Sunday, November 4, 2007

Come to this table...

One of my earliest memories takes place when I was two years old.

It is evening and my parents have just left. I am in a hospital room and in those days parents were not allowed to stay in the room over night. I was being prepped for a tonsillectomy and for some reason I had to spend the night; the surgery would be first thing in the morning.

I remember standing in the crib shaking it back and forth. I was offended that I had to sleep in a crib like a baby. I was not a baby. I had a baby brother; I knew the difference between my big girl bed and his crib.

I remember the nurse trying to get me to drink the twinkle time juice. I would not. (Who knew what was in that beverage!).

I remember climbing out of the crib and taking a walk down the hall.

[Oh, I’m sure the nurses were fit to be tied with me.]

I remember my uncle coming into the room with a group of elders from our church. My uncle laid his hands on my head and prayed. I don’t remember the words he said. I remember the calming effect of his hands and the soothing sound of his voice. I remember the presence of God’s love pouring through my uncle and into me.

In my memory I went to sleep after that prayer. --------

Memory is interesting….

Why do we remember some things and not others? Why is it that something happens and a memory pops up out of nowhere? That happens to me often when I am driving. I have lived all over the Chicago-land area. Certain neighborhoods are filled with memories…from college, to my first real job, the various apartments I lived in in Roger’s Park, the first house I bought and the second…memories of family and children, and friends.

But day in and day out I do not remember most of my life.

Some days I’m lucky if I can pull up in my memory bank the word I’m looking for…or remember why I walked into a particular room…

No.

Most days I live in the future, the place I am trying to get to, not in the present and not in the past.

Memory is important though. It is our memories that help guide us and keep us from making the same mistakes over and over. Memory is why Isaiah is pleading with the people – remember who you are and whose you are.

“Hear the word of the Lord…”

and then Isaiah reminds the people of what God desires of them.

The people have forgotten what the love and grace of God is really all about. They have started to think that what God wants of them is sacrifices and burnt offerings. They have started to think that God requires this of them before God can forgive them their sins.

We Christians have gone the same direction. We hang on to the idea that God needed Jesus to die on the cross before God could forgive us our sins.

The Letter to the Hebrews develops this idea, so does St. Augustine, so have many church writers through out history. Through out the ages, and even still today, we Christians have been struggling with a crucified and resurrected savoir, a God who came to live as a human… We call this “Atonement Theology;” what God was doing in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and how that pertains to our salvation. And, while there is one prominent way we remember the story, there are seven or eight or nine atonement theologies.

It’s helpful to remember that Christians have not completely figured this out.

[Yeah, the mystery of God must have something to do with it…]

What God is telling the people through Isaiah is that their religious rituals and acts have become meaningless to God. They are meaningless because the people are doing them for all the wrong reasons.

Sometimes our memory plays tricks on us,

we start doing something for one reason and then end up doing it for another…

But the truth is God has forgiven their scarlet sins and turned them to snow.

God forgives our sins too!

The sacrifice, Isaiah tells us, is supposed to be an act of gratitude.

A thank offering.

Thank you God for forgiving me my sins and loving me just as I am.

We hear a similar thing in Luke.

In our reading it sounds like Jesus’ willingness to forgive Zacchaeus depends upon Zacchaeus’ willingness to be repentant.

But here is where the interpretation of scripture misleads us. Our scripture speaks of Zacchaeus’ actions as if they are something he will do in the future, but the original Greek words, the verb tense, tell us it is something he is doing now. Present tense….

He is giving things away now.

He is tending to the issues of injustice now.

His heart is in the right place, even if his job would say other wise.

He is already doing what God asks.

It’s the people around Zacchaeus who presume, because of what he does for a living, a tax collector, that he cheats and steals. (www.sarahlaughed.net)

How often do we do this –

judge someone else based on superficial evidence?

How often do we limit our understanding of “who” they are, based on “what” we think they are?

Oh, you’re a lawyer…oh, you’re a priest,...oh, you’re a….

This reading tells us that when WE do this We become the sinner. We sin when our actions are “On behalf” of God, or “for” God, or to “appease” God rather than being “Of” God.

Maybe this sounds like I’m splitting hairs.

