My friends, today’s gospel about the pearl of great price calls each of us to consider what is most important in our lives and of how much we would give for this most important item.  Our consideration of what is most important to us no doubt includes more than one thing; more than likely, the consideration includes several things, persons among the list.  Solomon in today’s first reading; asks for something outside of himself, for the good of others—that he would be wise ruler.  Would we do the same—ask for the good of others or would “the great pearl seeking” be all about us?

The story that Jesus tells today says that the merchant gave everything because the treasure he found was so great that he was willing to give it all to have that prize.  If we think about who we consider our most treasured persons, perhaps our values in life, would we indeed give it all? I think we have an example of this in the person of Senator John McCain, a long-time Republican senator from Arizona. Recently, as you all know, Senator McCain was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of brain cancer.  I think this life-changing moment encouraged him to go after the “great pearl” placed before him, truth and justice, concerning health care and finally, “work across the aisle” with the opposing party, to do the right thing.

Jesus tells us that the kin-dom of heaven is like that—and the pearl of great price is the Word and way of God.  God has first loved us and asks merely that we love God in return. God loves each of us with an understanding heart, the gift that Solomon asked for in the first reading, to judge his people well and “do the right thing.”  John McCain’s significant vote in the early hours of Friday morning, added to the women’s Collins and Murkowski’s steadfast votes of earlier in the week, stopping a bad health care bill, that would serve so few very poorly, came from an understanding heart, a heart that was finally prompted to rise up, finally, finally, before it was too late, to do the right thing.

Paul tells us today in his letter to the Romans, “God makes all things work together for good”—sometimes it takes a while, but our hope is truly in our good God to change hearts!

Is our love merely something on our tongues or do our hearts become engaged too? Can we say, “I would give it all for the pearls of great price in my life?”  Are we willing to so conform our lives to God’s ways so as to make the changes necessary to truly be followers of our brother, Jesus?  How much would we be willing to give—our reputations, our livelihoods, our very lives?  As we see in the person of John McCain, our ability to make these great decisions to be who God has called each of us to be changes as we grow and change.

We are told in Psalm 119 today to “glorify the law of God,” but that doesn’t mean to take it in a legalistic way. Instead; we should remember God’s covenant with the people of Israel and by extension, with us. God’s covenant with all of us is about God loving us first. Let me repeat that as it is most important that we get this one idea—God, my friends, loved us first! The covenant continues from there—it’s all about following God’s lead, about us then, showing lovingkindness and compassion in our world.

In this, I am speaking of the Cosmic Christ, that life-force moving in our world that is bigger than any religion, ideology, or way of life.  The goodness that planet earth represents continually calls each of us to good, to make the wise decisions as did Solomon to give back to our world and its people the good each of us is capable of.   Our free wills allow us to choose solely for what is best for us as individuals and a country, but the life-force of the Cosmic Christ calls us, pulls us, strains within this universe and its people to choose wisely, being our best, not only for ourselves, but for everyone.

John McCain spoke eloquently these past days about doing the right thing for everyone and passing a health care bill that truly serves people.  And this will mean working with others, doing the truly hard work of listening to each other.  This doesn’t mean that everyone gets everything that they want, but that each side gets an equal amount and the two sides find a place where they can agree, while not stopping progress because  they can’t have it all—deciding which “pearls” can be let go of, which cannot.

Paul words that, “Everything works unto good for those who love God” isn’t the same as saying that everything will work out in the end—it is part of the human condition—we live imperfectly, now. God walks with us extending lovingkindness and compassion.  I think we don’t always believe that God is this good, because we don’t spend enough time in regular communication with the One who loves us above all others.

We are God’s pearls of great, great price.  If we are truly to believe this and act upon it in our lives, we will have to take time in our days to come to know this God of Love better.   God isn’t some being far off, unconnected to us and our lives, but with us, here and now, in the faces of our own “pearls of great price,” spouses, children, good friends—each can show us glimpses of our loving God if we can look with eyes of love, understanding and care.  The “pearl of great price” is always there, it is just for us to become wiser, see more clearly, love more deeply.

My friends, to repeat, in other words, our God always wants good and not bad for us, is our cheerleader, our best friend—wants us to choose what is best for us and ultimately for others, because our lives are not just for ourselves, but for all that we touch in this world.

