30th Week in Ordinary Time (II)—Tuesday

Readings: Ephesians 5:21-33; Luke 13:18-21

“Wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.”
That statement from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians
is not a sentiment that goes down too well
with most people in our modern egalitarian society.
Many quite rightly recognize that such scriptures
have been used, at times, to persuade women 
to stay in abusive situations,
or to coerce obedience to those 
who will not honor their full sharing 
in the image of God. 
Such statements seem, 
at best, culturally out-of-step
and, at worst, downright harmful.

St. John Paul II, writing in 1988, 
noted that Paul’s statement
is “profoundly rooted in the customs 
and religious tradition of the times.”
No one in the late ancient world
would be at all surprised at the idea
that women ought to be subordinate to men;
this was nothing new.
But, St. John Paul notes, 
this statement is prefaced, 
by something that is truly innovative:
“Be subordinate to one another 
out of reverence for Christ.”
Notice: this is not addressed just to wives,
but to husbands as well.
As Christians, husband and wife are both called 
to put the needs of the other ahead of their own,
and to do so to honor the example shown by Christ.
This is a call for all Christians
to serve each other out of love for Jesus;
this is the truly radical 
and counter-cultural message of the Gospel.
St. John Paul writes,
“This is a call which from that time onwards, 
does not cease to challenge succeeding generations; 
it is a call which people have to accept ever anew.”
To love and serve others rather than oneself
is as counter-cultural today as it was in the first century.
It is a way of living that rejects the worldview
that says you should look out for number one
and seek always to bend others to your will.

“Be subordinate to one another 
out of reverence for Christ.”
This brief statement, these ten words, 
are like the mustard seed from which
the Kingdom of God can grow;
it is the yeast that can leaven
the loaf of our world.

“Be subordinate to one another 
out of reverence for Christ.”
If we plant these words in our marriages,
if we knead them into our friendships,
our workplaces,
our churches,
our politics,
then even now 
the reality of God’s reign
will begin to show itself
in our midst.
 

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Reading: Exodus 22:20-26; 1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10; Matthew 22:34-40

Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
These, Jesus says, are the two great commandments.
It sounds pretty simple.
Of course, anyone who has tried to love
either God or neighbor, 
much less both,
quickly discovers that this 
is a fairly complicated affair.

How do we love God,
when God can seem so distant and mysterious,
so difficult to know?
Who is the neighbor that I am supposed to love?
Is it anybody and everybody?
Does it include my enemies?
Is it okay to love some more than others?
Does love mean accepting people as they are
or does it mean working to help them be better?
And how exactly do these two things—
love of God and love of neighbor—
relate to each other?
Can I do one without the other?
What if my love of God 
seems to come into conflict 
with my love of neighbor?
Which has priority?

We might continue to multiply questions,
but at some point the questions must end
and we have to get about the business of loving.
After all, love of God and neighbor is presented by Jesus
not as a helpful hint but as a command,
and our questions can become a kind of evasion.
There are many things we can come to understand
by stepping back and pondering them,
but we can only discover what love means 
by stepping in and actually doing it.
But how do we go about stepping in
to loving God and neighbor?

The best way to step in to loving God 
is by praying.
Because God is perfect, 
God needs nothing from us;
but, because God is good, 
God desires that we give him ourselves.
God wants us without needing us,
precisely so that we can flourish
and be united to God in eternity.
And the way we give ourselves to God
is by giving God our time, 
for time is the fabric
from which our lives are fashioned.
To step in to loving God,
offer God your time in prayer.
Offer it without worrying too much 
about whether you’re doing it right.
Just ask for what you want
and give thanks for what brings you joy;
God will let you know whether or not 
you’re wanting or enjoying the right thing.

My son the musician tells me 
that bad practice is infinitely better 
than no practice at all.
It’s the same with prayer:
flawed prayer,
distracted prayer,
misdirected prayer,
angry prayer,
bored prayer,
rote prayer—
it’s all better than no prayer.
For in our flawed prayer
God comes to help us,
and God’s Spirit prays within us
with sighs too deep for words.

