HOMILY

August 30, 2015, 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Moses told the people,  ”Now, Israel, hear the statues and decrees that I am teaching you to observe, so that you may live, and may enter in and take possession of the land that Adonai, the God of your ancestors, is giving you.  …”In your observance of the commandments of Adonai, your God, you must not add or subtract from that which I am giving you.”

Note that in those days the Jewish people didn’t as yet have a concept of reward other than in this life.   It wasn’t until Jesus’ time that a whole group of people believed in an afterlife and that sometimes people would have to struggle all their lives and keep the faith without seeing a reward.   Jesus taught by his example and words to love even to death, death on a cross.   That is the basic commandment of God: love God and neighbor as Jesus did, to the end, without expecting a reward in this life.    How each person lives that out is different. 

I imagine Pope Francis is not going to come out with a major teaching that same-sex marriage is acceptable, but he did show that he respects people’s efforts to love in their own way.  He apparently read the books that a lesbian woman sent him about a child having two mommies.  He sent her a letter and an Apostolic Blessing.  Now that’s love.  That’s his interpretation of how to follow the basic law of love of God and neighbor, both for him and for the two mothers!    

What about the loving compassion that leads people to spend their lives helping those who are mentally or physically impaired, addicted to drugs or other substances or behaviors!   What unselfish love it takes for people to help someone like Dee Curry and her efforts to live a healthy, productive life.   Pathways to Housing DC, is a nonprofit in DC that implements the Housing First model among those with severe mental illness.   Housing First offers the most vulnerable, chronically homeless people permanent housing and the supportive services to address mental and physical health, substance abuse, education and family reunification so that people can get back on their feet.  Many times the staff doesn’t see positive results at first or for a long time, though they do have an 85% success rate of keeping people off the street. 

Dee Curry came to them after many attempts to get away from drugs and homelessness.  She is happy to say, “They saved my life!’  In her long road back from chronic homelessness, Dee found navigating social services overwhelming.  The staff at Housing First was there for her every step of the way.  She now knows that she can trust them.  One staff person offered to accompany her to a job interview.  They stayed with her when she went back to drugs and lost her apartment.  They helped her find a way back. They taught her how to stay on a budget.   Now in her third apartment, no longer struggling with addiction, she says: “Finally I feel like myself.”   

Back to Moses and to Jesus, who quoted Isaiah, saying: “These people honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me.”  Jesus was interested in what was in people’s hearts.  He didn’t condemn the Pharisees for their beliefs.  He was questioning their motives.  He was teaching that actions must flow from deep convictions and be genuine expression of one’s praise or gratitude, of one’s need or reparation.  The discussion between Jesus and the Pharisees in Mark was a normal kind of dialogue that well-meaning Jewish people would have and still have over how a particular passage in scripture is best be interpreted. 

Our church hierarchy would do better, as Pope Francis is doing, to dialogue with people in a particular situation on how a law or commandment could best be applied.  That implies that people listen to each other and respect others’ honest point of view. 

Jesus readily forgave people who admitted their failures and were trying to do what was right.  The same thing is true for us.  Christ is always with us when we try to do what is right and speak the truth.  His concern is that his word take root in us.  Like the people in recovery at Pathways, who learn to trust loving people, we need to learn to trust that we are being led to wholeness, and to trust that we can trust our true selves.  At Seeds of Hope in Indianapolis, a home like Pathways, residents are required to keep a journal and spend one hour a day in prayer or reflection, another way to learn how to interpret God’s law of love.

So, there are some things that are essential to wholeness and some areas where we can make choices and need to make choices.  Some things are from God’s laws and are necessary and somethings where we need to discern what is best.  That’s where prayer and reflection come in for us, too.  The most important aspect is to have right relationships: kindness over cruelty, compassion over condemnation.

That’s the whole of God’s law and the key to how to interpreting what it means in a particular situation is to stay attuned to God’s word both personally and as a community through prayer, study and asking questions.