We may sometimes think that God doesn’t hear or doesn’t care when we pray for something that doesn’t happen. God’s walk with us in this life is not about rescuing us, but about giving us the strength to be whom we were called to be.  Again, John McCain and the Republican women senators, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are models in this now.

The misfortunes that happen to each of us in life are part of what it means to be human and prepare us for all that comes next.  But whatever it is that befalls us or graces us in this life; we can be sure that our God is there to share it with us—we just have to remember to not keep God far off, but front and center.

Every day, sincerely ask Jesus to be part of your day, allowing you to live a life of profound wisdom and always to make choices from the heart, not the head—the heart is a truer, more profound starting place.

Solomon, in the first reading today from Kings is a wonderful model for each of us in this quest to be our best selves.  He could have asked God for anything, riches of all kinds, money, a fine life; but instead he asks for wisdom and understanding that he might rule the People of Israel well—a nation so vast, they couldn’t be counted.  History shows us that indeed he did become a ruler like no other before or since, known for his wise and understanding heart.

What are the choices, my friends, that each of us will make? Who do we ultimately serve in our lives? What is the great pearl that we strive after and how much are we willing to give to have it? May we each be blessed with all we need to choose wisely.  Amen?  Amen!

 

 

Dear Friends, 

As you know, I was away this past weekend and Pastor Dick Dahl graciously covered for me–here is his homily–enjoy! Thanks Dick! 

---

The first two Readings today provide powerful images for this homily.

The reading from Isaiah presents Yahweh God saying: “For as the rain and the snow come down from the sky and do not return before having watered the earth, fertilizing it and making it germinate to provide seed for the sower and food to eat, so it is with the word that goes forth from my mouth; it will not return to me unfulfilled or before…having achieved what it was meant to do.”

Then Paul in his letter to the Romans, describes the whole universe groaning with severe labor pains as the Word of God is in the process of “achieving what it was sent to do.”

Quantum theology also gives us a new insight into this “whole universe.” It reveals that the gigantic cosmos, like a hologram, is mirrored in each smallest part of reality. Similarly we too, small as we are and seemingly insignificant, are part of the universal process in which God’s Word is “achieving what it was meant to do.” And, as in the quantum world, to quote Fr. Richard Rohr, “If we let the mystery happen in one small and true place, it moves from there! It is contagious, it is shareable, it reshapes the world”

Part of the slow and agonizing labor pains our part of the universe is going through is coming to deal with people who see things differently from us. This challenge presents itself to us in politics, religion, culture, and other differences. The tendency is not only to dislike their views, but to dislike them—in extreme cases to view them as evil.

In her thoughts about non-violence, Sr. Joan Chittister writes, “Nonviolent resistance is committed to making friends out of enemies. Nonviolent resistance condemns systems, ideas or policies that oppress, but never launches personal attacks against individuals who are agents of the system itself. Nonviolent resistance refuses to sow hate for the enemy.”

Father Rohr advises, “Don’t waste any time dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys. Hold them together in your own soul—where they are anyway—and you will have held together the whole world. You will have overcome the great divide in one place of spacious compassion. You, little you, will have paid the price of redemption. God takes it from there, replicating the same pattern in another conscious human life.”

I’ve read, for example, that during former president Jimmy Carter’s audacious effort to bring about reconciliation and a peace agreement between representatives of Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the effort appeared to be ending in failure after days of difficult negotiation. The night before the unreconciled participants planned to depart, President Carter brought eight photographs of the eight children of the dissenting Israeli holdout. Carter had written a personal message to each of the eight children. This act of personal kindness led the Israeli leader to soften his resistance and the peace agreement was eventually achieved.

One of the core principles of Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation is, “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” As Jesus explained about the parable of the sower of the seed, “The seed sown in rich soil is someone who hears the word and understands it; this is one who yields a harvest.”

The remainder of this homily follows the framework of the three Readings. It is about understanding the Word of God that has come among us and “will not return until it has achieved its purpose.”

Again I find Richard Rohr helpful in finding a way to proceed. He writes that abstract ideology will not get us very far, and much common religion is ideology rather than real encounter with Presence. When religion becomes mere ideology (or even mere theology), one’s spirit withers. As Pope Francis says, people all over the world are rejecting this top-down form of religion—and they should because this is not the path of Christ himself.