What about loving our neighbor?
How we step in to loving our neighbor 
is as varied as the neighbors we love.
Our reading today from the book of Exodus
calls our attention to those neighbors 
most in need of our love,
but whom we might be inclined 
to step back from.
The foreigner living in our land,
the widow and orphan who have no protector,
the person in need who is subject to exploitation,
all those whom we can easily overlook.
We tend to think of the word “love”
as finding its natural home 
in our circle of family and friends.
But the law of love calls us 
to cast a wider net.
Indeed, the way to step in 
to loving our neighbor
often involves us stepping out
of our immediate circle.
And this means seeking justice 
for those most in need,
those most fragile and vulnerable,
those most unprotected and friendless,
no matter who they are.
As the philosopher Cornel West puts it,
“Justice is what love looks like in public.”
Concern for the needy stranger
in whom Christ himself is present
is the standard by which we will be judged.

Of course, the love we show our neighbor
through the pursuit of justice
can be as flawed and frustrating
as our attempts to love God through prayer.
I think we Catholics can feel this 
particularly during election season
as we confront what is, 
in light of the standard
set by the Church’s social teaching,
an array of less-than-perfect choices.
Even more frustrating is the fact
that the needs and the interests 
of those crying out for justice—
the widow and the orphan,
the alien and the poor neighbor—
might not seem always to align 
and the justice we can achieve
is only a rough approximation
of the justice God calls us to.
But just as flawed prayer 
is better than no prayer,
our stumbling pursuit of justice
is better than injustice.
We do what we can,
trusting that God’s Spirit 
will work in us and through us.

We cannot let the imperfection 
of our love of God and neighbor
become an excuse for stepping back
from the love that Christ commands.
The Spirit calls us to step in
and be not afraid.
Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind;
love your neighbor as yourself.
Trust in the Spirit to aid you in your weakness
and to bring to completion
the good work begun in you.
And may God have mercy on us all. 

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isaiah 25:6-10a; Psalm 23; Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20; Matthew 22:1-10

You get the feeling that there must be
some sort of backstory.
A king sends messengers
to invite you to his son’s wedding
but you, for some reason, refuse.
The king sends more servants,
and this time you kill them.
The king then sends an army
that kills you and burns down your city.
What the heck is going on?
Why are all of these people
acting in such inexplicable ways?
I know that there can be
a lot of tensions around weddings,
but this is ridiculous.

Of course, we have no way
of knowing for sure
what the backstory might be:
perhaps long-standing hostilities
between the king and the invitees;
perhaps some cultural context
that is now lost to us.
But we don’t need to know the backstory
in order to get the main point of the parable:
God is inviting us to the banquet of life,
the wedding feast of the Lamb,
and if we refuse that invitation
we do so to our own detriment.
Jesus draws on the imagery
with which the prophet Isaiah speaks
of the fullness of life that God wishes for us:
“a feast of rich food and choice wines,
juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.”
Why would we refuse?
What would keep us from saying, “yes”?

But that is in fact what we do.
Like the people in the parable
we often respond to God invitation
with either indifference or even violence.
Throughout history, we human beings
have studiously ignored God’s invitation
to live the values of God’s kingdom:
the values of compassion and peace,
the values of concern for the weakest among us,
the values of generosity and self-sacrifice.
We human beings have even sought to eliminate
those whom God sends to remind us of this invitation,
not least Jesus himself, whom we hung on a cross.
I think today we can simply read the news
and see that we continue to shout each other down,
demonize those with whom we differ,
ignore those most in need,
and treat life as if it were a game
that you win by defeating those who differ
and grabbing all you can for yourself.
When God is offering us abundant life
why would we act in such inexplicable ways?
So we might ask, what is our backstory?

Our backstory is what Isaiah calls
“the veil that veils all peoples,
the web that is woven over all nations.”
Our backstory is the story of fear,
the story of mistrust and lack of faith,
the story that is told in Scripture
of our first ancestors
who were offered the abundant life of paradise,
if only they would trust in God to provide,
but who instead sought to become
their own gods, their own providers;
it is the story of faithless people
who preferred slavery and death
to reliance on God’s goodness;
it is the story of wars waged
in order to win for ourselves
what God wants to give us without cost.
This is our backstory;
this is who we are:
offered life, we chose death
rather than trust in God to provide.

