Homily for Sunday 25 May 2014--Our Imperfections Reveal the Works of God

Homily for 25 May 2014:  6^th Sunday of Pascha (the Man Born Blind)

(Acts 16:16-34)

(John 9:1-38)

 

Today’s reading from the Gospel according to St John gives us the chance to consider how God works in ways that are hard for us to understand.  In fact, in order to begin to understand how God works, we have to put aside and get beyond a lot of ideas that we think are just plain facts, just normal situations, just natural conclusions.

This is what happens to the disciples when they ask Jesus about the man born blind.  To them, it’s just obvious and natural to believe that he is blind because either he or his parents sinned.  But Jesus overturns their conclusions when He says, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”  He goes on to teach the lesson that we must “do the works” of God while we have the time, while it is still daylight.

The fact is, no one is perfect.  In a way, all of us are born blind.  We are all born with some imperfection, because all of us, since the first sin of Adam and Eve, the original sin, have fallen away from the perfection God originally intended for the human race.  So doing the works of God, and having them revealed in us, consists of trying to live in a way that eventually will restore—or allow God to restore—that original perfection in us.

Our Byzantine Christian Tradition calls this “theosis”—becoming like God or returning to God.  It’s part of the process of salvation.  All of us are born the way we are so that the works of God can be revealed in us.

Our challenge—our call from God—is to be who God made us, no matter how other people may judge us to be sinful or defective or abnormal or unnatural or any of those other nasty labels, and to live in a way that shows the glory of God to other people.  We have to remember—about other people and about ourselves—that God doesn’t make junk (as Bishop John Elya so often said); God makes us in God’s own image and likeness.  So anything that is natural or born in us is given by God—from hair color or eye color or skin color to being left-handed or right-handed, or male or female, or musical or athletic or mentally gifted.  What we have to do is discover, with God’s help, how to live with what God has given us so that the works of God are revealed in us.

Our church community is the place where we can make this discovery and share the revelation of God’s works in each other.  This is because the church is a special place where God calls God’s people together.  It’s not a business.  It’s not a social club.  It’s not an obligation.  It’s not about numbers.  It’s not about money.  Church is a mysterious, wonderful, beautiful, mutual revelation of God at work, accomplishing God’s will, through the people He loves—in all our sinfulness, all our blindness, all our imperfection, all our diversity.

Through faith and love, through prayer and fasting and works of charity, the church is the place where we recognize the face of Jesus Christ in our own faces and in the faces of all the people around us.  Although we are born imperfect, we are born again through water and the Spirit in Baptism, and we set out on our life-journey to reveal God at work in us and in the world, and at the end of that journey we are made perfect in the eyes of God.

So we don’t complain about, or curse, our blindness and our other imperfections.  We thank God for the chance to show forth God’s love and mercy and justice and righteousness, and we give thanks and praise and glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and ever and unto ages of ages.  Amen.

Homily for Sunday 18 May 2014--Jesus' Word is Easy and Hard

Homily for 18 May 2014:  5^th Sunday of Pascha (the Samaritan Woman)

(Acts 11:19-30)

(John 4:5-42)

 

Today’s Gospel reading gives us two excellent examples of how people misunderstand what Jesus says.

The Samaritan Woman whom Jesus encounters at Jacob’s Well thinks that the “living water” that Jesus talks about comes from the well.

The disciples think that someone else has brought food to Jesus when He tells them that He has food that they do not know about.

In both cases, Jesus has to explain the real meaning of His words.

We might be tempted to ask, “Are these people just stupid?”  Or is there another reason why they misunderstand?