Father Rohr explains that most religious searches begin with one massive misperception. People tend to start by making a very unfortunate, yet understandable, division between the sacred and the profane worlds. Early stage religion focuses on identifying sacred places, sacred time, and seemingly sacred actions that then leave the overwhelming majority of life unsacred. People are told to look for God in certain special places and in particular events—usually, it seems, ones controlled by the clergy. Early stage religion has limited the search for God to a very small field and thus it is largely ineffective—unless people keep seeing and knowing at larger and deeper levels.

In Franciscan (and true Christian) mysticism, there is finally no distinction between sacred and profane. The whole universe and all events are sacred, serving as doorways to the divine for those who know how to see. In other words, everything that happens is potentially sacred if we allow it to be. Our job as humans is to make the admiration of reality and the adoration of God fully conscious and intentional. Then everything is a prayer and an act of adoration.

For those who have learned how to see fully, everything—absolutely everything—is “spiritual.” This eventually and ironically leads to what the Lutheran mystic Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) called “religion-less Christianity.” Bonhoeffer saw that many people were moving away from the scaffolding of religion to the underlying and deeper Christian experience itself.

Once we can accept that God is in all situations, and that God can and will use even bad situations for good, then everything and everywhere becomes an occasion for good and an encounter with God.

Yes the universe is groaning in seemingly unbearable labor pain, but God’s plan is so perfect that even sin, tragedy, and painful deaths are used to bring us to divine union, just as the cross was meant to reveal. God wisely makes the problem itself part of the solution. This is what is happening now while the Word of God is achieving its purpose. It is all a matter of learning how to see rightly, fully, and, as Jesus says, with “understanding.”

My friends, the gospel from Matthew that I just proclaimed gives us much comfort in our lives as we try to be our brother, Jesus’ followers.  “Come to me, all you who labor and find life hard—I will refresh you.  Take the burden of following me, being true to the way of life I have given you, upon your shoulders, learn from me, my gentleness, my humility—for that is how it must be done—not through war, but peace as proclaimed by the prophet Zechariah today, speaking of the Messiah to come.

This reminds me of the play we saw this week, An Iliad, at the Great River Shakespeare Festival, (GRSF), not a Shakespearian play, but a take-off on Homer’s epic poem, The Iliad.  For those who see it, you will be confronted with humankind’s propensity to make war and not peace.  You cannot watch this one-person delivery and not realize that the strong tendency to react violently to what life sometimes brings, is within each of us.  We are capable of great good, but also, great evil.

Paul, in his letter to the Romans continues—we are to live in the Spirit, not the flesh.  It would seem from that; we need to recall that we are “spiritual beings here, having a human experience,” as someone once said—not the other way around. We aren’t here, in our humanity to become more spiritual—we are of God already, attempting through our humanity to be true ultimately to God’s Spirit within us. That kind of shoots the whole theology of redemption doesn’t it?!  And in all of this, Jesus will give us rest, comfort, we are told, just as he sought the same in his own humanity.

I have been working my way through a small volume, Simply Bonaventure, by Franciscan sister, Ilia Delio, in preparation for the 800 year celebratory remembrance of St. Bonaventure next week with the Sisters and Cojourners of the Rochester Franciscans. The celebration is aptly named, “Bonaventure Fest.”

Bonaventure, a scholar and teacher, but a true Franciscan in every way, spent much of his religious life as an academic, trying to understand the Trinity—that grouping of three distinct persons that we know in Christianity, as One God.

Simply put, for our understanding, the Trinity, which is all about love because that is what God is all about, has to be configured as three distinct persons in One God, so that God can be God, Bonaventure says. The love of God is so great that in order to be expressed, there must be the Son who is the gift of God’s original love—Bonaventure names this gift, “The Word.”  The Word (Jesus), spoken in the world causes the spreading of love and the creation of so much more love, as we, his followers, share it, and this is the Spirit of the original love.

Bonaventure says if God, the [Creator] and Jesus, the Son were all there was to God, the love would be just between them, but having the love move into all that is created—a love so great so as to create another person, makes God complete.  Did I say this was simple? But, really it is:

God is love—so great as to create the Son and the love between the two so much greater so as to create a third, the Spirit.

This is quite a different image of God from what many of us grew up with—a God who was ready to pounce if we did anything wrong.