But our backstory is not the whole story.
The good news of the Gospel
is that our past is not our destiny:
in Jesus God is writing for us a new story,
a story in which God will destroy death forever
and wipe away the tears from every face.
The parable of the wedding feast
should be read as a warning,
not a prediction.
Through God’s grace,
our story can be the story,
not of the old Adam,
the story of fear and faithlessness,
but the story of the new Adam,
the story of Jesus Christ,
who entrusted himself
fearlessly and faithfully
to the hands of his Father
and won victory over death.
The story of Jesus,
the story of God’s beloved
whom fear and death could not defeat,
can become our story.
And with this as our story
we can say with the psalmist,
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want….
Even though I walk in the dark valley
I fear no evil; for you are at my side.”
With this as our story we can say with Paul,
“I have learned the secret…
of living in abundance and of being in need.
I can do all things in him who strengthens me.”
We can become living signs of the abundant life
that God wants all people to share in;
we can be God’s invitation
to the wedding feast of the Lamb.

I am convinced that so much
of what plagues our world
grows out of fear and mistrust:
fear and mistrust of each other,
but even more fear and mistrust of God.
We treat one another as enemies
because we do not believe
that the Lord will provide for all peoples
a rich feast, a banquet of abundance.
We treat one another as enemies
because we do not believe
that only goodness and kindness follow us
all the days of our lives.
We treat one another as enemies
because we do not believe
that God will fully supply whatever we need,
in accord with his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.
But this does not have to be our story.
Let us pray today that God, through his Spirit,
will draw us into the story of Jesus,
the story of God’s reign,
so that we can hear and answer
his invitation to the banquet of life.
And may God have mercy on us all.

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Sirach 27:30-28:7; Romans 14:7-9; Matthew 18:21-35

The unmerciful servant in today’s Gospel,
who holds his fellow servant 
to a strict accounting of his debts,
despite having his own debts forgiven by his master,
engages in actions that are, at the same time,
so malicious and so self-defeating
that they seem to border on the inexplicable.

My wife always tells me that, when confronted
with someone’s seemingly inexplicable actions,
whether inexplicably stupid or inexplicably cruel,
you should ask yourself, 
“in what world does this make sense?”
People don’t act without a reason,
even if their reasoning seems nonsensical
from within our understanding of the world.
And while seeing how someone understands the world
does not condone their bad actions,
is can, perhaps, help make us 
a bit more compassionate toward them.
So it is worth asking ourselves,
in what world do the actions 
of the unmerciful servant make sense?

Notice that what he asks for from his master
is simply an extension on his loan,
so that he has time to pay it back,
but what he gets from the master
is complete forgiveness of his debt.
But it is as if he simply can’t accept 
that someone would really forgive another’s debt,
that his master isn’t going to show up later
and demand repayment,
so he immediately goes about trying to collect 
the debts that are owed to him by others,
so that when his master shows up 
demanding repayment,
as the servant is convinced he inevitably will,
he will have the means to pay back what he owes
and avoid the cruel penalty that the master
would undoubtedly inflict.
The unforgiving servant’s action make sense
in a world in which no one 
is ever truly compassionate,
no one is ever truly forgiving;
his actions make sense 
in a world in which the best we can hope for
is to buy a little time in order to grab what we can
from those who are weaker than us
so that we can pay off those who are stronger.

The book of Sirach tells us,
“Wrath and anger are hateful things,
yet the sinner hugs them tight.”
Actions that are malicious and self-defeating,
can seem like reasonable options in a world without mercy.
The unforgiving servant lives in a cruel and ugly world,
a world in which we must live only for ourselves,
we must trust only ourselves,
we must look out only for ourselves,
because nobody else is going to look out for us.
He lives in the same world than many today live in:
a world of zero-sum competition
in which another’s gain is always my loss;
a world in which there is never true forgiveness
but only debt-extension, 
usually with compounded interest;
a world in which I have no choice 
but to be merciless
if I want to survive, 
whether in business 
or politics
or international affairs.

But Jesus offers us a different world to live in. 
Jesus offers us a world 
in which we are not left on our own
to survive as best we can.
Rather, Jesus offers us a world in which
the master is moved with compassion
and forgives our debts.
He offers us a world in which 
we do not need to fight and claw to survive,
we do not need to trample down those in our way,
we do not need to forego mercy and compassion
lest someone take advantage of us.