Maria Thornton McClain, RCWP

August 30, 2015

Homily by Nancy Meyer, RCWP

The ancient biblical world contained, it was believed, 70 or 72 nations.  So in Luke’s gospel, Jesus sent out the disciples to the whole world, not just to the Israelite communities.   The disciples were to take up the strenuous work of evangelization.   How they are to be is peaceful, gentle and loving in the midst of intense resistance.  They are dependent on the hospitality of the people that they meet.  They were to cure the sick and proclaim that ‘the reign of God is at hand’. 

What does ‘at hand’ mean?  My understanding is that wood crafters lay their tools out in order so that they are ‘at hand’, right here, in the same space when they are required for a particular task.  The reign or the kin-dom of God is right here, at hand, among us, and within us.  So the disciples were to make ready the towns and villages to receive Jesus, to alert that the reign of God was right here with them.  Jesus warned the disciples that the mission would not always go well and so they were then, to move on to another place.

They came back from their mission jubilant at their success and all that they had accomplished.   There have been those moments for us as well, when we focus on the visible result and take false pride in what we think we have accomplished by our own efforts!  Yet Jesus may have thrown a wet blanket on the disciples high spirits and our spirit when he said to them, rather be glad that your names are written in heaven.  Be glad that you have made a difference in someone’s life, something beyond yourself, something bigger than your own self interests. 

That is the Christian formula for success.  Make a moral difference.  Be a part of something larger than yourself.  This is not the teaching of the world’s criteria for success which is: lots of money, power, prestige and consuming a lot. 

One evening the news reported the flood that was imminent from the rising river in river town.  It was the same town that had devastating floods a couple of years earlier and people had just recovered.  The young people were there filling and stacking hundreds of sandbags to protect their town.  A reporter interviewed several of the young workers.  It was backbreaking labor they reflected, yet they had become numb to the pain in their backs and arms because they were part of something that made a difference.  Each one was talking about being a part of something larger than them self.  They felt really good contributing to the saving of their town in an effort that really brought people together.  United in this common cause they worked to lessen the devastation facing them.  They were unified for the common good, a very new experience, it seemed, for some of them.

My oldest sister Charlotte and Dorothy were good friends in high school.  As happens at graduation each went their different ways.  Dorothy entered the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, taught school and then was missioned to Brazil. 

Dorothy worked on behalf of the peasant farmers there who were sustaining threats from the loggers, ranchers and their hired gunman.  It was the farmer’s land they were after.  Some urged her to leave or crank down her outcry against the devastation of the Brazilian rain forest.   Sr. Dorothy would not leave the poor farmers whose livelihood and land were in peril.  She traveled to their villages over almost impassable mud roads to read scripture and pray together, to uplift their spirits and sustain their courage.  They had each other and they could continue to live in harmony with themselves, the rainforest and their God. 

On her way through the forest to a gathering of farmers, Dorothy Stang was stopped, questioned, and gunned down by two men in February, 2005.  An older woman standing with, praying with, and being with poor peasant farmers is viewed as a subversive activity against the powerful.  That simple activity cost her life.  How you are to be is peaceful, gentle and loving in the midst of intense resistance.  You will be sent as sheep among wolves, Jesus promises us.

Our mission and challenge today is here, bringing the word of the Holy One’s loving maternal presence with us and being attentive to the common good that is desperately being called for in our neighborhoods, city, nation and world.  That is what we are called to discern and act upon. 

Jim Wallis of Sojourners has just published a new book: On God’s Side: What religion forgets and politics hasn’t learned about serving the common good.  I would like to end with the quote from John Chrysostom that Jim begins his book with:

“This is the rule of most perfect Christianity; its most exact definition, its highest point, namely, the seeking of the common good… for nothing can so make a person an imitator of Christ as caring for [ones] neighbor.” 

Nancy Meyer, RWCP