A homily for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, February 5, 2023
Is 58:7-10, 1 Cor 2:1-5, Mt 5:13-16
There are three little bins on a shelf in our basement with batteries in them: double-A, triple-A, and some random C, D and 9-volt types. We go through the double-As fairly often, and I reload the bin whenever it gets low, whenever a couple of them leak, or whenever Costco puts the 40-pack on sale.
There’s another, smaller bin on a shelf built into my desk at home, and it has a bunch of rechargeable double-As and a four-battery charger. They’re collecting dust.
They shouldn’t be.
They are, however, symbolic.
A while back, after checking with Consumer Reports, I bought a few kits with eight rechargeable batteries and one charger each — on sale at Costco, of course — and made sure all the cells had 100% of their volts and amps and watts and wattevers. I scouted out gizmos around the house and in my camera bag that use double-As, and as the devices needed batteries, I swapped in the rechargeables for the throwaways.
This lasted about one or two cycles.
Oh, the rechargeable double-As did their job admirably, lasting almost as long as the one-use Duracells. And the charger did its job well as well; I plugged it in after dinner and the batteries were ready to go in the morning, maybe sooner.
I was just too lazy to do it, to be Earth-friendly and economy-minded enough to take the five minutes to click four batteries into a charger and plug the whole shebang into the wall outlet.
Somehow it just seemed like another annoying thing that I had to do, that I had to remember to do.
So not only am I wasting money by using throwaways primarily, but I’ve also wasted money buying rechargeables that collect dust. And by occasionally tossing out a rechargeable or two by mistake.
Which makes me wonder about what, if anything, is powering the light Jesus wants me to shine to the world.
Wants us to shine. All of us.
You see, the spiritual battery within each of us is the rechargeable type. It isn’t, and shouldn’t be mistaken for, a throwaway. It gives us great power to obey God.
How?
Every day of our lives, God challenges us to show the light of love, the light of divine love, to anyone and everyone we meet.
To perform random acts of kindness. Or perhaps something even larger.
To take courageous positions on behalf of justice.
To stand with and uplift our sisters and brothers oppressed by hate, by racism and sexism and ism-ism and homophobia and other-phobia.
To join upstanding, loving people on the figurative rope in the cultural tug-of-war.
Whew.
That sounds exhausting.
Because it is.
If it were easy, it wouldn’t be as important. It wouldn’t be a challenge from God. It wouldn’t be the essence of being Christian, of being Christlike.
This is why our batteries are rechargeable. Because our Creator realized we’d need to power up from time to time.
And, like the blister-packed kits from the warehouse store, our rechargeable batteries came with a charging kit from God: the Holy Spirit, the Eucharist, divine grace flowing around us and through us, the wisdom of the Almighty as revealed through inspired Scripture.
All of God’s Creation as revealed to us in nature, in science and math, in art and music and performances.
A quiet nap in the spring or summer sun.
A game of catch or Frisbee.
Holding a loved one’s hand.
However we experience God’s gifts to us — and recalling that God’s greatest gift to us is ourselves, our own lives — that joyful experience is guaranteed to fill us again with the divine energy and God-given strength to once again shine Christ’s light to the world.
Batteries wear out. Light bulbs burn out. People, likewise, wear out and burn out. And God always knew this, always knows this. God equipped all of us for this eventuality.
That’s why we can and must recharge from time to time, and share the challenge God has given us, so that Christ’s light always shines in the darkest of times.
We all need help to feel fine.