It is not some fantasy world he offers, however.
People will still try to take advantage of you.
You will still have to deal with people who see the world 
in the cruel and ugly way that the unforgiving servant sees it.
Your mercy will not always be met with mercy.
But, as St. Paul reminds us,
we are not left on our own:
“None of us lives for oneself, 
and no one dies for oneself.”
If we belong to Christ,
if we seek to live in the world of mercy he offers,
we do not need to fight and claw for survival,
“For if we live, we live for the Lord,
and if we die, we die for the Lord;
so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.”
If we are the Lord’s whether we live or die,
then we can take the risk of accepting mercy
and take the risk of showing mercy.

But what about the end of the parable,
when the unmerciful servant is
“handed… over to the torturers
until he should pay back the whole debt”?
Does this mean that, at the end of the day,
God’s mercy comes to an end?
Not necessarily.
I believe that the world of the unmerciful servant
the word of cruelty and ugliness,
wrath and anger,
is itself a painful, torturous world in which to live, 
and the unmerciful servant is tormented
by his own inability 
to accept the mercy of his master.
God wants to free us from that torment.
But, having trapped himself in that world,
the unmerciful servant’s torment will not cease
until he learns to see and accept
the mercy offered to him at every moment.

Let us pray for those who live 
in an ugly, cruel world
of debt without mercy,
that their torment may be lifted.
Let us pray for those who suffer
the wrath and anger of those
who live trapped 
in a cruel and ugly world.
Let us pray for ourselves,
that we may be made free
to live for the Lord
and to die for the Lord.
And may God have mercy on us all.
 

23rd Week in Ordinary Time II--Wednesday (Peter Claver)

Readings: Isaiah 58:6-11; Matthew 25:31-40

We’re all familiar with the so-called Golden Rule:
as Jesus phrases it in Matthew’s Gospel,
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Mt. 7:12).
But this is not a teaching unique to Christianity.
We find equivalent statements
in religions and philosophies from around the world.
The prophet Muhammad is reported to have said,
“As you would have people do to you, do to them;
and what you dislike to be done to you, don’t do to them.”
In the Buddhist sacred writings we are told,
“Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.”
And Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative,
even though he himself thought it far superior
in philosophical rigor to the Golden Rule,
ends up sounding pretty similar:
“Treat others how you wish to be treated.”
We might say that something like the Golden Rule
is part of the common moral inheritance of the human race.
It is rooted in our capacity to see ourselves in others,
to see the common bonds of our humanity,
to imagine ourselves in another person’s shoes.

But today’s Gospel offers us something else,
something that goes beyond the Golden Rule.
Rather than telling his followers
“do unto others as you would have them do unto you,”
Jesus says, “do unto others as you would do unto me.”
For, as he say to his disciples, “whatever you do
for one of the least brothers of mine you do for me.”
We are not simply to see ourselves in others;
we are to see Christ.
 
Rather than being, like the Golden Rule,
a moral intuition shared by many peoples and culture,
what Jesus teaches us today
is something unique to Christianity:
that in serving our brother or sister in need
we are offering service to God himself.
For in Christ God has taken on suffering flesh
and so identified himself with every living person,
especially those who suffer hunger or thirst,
estrangement or deprivation,
captivity or illness.

It was this command to see Christ in others
that led St. Peter Claver to undertake
his extraordinary ministry to the enslaved Africans
who were brought to the New World.
He would meet the slave ships
that arrived in the port of Cartagena
to minister to the human cargo of those ship,
many of whom were naked, sick, and dying,
sometimes literally giving them the clothes off his back.
What the world would treat as chattel to be sold,
Peter Claver treated as deserving of
the same human dignity that he himself desired.
But even more than that,
he treated them as sacred icons
in which he could see the face of Christ.
The lives of these Black slaves mattered to him
because they mattered to Christ
and Christ mattered to him.
Let us ask for St. Peter Claver to pray for us
that we too might find the face of Christ
in the face of those who suffer,
especially those who suffer
racial hatred and discrimination.
And may God have mercy on us all.

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Ezekiel 33:7-9; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20

Our Gospel today seems particularly relevant,
since it gives something like a plan of action
for dealing with conflict and controversy,
and I think it is pretty non-controversial
to say we live in conflict-ridden times.
Jesus says that if you perceive
that someone has wronged you,
rather than seek to publicly shame them,
you should go to them one-on-one
to confront them with the truth
of the harm they have done.
If that doesn’t work,
bring a couple of other people along
so that, “every fact may be established.”
Finally, if the other person will not face up
to the truth of the harm they have brought about
then you, as it were, go public,
bring the matter before the Church community.
If your opponent does not repent and reconcile,
then they can no longer be part of the community,
and must be treated as “a Gentile or a tax collector.”