But what I’m trying to nuance is the significance of our actions when they are grounded in the love and graciousness of God instead of what we think will please God and grant us salvation while forgetting that we are already saved.

The heart of both these readings is to remind us that God has already forgiven us and loves us as we are.

God’s mercy is profound and stretches beyond our comprehension.

Thankfully God’s mercy is not dependent upon anything anyone of us does.

Thankfully we have a history of God acting in and through people upon which to ground our trust. --------

Today we celebrate the collective memory of the Saints, those blessed ones who have gone before us, those who gave their lives to God. (think, St. Paul, St. Theresa, St. Hildegard, St. Augustine)…

Individually their lives help us remember God in a particular time in history

and collectively they help us know God’s grace and love through the eons of time.

Most of us are less like the saints…we are more like the Israelites that Isaiah is speaking with, we get caught up in details that distract us from what is really going on.

We forget what God really wants of us. We get carried away with issues about human sexuality and forget about the dying, the hungry, the poor…

I am really drawn to the line in Isaiah where God says,

“Come now, let us argue this out.”

I love that God is portrayed as one willing to argue with us and still love us.

“Let us argue this out…though your sins are like scarlet they shall become like snow…”

God invites us into a passionate caring. God wants us to be deeply invested. This passage from Isaiah tells me that God cares about what is in our hearts. God cares about why we do something. God seems to care less about the exact details of what we do.

It’s not about the burnt offering;

it’s about your heart.

It’s like God is saying

I don’t want you to do “the right thing” in order to make me love you.

I want to know what is in your heart.

And, so, it’s about trusting that God does love us just as we are. Trusting this because God has lived as one of us. And if God in Christ has lived as one of us, then God understands the distractions and conflicts of the human heart.

But, at some point, trusting that God loves us, really trusting that, will fill our hearts with joy and gratitude.

We will worry less about doing the right thing for fear of reprisal or to sway God’s heart.

God’s heart is already with us, that’s the message.

That’s why we are called to offer sacrifices of thanksgiving.

This is the language of our Eucharistic prayers. These prayers are known as “The Great Thanksgiving.”

We come to the table, just as we are, broken and lost.

We come to the table with our opinions about:
We come to the table with our opinions about who can lead this country, could it be a woman?
We come to the table with our opinions aboutwho can be Bishop..
We come to the table with our opinions about Homeless
We come to the table with our opinions about immigration…
We come to the table with our opinions about the economy…
We come to the table with our opinions about the environment.
We come to the table with our opinions about mental illness.
We come to the table with our opinions about global warming.
We come to the table with our opinions about the meaning of scripture.
We come to the table with our opinions about about homosexuality.
We come to the table with our opinions about the war.
We come to the table with our opinions about Right to life or Right to Choose….
We come to the table with our opinions about real bread and real body.
Is it?
We come to this table with many different opinions.

We come because God calls us to this table.

But God does not call us to come in order that we all have the same opinion.

It’s about unity not uniformity….

There is a line in an Indigo Girls song that goes,

“There is more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line…”

Christians through out the ages have held different understandings of who God is and what God desires of us.

It is a crooked line.

Thankfully there resides, I think a kind of collective memory in our history. It is this collective memory that we are trying to pray in the Eucharist. But even in that collective memory is much diversity.

Can we pray about God as mother?

Some early church fathers did just that...they used images of God as mother.

Some of us today think that’s blasphemy…..

Come, God says, let’s argue this out.

Because to argue it out says something about our investment in it.

I’m not suggesting vitriol nor am I suggesting mean spirited behavior.

I think the passage is a cry for passion.

Passion for Christ’s sake….!

Passion for the love of God!

Come God says, because you care.

Come God says because no matter what,

so long as your heart is here,

I will turn your sins from scarlet to white as snow.

Come God says.

This bread and this wine is a fragrant offering of love

given equally to all.

Come.

Partake.

Let the meal at this table

be for you the real presence of God’s love,

that you may remember

and then,

go and do likewise

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really liked how today's homily drew from both the Old and New Testament readings.
Maybe God made my heart more receptive today; maybe it was just an especially good topic. But I really felt God speaking to me thru the the words of today's sermon.

trinity thoughts said...

I'm grateful the sermon spoke to you today...I believe that at some point the words leave my being and the Holy Spirit takes over!