But we need to be very careful about calling them stupid—because we also find it

• Easy to misunderstand Jesus’s message, and
• Hard to comprehend what He really means.
  Let’s look at a couple of examples:
  When Jesus says, “You must deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me,” we think he’s imposing a burden on us.  We forget that the Holy Cross is the key to the gate of Heaven, and unless we are willing to carry our cross, as Jesus carried His, we will have a hard time entering His Kingdom.
  When Jesus says, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” we think to ourselves that it’s not natural to love everybody.  But in fact we usually don’t really love ourselves, so we can’t love our neighbors.
  When Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven,” we despair, because we all want to be rich—maybe even more than we want to be saved.  But it is attachment to wealth (a form of idolatry, loving money as a god), not wealth itself, that blocks our entry into Heaven.
  Jesus’s teachings are often easy to misunderstand and hard to understand because God’s ways are not our ways—even though they should be, because we are created in the image and likeness of God.  Sin prevents us from being in sync with God’s ways.
  This sometimes even extends to our idea of what the Church is.  Don’t we sometimes think of St Joseph’s as “the Arabic church” and of Latin Catholic parishes as “the American church?”  But isn’t the Church for everyone?  It’s God’s church for God’s people, not “our church for our people.”
  The Samaritan Woman talks to Jesus about her people’s beliefs in contrast with Jewish beliefs, but He tells her that soon “true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth . . . neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.”
  And today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles says that the early Christians left Jerusalem because they were being persecuted and they preached about Jesus as the Messiah as far away as Phoenicia (that is, Syria and Lebanon), Cyprus, and Antioch (now in Turkey)—but only to Jews.
  Then, some also preached to Greeks and Greek-speaking Jews in Antioch, and many of them believed in the Lord.  The Church leaders in Jerusalem heard of this and sent Barnabas especially to work in Antioch.  They adapted to changing circumstances and broke out of their usual way of thinking about the Church.  Barnabas, as it turned out, had great success, and in Antioch the disciples were first called “Christians.”
  The lesson for us is clear—especially since we are the Church of Antioch, and we wouldn’t be Christians now if the original Jewish Christians hadn’t decided to include Greeks in the Church.
  Jesus Christ came for all people and His Church is for all people.  We never forget where we came from, but we have to live where we are now, and reach out to strangers, as Jesus did to the Samaritan Woman and as Barnabas did to the Greeks in Antioch.
  This is easy to understand—it’s not hard to get—the Church is not limited to a mountain or a city or a language or a country.  True believers worship in spirit and in truth, inviting everyone to hear God’s word and to share God’s love.
  The truth never changes, but the Spirit leads us where we need to go—which is not always where we expect to go or want to go.  We have to open up our minds and our hearts and our church so that we can let everyone learn about Jesus and discover, like the Samaritan Woman, that He is “truly the Savior of the world,” and give thanks and praise and glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and ever and unto ages of ages.  Amen.

Homily for Sunday 11 May 2014--Healing for Body and Soul

Homily for 11 May 2014:  4^th Sunday of Pascha (the Paralytic)

(Acts 9:32-42)

(John 5:1-15)

 

Sometimes when we read this story of Jesus healing the paralyzed man at the Pool of Bethesda, we pay so much attention to the events leading up to the healing that we don’t pay any attention to what happened afterwards.

But there are two main things worth thinking about in the second part of the story.

Number One is the reaction of the religious authorities.  (The Gospel just refers to “the Jews,” but clearly they are the authorities who are experts in the Old Testament Law.)  They don’t seem to notice or to care that the man has been healed and can walk again after being paralyzed for 38 years.  All they care about is that he is breaking the religious Law by carrying his sleeping mat on the Sabbath.  That counts as work, and work is forbidden on the Sabbath, the day of rest.

Number Two is the reaction of Jesus.  Jesus doesn’t want to be noticed after He heals the paralyzed man, so He blends into the crowd.  But He isn’t finished with the man.  When we encounter God, we have to learn something.  So Jesus goes hunting for the man, and finds him in the Temple area.  Then He warns him, “You have been made well.  Take care not to sin anymore, so that nothing worse may happen to you.”

Obviously, the religious authorities and Jesus have very different ideas of sin.  The authorities are concerned that the man has violated the Law by working on the Sabbath.  They don’t seem to connect physical healing and spiritual healing.

On the other hand, Jesus doesn’t seem concerned with the Law.  But for Him, the physical healing of the paralytic is just the first step.  He has to make sure that the man understands how profoundly his life has been changed—how his physical healing is just the sign of a deeper spiritual healing.

I don’t think that Jesus means that sin leads directly to illness.  Or that illness is direct punishment for sin. But sin can literally make us sick.  It can paralyze our ability to make moral decisions.  It can make us sick with guilt.  It can poison our relationships with other people and with God.  It can lead us to do stupid and dangerous things.

Very often we don’t think much about the connection between sin and health, between our spiritual and physical condition.  It doesn’t seem that the paralytic does this, either.  Before he’s healed, he just complains that no one will help him, and afterwards he just seems to be glad that he can walk.  He’s focused entirely on his physical condition.

The religious authorities also don’t seem to connect the physical and the spiritual, except for them the spiritual dimension is missing entirely.  They consider only the physical aspect of sin:  it’s just a matter of breaking the law, rather than dealing with what’s in the heart.

What Jesus shows the paralytic—and us, too—is that both of these attitudes are wrong.  We can’t take health—or any other part of physical existence—for granted, and leave God out of it.  And we cannot reduce our relationship with God to following the rules.  We also cannot judge other people and their relationships with God on how well we think they follow the rules.

When Christ comes into our lives, He brings healing for body and soul.  He frees us from paralysis, from sin, from obsession with rules.  But He frees us not just from things; He frees us to do things:  to live holy lives of love and mercy and justice, to be humble and respectful and generous, and to give thanks and praise and glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and ever and unto ages of ages.  Amen.