Note that this is not merely a mechanism
for resolving disagreements;
the scenario imagined is not simply one
in which two members of the community are at odds
and are seeking to reach a compromise.
Rather, it is one in which one party has wronged the other
and must be made to see the wrongness of their ways.
The issue is not simply reconciliation,
but repentance and truth-telling.
For there can be no reconciliation without truth-telling,
without a truthful account of past harms inflicted.

But telling the truth is a tricky thing.
On the one hand, it can be difficult
to speak a hard truth;
we would often prefer
to let the unreconciled elephant-in-the-room
go unremarked
rather than to deal with the messy fallout
of, if I may add another metaphor,
opening up a can of worms
we may not be able to close.
On the other hand,
I suspect we all know people
who wield truth like a weapon,
not as a means to reconciliation
but as a means
of bludgeoning others into submission,
exacerbating conflict and alienation,
perhaps even destroying the wrong-doer.
So how do we walk that line
between elephant-ignoring
and truth-weaponizing?

Paul tells us, “Owe nothing to anyone,
except to love one another,
for the one who loves another
has fulfilled the law.”
We owe one another the truth
and so we must sometimes risk the possibility
of opening a can of worms we cannot close,
but only if it is a truth spoken in love,
only if even a hard truth is spoken
out of a genuine desire
to find on the other side of the painful process
of reckoning with harms, past and present
healing and wholeness for all parties involved.
“Love does no evil to the neighbor.”
Note that the process Jesus outlines in the Gospel
is one that is very careful to save and not destroy
the person who has committed the offense.
Which is not to say
that the truth spoken in love never hurts.
Anyone who has ever undergone physical or psychological therapy
knows that pain can be a necessary part of the healing process.
Painful truth spoken in love is the spiritual therapy
that can lead to that healing that we call reconciliation.

We can see the connection of truth and reconciliation
in our on-going national struggle to deal with race
and the legacy of slavery.
We can see the temptations of elephant-ignoring
and of truth-weaponizing,
of pretending that we have put the past behind us
and of wielding truth as a cudgel
simply to balance the scales pain.
But between these twin temptations lies the narrow way
of reckoning with the truth as an instrument of love
and a means of reconciliation,
a pursuit of reconciliation that is not simply
an attempt to declare victory and go home
but involves concrete works of repair
to overcome the effects of the legacy of racism.

Over the years I have found myself
forced to rethink many things I was taught
in my upbringing in the American South,
things about the past and about the present,
things about the nobility of causes and heroes,
things about the fairness of current structures,
beliefs that, in the name of truth,
I have had to abandon.
And, though this was sometimes painful,
I owe a debt of gratitude to those who over the years
have loved me enough to inflict that pain,
who continue to confront me with the truth—
the truth that must be faced as the first step
toward true reconciliation and repair.

Of course, we Christians recognize
that the work of reconciliation and repair
is no mere human work;
indeed we recognize that our human efforts
are simply not adequate to the task
of bringing about true reconciliation,
of repairing a history of damaged relations,
whether between races or classes or nations,
and even less so the broken bond
between humanity and God
that lies at the root of all our brokenness.
Reconciliation on all levels is the work of grace,
which comes to us through Christ.
As Paul writes to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 5:19),
“God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,
not counting their trespasses against them,
and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.”
The truth that we must proclaim is not simply
the truth of past and present harms,
but the truth of God’s on-going work of reconciliation,
a work that is rooted in and grows from
the painful moment of truth-telling that is the cross,
in which we see displayed the reality of divine love
against the backdrop of human evil.

Let us pray that God would give us
the grace to know the truth
and to bear that truth in love
to a world in search of reconciliation and repair.
And may God have mercy on us all.

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Jeremiah 20:7-9; Romans 12:1-2; Matthew 16:21-27

As our nation’s two major political parties
wrap up their nominating conventions
the word of God this week remind us
that the call of Jesus to be his follower
is something far more radical and far-reaching
than the values enshrined in American politics,
and offers us a way of living together
beyond the endless and increasingly rancorous squabbles
that mark our public discourse.