We often watch reruns of the old MASH series on TV because the lessons taught seem as fitting and new today as they were during the Korean Conflict, which for all intents and purposes was really a war.  For all the times that we have tuned in to this series, you would think we had seen them all. So, we were surprised recently to see one that we realized we had never seen before!

The nugget that we walked away with was this: Father Mulcahey, the priest and spiritual representative in the series was looking for some reassurance that he was doing a good job and was upstaged by a patient coming through who learned that he had leukemia.   In the 1950’s, leukemia was basically a death sentence as research was just in the beginning stages at this point. With Father Mulcahey’s spiritual support and care, the patient was able to move past his own personal concern and reach out to give comfort to one of his buddies who had been wounded too. He opted to stay behind for a few days to be there for someone else in need rather than being sent to a hospital in Seoul for immediate care of his own illness.

Fr. Mulcahey was so spiritually and emotionally moved by this complete selflessness on the part of this young man that he shared his shame over his own personal selfishness for acclaim in front of the whole camp by proclaiming that, “God didn’t send us to earth to be patted on the back for the good we have done, but that God could live through us!”  That doesn’t sound like a God who is watching for our every misstep.  It turned out that his superior, Cardinal Reardon was making a pastoral visit to the MASH unit at this time and Fr. Mulcahey was trying to put his best foot forward.  Turned out that he did!

So when we look at our world, in all of creation, from the highest or most advanced, humankind, to the lowliest insects; we have to marvel that God in all goodness wanted all of this for us to enjoy and with that, to care for all of it—our earth.  With Jesus’ Spirit our response must be to love and to share the love.  Making war, as was laid out in An Iliad, is always to have failed to be all that we can be.

Yet, we are given a free will to choose good or evil and granted, the choice isn’t always clear, but the choice is always ours to make.  Apparently, it would seem, war and violence are always the easier choices as is depicted so poignantly in the play, An Iliad as the actor named perhaps 100, more or less wars throughout history from B.C.E. times to the present and in all of these times, we as humans failed to do the really hard work of being people of peace, instead of war.  Now you might be thinking that in some wars, that was the only answer—someone needed to be stopped and in that, it was justified.  That may be so, but then, we don’t know because we didn’t choose the diplomatic, peaceful route.

I don’t know if because as I grow older and time for me seems shorter, I become “pressed” within my spirit, believing that war has never been the answer and I then ask how many wars it will take before we all, collectively realize that we can’t be people of love, spiritual people, sent here to allow God to live through us and then sanction war, killing, wasting the precious lives of our youth and finish not any closer to the illusive dream of peace that we all seek.

Spring and summertime bring celebrations wherein we remember the women and men who have died, protecting those same freedoms.  Why do we never have celebrations for those who lived protecting our freedoms? There are groups in our country who get together on weekends to re-enact past wars and battles. What is all the passion for war and death about? Would those wanting to re-enact these battles do so if they actually had lived through the horrors of battle?

The production at the GRSF displays so clearly the horrors of war, what men, mostly, are driven to, protecting home, family and possessions. It begs a different response.

So, my friends, that brings us back to where we started—the comfort that Jesus will bring us when we choose to follow him, making the hard choices—choosing life, not death.  Jesus speaks to his disciples, to us, in many ways about looking for the fruits of our actions to know if we are choosing wisely.  To choose war and violence over negotiation and other peaceful means to settle differences on the world stage have their consequences.

Beyond physical injuries that soldiers return home with, some so severe as to entirely change their lives, if indeed they didn’t lose their life in the battle, comes the mental agony of what the war caused them to do, for which they have to live with for the rest of their lives. For those who can’t, ending their suffering through suicide has been a way out for far too many.

Yet, “Come to me all who labor and find life hard and I will refresh you—take my burden upon your shoulders and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble—you will find rest for your souls, for my burden is easy and light.”   Amen? Amen!

 

My friends, this Sunday’s readings give a wonderful treatise on the great love of God for us.  Scripture scholar, Diane Bergant says, in no uncertain terms that, “The only way Elisha could have made the promise to the Shunemite woman, “This time next year, you will be holding a child in your arms,” and have it fulfilled, is through the power of God.

She says, we can liken this gift to the same offered to Abraham and Sarah—Isaac would be a gift to the nation and from him, along with all the women involved, a great family would result.  But this son offered as gift to the Shunemite woman was merely a gift for her, for her kindness to the prophet, Elisha.

