Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

How easy it is for us to get it all wrong. And how hard it is to get it right.

There is a continuum in human experience, a long, intricate and often tangled chain that unites two poles that seem infinitely far away from each other.  The poles are contemplation and action.

Negatively put, consider the poles:

Consider the Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber and the Osama bin Laden. The Unabomber, a brilliant, tortured recluse his contemplation led to madness and despair and violence; the second, Osama, the Zealot, the religious fanatic and leader, the inspiration for a generation of unimaginable terror, all “in the name of God the most High.”

Positively put, consider the continuum:

Consider St. Therese of Liseux, the Little Flower, and Dorothy Day. Therese, the daughter of a middle class family in late 19^th century France.  She fell in love with God as a girl, and at 15 she entered the Carmelite convent.  She died 9 years later of tuberculosis. In those nine short years, prayed, she sang, she kept silence; she wrote about her “little way”.  She lived an utterly unheroic, hidden life, and died an ordinary death at 24.

Consider Dorothy Day, who was born in Brooklyn two months after the death of Therese.  She worked as a journalist, lived a bohemian life in New York. She befriending artists and thinkers, socialists and communists. A long and complicated road lead her to Catholicism at the age of 30. For the next 57 years, she was an eloquent advocate for the poor and disenfranchised, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, a tireless writer and Christian activist.

Most of us live active lives.  We engage with the world. We do our work, we look after our families and those we love, and are looked after by them. We try to balance it all out: the requirements of daily living, and, since we’re here today, I can assume we’re also trying to understand what God want for us and from us. We do the best we can, under the circumstances. Difficult circumstances.

Today’s readings, on first glance, make us wonder. Is Jesus telling Martha to join the convent rather than fix dinner for his disciples?  Poor, poor Martha. Mary sits at the feet of Jesus, hanging on every sweet word that comes from his mouth, and Martha gets stuck stirring the stew and washing the dishes. 

Abraham and Sarah fuss and fume to observe the fundamental law of hospitality, to entertain their unexpected guests. In the fuss, they fail to recognize that it God the most high and two angels who are their guests. Old Sarah laughs in the tent when she hears them promise them a son within a year.  And a year later, she named that son “Isaac” which means “God Laughs.”

What the readings are telling us, I think, is that we need to keep our eyes and hearts fixed on what is really important: on the mercy and love of God who brought good news to Martha and Mary, to Abraham and Sarah, to each of us if we open our ears and hearts.

We are not the good news.  We hear it, and hold it, and try not to pervert it as Osama did. We try to read the signs of the times, but not as the Unabomber did, through the perverted lens of hate and anger. We do better if we take that good news, as Therese did, and strive to live it in our own little way; or as Dorothy passed it along in countless writings and actions that were teachings of compassion and mercy.

We need to be both contemplative and active; to reflect on what we hear and experience, of course to reflect and pray, but also to put that good news into practice. We all know, as Ignatius puts it, that love is shown more in deeds than in words.  That’s why those three mysterious strangers came to Abraham and Sarah’s tent under the oak tree; that’s why Jesus came to Martha and Mary and Lazarus’ house; that why he comes here today, in word and sacrament: to encourage us and give us strength, to help us in this hour to remember the balance we need find in our lives. The guest is the giver of good gifts.

Let’s remember that, and welcome him. 

Rev. Tom Lucas, SJ