St. Paul goes right to the heart of the matter:
“Do not conform yourselves to this age
but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.”
When Paul speaks here of “this age,”
he is not thinking simply
of his own first-century Roman culture.
Rather, he is thinking of the entire sweep
of human history lived in its fallen state.
He is thinking not just of his place and time
but of every place and time
in which human beings
seek worldly goods and glory
rather than “what is the will of God,
what is good and pleasing and perfect.”

St Thomas Aquinas, commenting on Paul’s statement,
notes, “the present age is a kind of measure
of those things that slip away in time” (Comm. Rom. n. 965).
To be conformed to the present age
is not simply to follow current fads and fashions
but to love too much
the fragmentary and temporary
goods of this life,
to be so enraptured by the glittering image
of power or wealth or control
that we fail to love
what is good, pleasing, and perfect,
that we miss the moment
of Christ’s invitation to be his follower.
And when, as it always does,
fortune’s wheel turns
and our power and wealth and control
turn to dust in our hands
and ashes in our mouths,
we find ourselves equally bereft
of those eternal goods,
those things that do not slip away in time.
“What profit would there be
for one to gain the whole world
and forfeit his life?”

This is not to say
that the politics of this present age do not matter.
For example, many sincerely believe
that one or the other presidential candidate
is clearly the superior choice as leader for this country.
Many sincerely believe
that one or the other party’s policy positions
clearly reflect the superior choice
for the future of America.
And people should undoubtedly vote
according to their sincere beliefs.
But let me say, in complete frankness,
that neither political party embodies fully
the vision of the good life for human beings
as understood by the Catholic tradition.
The vision of human flourishing
that has for centuries animated
saints and scholars,
prophets and Popes,
is simply not reflected
in the pre-packaged political platforms
that we are asked to affirm.
Whether it is a question of holding human life sacred
from conception to natural death,
or of the immorality of employing the death penalty
in modern societies,
of protecting the earth, our common home,
or of protecting the rights of religious conscience,
of making space for certain traditional values,
or of making space for the migrant and refugee,
it seems there ought to be something
that Catholics should find troubling
in all of the political packages presently on offer.

But the problem is not simply the failure
of our two major political parties
to cohere with the Catholic vision of human flourishing.
The problem ultimately is something deeper.
The problem is that politics,
rather than being a means
of negotiating our way through this present age,
seems to have become for many
the sole source of ultimate meaning.
Research indicates that while Americans
have become more willing to marry
someone of a different religion
they have become significantly less willing
to marry someone of a different political party.
To me this suggests that politics
has become for many what religion once was:
a bottom-line value that shapes our lives
in the most fundamental way.
The question is,
can our contemporary politics,
which is based upon winners and losers,
my side against your side,
us versus them,
bear that sort of weight?
Or, under the pressure of that weight,
does it inevitably turn into something quite ugly?

I was speaking the other day with a friend,
with whom I have some political differences,
and she said to me that what bothered her most
on the current political scene
is the amount of hatred.
One might respond, of course,
that heated emotions are normal
because the stakes in politics are high,
and policies and priorities
have a real impact in people’s lives.
And this is true.
But for a Christian,
those stakes are not ultimate.
As important as politics is,
if it engenders hatred in us
then we must ask ourselves,
what has gone wrong?
If we cannot see that those who support
a candidate we find reprehensible
are also people
who love their spouses and children,
who are capable of kindness,
and who are, like us, seeking some sense
of meaning and peace in their lives,
then we must ask ourselves
what has gone wrong?
If we cannot find a way to pray
for our political enemies,
then we must ask ourselves
what has gone wrong?
What profit would there be
for one to win an election
and forfeit the life of one’s soul?

Confronted with his own political enemies—
the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes—
Jesus chooses the path of cross and resurrection,
And he calls us to take up the cross and follow him,
and in doing so he points us to a different path:
the path, not of hatred and rancor,
but of non-conformity to this age,
the path of transformation
by the renewal of our minds,
the path of mercy and love.
In this season of political conflict
let us pray that God would open to us
the path that Jesus calls us to walk,
and may God have mercy on us all.

