A homily for the Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 12, 2020
Is 55:10-11, Rom 8:18-23, Mt 13:1-23
Back in the days of “Children should be seen and not heard” and “Because I said so,” Mom always justified those neanderthal rules with so-called “biological math”:
“You have two eyes and two ears but only one mouth. Which do you think are more important?”
And she, like all mothers, made a good point. If we don’t see and hear, if we don’t watch and listen, we don’t learn. If we don’t learn, we live in the dark.
But once we do learn something, especially once we learn something as children or through our inner child, what do we want to do?
We want to tell somebody.
And the more interesting or newfound or unusual the learning, the more excited we become. The more excited we become, the more urgent we become. We want to share our discovery now and loud.
That’s why today’s Gospel call to evangelization is so important every day, but especially in these times of limited social contact.
Because we have less interaction with friends and especially new acquaintances or even strangers, we need to share what we know, what we’ve learned, what we believe as excitedly as possible in the hopes of exciting the other people.
We should reach back to when we were 4 years old, for example, when we saw an Air Force jet overhead for the first time. Didn’t we run into the house hollering, “Mommy, Mommy, guess what I just saw!”? That’s the muscle memory we need to recall; that’s the adrenaline we should conjure up.
Jesus spoke in parables. The content of his short stories was instantly relatable to the residents of First Century Palestine; the images and scenarios were straight out of their everyday lives. Those memorable parables hooked their listeners and prodded them to action. As a medium, they conveyed the message perfectly.
Two millennia later, those same parables’ less-than-everyday images of herding sheep or scattering seeds or keeping extra oil for our lamps may take us a minute or two of reflection to get to the aha moment. And that’s OK, because we should reflect. And Heaven knows, in our COVID-slowed world, we have the time. In our information-saturated 21st Century, we have the tools and perspective to excavate even the deepest meaning.
Once we’ve fully understood the message, we can use more-familiar modern imagery to convey the same truths, to get those seeds of truth and wisdom to sprout.
(By the way, in 30 A.D. Jesus certainly never saw grass growing up through the cracks in a Manhattan sidewalk. Some seeds do sprout in the unlikeliest of places. And a jackhammer comes in handy sometimes, too.)
This brief interlude via Dan Schutte summarizes our call:
So: What truths do we know? What have we heard, in the dark or otherwise, that we must speak in the light — or, better yet, what have we heard in the dark that will bring the light when we speak it?
First and foremost, God is Love. God is Good. Ergo, Love is Good. And Goodness is Love.
Love is more than the warm-fuzzy; love is more than the hugs we so desperately miss while six feet apart.
Love is action. To love is to do good, in the name of God. To love is to elevate the lives of everyone. To love is to find dignity in every brother and sister on our little third rock from the Sun. To love is to preserve that dignity, to defend that dignity.
If God so loved the world — John 3:16 — can we do any less? Especially when we can see, must see the divine spark in every other person who was created in the image and likeness of God.
Next, we are family. God gave us each other just as he gave each of us our individual lives. We are all on the same journey, from womb to tomb. Our paths may be different — superhighway, rugged trail, ocean voyage — and our advantages may vary widely because of the accident of birth, but we all end up in the same place. Once we realize that, we also should realize that we need to team up and pull everyone toward the center, not push anyone to the margins.
As a family, we work for fairness and justice, for equality and equity. We declare that Black Lives Matter because for so long they did not. We stand up for LGBTQ+ people because they are in God’s image, they are God’s children. We figuratively pull drowning people out of the river and then go upstream to eliminate the system that causes people to fall in or, worse, fall in again.
As a family, we listen. We go where our other family members are; we don’t force them to come to us.
With so, so many people turning their backs on religion, and indeed on God altogether, we can’t pout and stamp our feet and demand that they get back into the pews. Many never will. Not after months of lockdown.
But we can acknowledge that what they feel and how they feel is valid for them and pray that that dialogue leads somewhere positive.
And then there’s Creation, God’s most visible gift. Our fragile Earth and all the interconnected life and life-sustaining elements on it. We are challenged to use, not abuse, this Earth, to leave it better than we received it because it belongs to our children’s children’s children, not us. To show our appreciation and gratitude to God for all things visible and invisible — as we pray in the Nicene Creed.
God’s truth is simple, really. And so, so sensible.
It’s the speaking of truth that gets us all knotted up.
Fortunately, the Spirit is always ready to help when we get tongue-tied.
