,
that the powerful of the world have missed,
have overlooked,
have been blind to
and that we are called to speak?
When Paul says that “if they had known [this wisdom],
they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”
he suggests that what the Jewish and Roman leaders
did not know, could not see,
is that the one whom they crucified
is the Lord of glory.
What the mighty of Jesus’ day could not see,
the wisdom and truth to which they were blind,
is that the Lord of glory does not appear among us
clothed in the trappings of power,
but as one unjustly accused,
one tortured and humiliated,
one executed by the ruling imperial regime
as a threat to public order.
He appears among us as the truth crucified
by the powerful lies of our world.

This is the wisdom that Paul proclaims;
this is the truth that Jesus calls his disciples to speak plainly;
this is the mystery hidden from those who rule our world,
but made plain to those who have received the Spirit of God:
the Lord of glory is not to be found
among the powerful and the wealthy,
whose power and wealth are destined to pass away,
but among the poor, those on the margins,
the outcast, the refugee, the immigrant,
the homeless one in our streets,
the child in the womb.
God chose to come among us
in the form of lowliness,
and God chooses still to found
in those who have nothing,
in those who are defenseless and voiceless.
Jesus calls us to seek him there—
not in the halls of power,
where powerful people speak their minds
from positions of privilege,
but among the powerless.
We are to speak plainly
the truth of God’s presence there,
and witness boldly to the power of the Spirit
who has revealed this hidden wisdom to us,
by giving comfort to the sick,
food to the hungry,
clothing to the naked,
refuge to the stranger.
“Whatever you did
for one of these least ones,
you did for me.’

This is the truth we are called to speak.
The books of Sirach tells us that we have before us
life and death, good and evil,
and that whichever we choose shall be given to us.
We also have before us truth and lies:
the truth of the crucified Lord of glory
and the lies of those who killed him
in the name of public order;
whichever we choose will be given to us.
Let us choose to speak the truth of Christ
in the face of the world’s death-dealing lies;
let us choose to speak not our own minds
but the mind of Christ,
and let our “Yes” mean yes
to the God of life and compassion
and our “No” mean no
to the powers of death and fear,
which even now are passing away,
defeated by the truth
of the crucified Lord of glory.