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isaiah 56:1, 6-7; Romans 11:13-15, 29-32; Matthew 15:21-28

She called out to him from afar,
using a term that was alien to her
but seemed to mean a lot to the Jews:
“Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David!
My daughter is tormented by a demon.”
He ignored her;
nevertheless, she persisted.
He made clear that the salvation he brought
was not for her kind, but only for the Jews;
nevertheless, she persisted.
He compared her to a dog,
begging for food that was not hers;
nevertheless, she persisted.
She persisted because persistence
was the only tool she had,
the only weapon in her arsenal.
A Canaanite and a woman,
she was doubly disadvantaged,
by her race and by her sex,
in approaching a Jewish holy man
to beg a cure for her daughter.
She had no leverage,
no angle to work,
just sheer stubborn persistence,
and a capacity to absorb pain and insult,
and a deep, deep love for her child,
who was suffering so much.
And, seeing her persistence, Jesus said,
“O woman, great is your faith!
Let it be done for you as you wish.”

The unnamed Canaanite woman
joins the ranks of persistent women
who stories are told in the Gospels:
the woman with the hemorrhage
who, after years of medical abuse,
pressed through the crowd
to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment;
the sinful woman who,
despite shame and rebuke from bystanders,
bathed the feet of Jesus with her tears
until she heard the words,
“Your sins are forgiven”;
the widow in Jesus’ parable
who, through resolute nagging,
won justice from an unjust judge;
perhaps above all, Mary of Nazareth,
who persisted in faith:
from a most unexpected pregnancy,
through the suffering of her son’s cross,
to the joy of the resurrection.
Of course, in the Gospels and throughout scripture,
it is not only women who are persistent—
certainly a prophet like Jeremiah is a model of tenacity—
but in the ancient world in which Jesus lived
the near complete powerlessness of most women
made persistence a particularly important
skill for them to have,
a capacity to carry on
in the face of rejection and setback.

But the kind of persistence shown by the Canaanite woman,
shown by the woman with the hemorrhage
and the sinful woman at Jesus’ feet,
shown by the nagging widow and Mary at the cross—
such persistence is something that all Christians need to have.
For the road to God’s kingdom is long and difficult;
and if we are to follow the way of Jesus,
we cannot walk it
burdened by the baggage of worldly power
that might win for us quick and painless solutions.
God plays a long game,
and we must too,
for our goal is nothing less
than God’s reign of love,
which calls for us to live lives
of persistent faithfulness.

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.,
in a sermon entitled “Loving Your Enemies,”
spoke of how, in struggling against racial segregation,
it was important not to relinquish what he called
“our privilege and our obligation to love.”
He continued, “While abhorring segregation,
we shall love the segregationist.
This is the only way to create the beloved community.”
This sort of love calls for persistence.
Addressing his segregationist opponents,
he said, “Throw us in jail,
and we shall still love you….
But be ye assured
that we will wear you down
by our capacity to suffer.
One day we shall win freedom,
but not only for ourselves.
We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience
that we shall win you in the process,
and our victory will be a double victory.”
To defeat your enemies, not by destroying them,
but by making them your friends
is a long, slow process of persistence—
a struggle to act out of love
and not out of hatred.
For us too, these are days that call us to persistence.
From the ongoing struggle for racial justice,
to advocating for the sanctity of human life
from conception to natural death,
to building a community that welcomes the stranger
and cares for its weakest members,
to enduring the trials of a global pandemic,
our times confront us with challenges
that cannot be remedied by hatred and violence,
though many are tempted by such remedies.
We Christians have a lesson
to teach the world about persistence.
We should be the ones who can show the world
that persistence is more than simply
white knuckling it through a crisis.
We should be the ones who can show the world
that persistence is the fruit of the Holy Spirit,
something brought about in us
by the grace of a loving God.
We should be the ones who can show the world
the beauty of persistence that springs,
not from confidence in our own power,
but from our confidence is the power of God.

Remember the Canaanite woman:
confronted with seeming rejection by Jesus,
she did not grow angry or lash out,
but resolutely acted out of love for her daughter
and her faith that Jesus could heal her.
In commending her faith,
Jesus commends her persistence
and calls us to emulate her.
So in facing the many challenges
that beset us in these days
let us act with persistent, grace-filled love,
let us walk with Christ
the long, hard road to the Kingdom,
trusting that God will bring to completion
the good work that he has begun in us.
And may God have mercy on us all.

19th Week in Ordinary Time II -- Friday (Maximillian Kolbe)

Readings: Ezekiel 16:59-63; Matthew 19:3-12

In Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons,
which tells the story of St. Thomas More,
the character More, facing execution at the hands of the king,

says to his daughter,
“When a man takes an oath, Meg,
he is holding his own self in his own hands.