Psalm 89 speaks of the “lovingkindness” (one word—hesed, in Greek) and faithfulness of our God.  The entire psalm uplifts God’s love which lasts forever and God’s faithfulness that is praised through the ages, because of the covenant God made with the People of God.  In other words, God will always-be-with-us!

And what are we to do in response to this great love? Paul tells us in his letter today to the Romans.  We are to set aside our old ways of living and take on a new life of holiness.

Paul speaks of what happens to us in our baptisms—Bergant continues and I paraphrase—we are plunged into the real chaos of death to ourselves through baptism and are raised to new life in Jesus—new life, living as he did.  Paul continues, she says, and again, I paraphrase, the chaos that physical death can be because it changes the one who goes through it, is what Jesus encountered when he lived, died and ultimately rose from the dead—an encounter we will all experience, one day!

In anticipation for this new way of being; we are to prepare our spiritual and physical selves through becoming all that we are called to be in this life, just as Jesus did, and the gospel reading from Matthew today, tells us how.

The words of this gospel can be a hard reading if we read it only in a literal way.  Does Jesus really mean that we are to put family aside—think of their needs only second?  Yes and no!  He is not asking us to turn our backs on our families when they are in need. What he is saying is that tending to our families cannot keep us from living moral lives—doing the right thing—doing what Jesus would do.

An example or two will make this clearer.  If we are asked to keep a secret within our family under the guise of protecting the family unit when the secret is covering up abuse, the challenge from Jesus would be to do the right thing.    In the past, much abuse, sexual and physical was kept quiet because people were taught that the institution, Church, State or Family was of most importance.

The Netflix documentary, The Keepers, tells its viewers the story of Catholic nun, Sister Cathy Cesnik, a member of the School Sisters of Notre Dame who was cruelly murdered in 1969 because she was going to go public with the truth of sexual abuse of female students at Keogh High School in Baltimore over several years, primarily by one priest, with the collusion of Church and State. More than her murder, the story of the cover-up of her murder looms before us as followers of Jesus.  Now, you might be thinking, why did we never hear of this? Why indeed?!

This is an incidence of protecting the “family of the hierarchical church” over the “little ones” that we as baptized followers of Jesus are called to watch out for and Jesus would say that this is wrong.

Martin Luther King, Jr. while in prison for civil disobedience in the 1960’s wrote of this overriding principle:

“In a real sense all life is inter-related…All [people] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.  Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.  I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.  This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

Our baptisms in Jesus, the Christ and our calls to be his followers challenge us to spiritually die to our own desires, wishes, preconceptions of what and how life will be.  A letter to the June 30^th edition of the National Catholic Reporter is indicative of this—in part, it reads:

“I was one who was indifferent toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons until my grandchild came out as gender neutral at about age 16 or 17.  Then I remembered how this child struggled since early childhood with personal identity and continues to struggle today at age 20. Now my indifference has turned to awareness and deep concern for my grandchild, whom I will always love and hold dear to me.  This awareness and deep concern now extends to all of the LGBT family.  My grandchild’s struggle has changed me by opening my eyes to be more understanding and accepting of others.”

For those who get the Winona Daily News, this past week carried the 60 year love story of two people, Jim and Peggy Meyer, known to many in our community.  In 2009, Jim came out publically to family and friends as a transgender person and assumed her new identity as Jaimie Ann Meyer, a reality that she has been living with and coming to terms with for most of her life. One can only imagine the pain of not knowing who you really are for so many years, living within a culture of Church and State that, in many places still chooses to see reality for others in a very small, narrow vein.  And yet, we are confronted in today’s Scriptures that speak to us of a God of lovingkindness who is faithful forever.  God created all the differences for us to delight in, not to set some up as the norm and condemn the rest.

We can only imagine what Peggy Meyer has gone through coming to terms with Jaimie Ann’s coming out.  We are told that, “they are finding their way together.”  I cannot read this story without thinking of the total giving, dying—really, to oneself that has gone on in the past for Jaimie Ann and in the present, now for Peggy.  I salute them both as women of strength.

So, Ordinary Time—not for sissies—if we are true to Jesus’ message; it calls us to expand our hearts and minds and souls—to truly see our brother Jesus in all the wildly different manifestations that are presented to us each day in lives that are fully engaged! Amen? Amen!