Like water.
And, if he opens his fingers then—
he needn’t hope to find himself again.”
Promise-making and promise-keeping
are one of the chief ways
in which we give shape to our lives—

just as our hands give shape to water—

in which we form an identity,
in which we become the self who we are.

For Christians,
the self that is formed by promise-keeping
is a self that bears witness to the promise-keeping God.
In the prophet Ezekiel, God says that he will remain true
to his sinful and wayward people Israel:
“I will re-establish my covenant with you,
that you may know that I am the LORD.”
God does not take the Israelites’ disobedience
as an excuse to go back on his promise,
to break his covenant with them;
God remains resolutely, fiercely true to his word,
and calls his people to be faithful in turn.
This is who God is: the God of steadfast love.
And this is who we are to be:
a people of steadfast love,
a promise-keeping people.

This is why Jesus is so stringent in his expectations
for the permanence of marriage.
This is not simply a bit of marital morality.
This is something that should speak to all of us,
married or not.
This is about the power of God’s grace;
the power we sense when we realize
that the hands in which we hold ourselves
enclosed like water
are themselves enclosed
in the steadfast, loving hands of God.
This is about letting God’s grace work in us
so that in keeping our vows in good times and in bad
our lives give witness
to the God of fiercely steadfast love.

Today we celebrate the feast of Maximillian Kolbe,
the Polish Franciscan priest who died
in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
After a prisoner escaped,
the commander of the camp
sentenced ten men to die by starvation
to deter future escape attempts.
Kolbe volunteered to take the place of one of the ten
whom he knew had a wife and child.
Having promised himself
in baptism and religious consecration
to be a follower of Jesus,
to walk with Christ
the path of cross and resurrection,
Kolbe stood at that moment
holding himself in his own hands like water.
And he chose, by God’s grace,
to be a person of fiercely steadfast love.
This is who we, by God’s grace, can be as well.
Let us ask today for the prayers
of Saints Thomas More and Maximillian Kolbe
that we too might be true to our vows
so that God might make us
witnesses in the world to the love of God.

18th Week in Ordinary Time II -- Friday

Readings: Nahum 2:1-3, 3:1-3, 6-7; Matthew 16:24-28

Today’s Gospel reading pretty much sums up

what it means to be a Christian:

“For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,

but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

This is a mystery and a paradox:

that we lose everything by trying to hold on to it

and we gain everything by letting it go,

if we surrender everything for the sake of Jesus.

It also presents us with two paths:

the path of holding on

and the path of letting go.

 

If we follow the path of holding on,

we discover that there can be no end to our grasping

and our efforts to retain control of what we see as ours

end in desperation and destruction.

We can see this in our first reading,

which tells of the fate of Israel’s foe,

the city of Nineveh,

which sought through warfare

to secure its wealth and power

and dominate its neighbors.

But the conqueror is eventually conquered,

and in our first reading

the prophet Nahum offers us

vivid and horrifying images of ancient warfare:

the sound of approaching chariots,

the sun glinting off of swords and spears,

piles of dead bodies.

It is a terrifying scene,

but presented as just recompense

for Nineveh's warlike ways:

in seeking to save their lives,

they lost them.

If we turn ourselves into little Ninevehs—

if we become people who seek

to secure our lives by control and domination—

we too will lose all,

we too will find our lives ruined

by the very power we sought to wield.

 

But Jesus says that there is another path to follow,

another way to live:

“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,

take up his cross, and follow me.”

Jesus’s call to his followers to take up their cross

is a call to live our lives

with open hands and open hearts,

to surrender ourselves to his way.

This is crucial for us as we seek

to find our way through these difficult times

of pandemic, civil unrest, and political division:

we might be tempted by the path of grasping

as we seek to gain some sense of control over our lives;

we might be tempted by the path of anger and blame

directed toward those who seem to threaten our security;

we might be tempted to abandon the path of Jesus—

the path of love and gentleness,

the path of mercy and forgiveness—

as unrealistic or impractical.

But our faith tells us that

in the great paradox that is the Christian way,

in the great mystery that is the path of cross and resurrection,

it is by surrendering to God’s love that we are saved;

it is by turning ourselves over in faith to the path of Jesus

that we truly find ourselves in him,

beloved children of God sharing in life eternal.

What does it profit us to gain the whole world

if we cannot find ourselves in Christ?