August 29, 2021 (22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time)
/by Fr. Xavier Lavagetto, O.P.
I feel cheated! I dislike sliced and diced texts. … Today’s three readings are like Swiss cheese — full of holes. The Gospel is missing 10 verses! It’s like buying an abridged book; it is a time saver, but it’s not what the writer wanted. … I want a rebate! …
I wonder if God wants a rebate for all our gaps in our life, for grace ignored and opportunities missed.
What would our Catholic Community at Stanford look like, … feel like and … be if we all seized the opportunities of connecting and serving? … Sure we “do” Church stuff, but what if we really decided to “be” the Church Jesus wanted? … That would be an awesome adventure!
Sure, we have this hiccup; the unvaccinated and Delta + delay a return to normal, but there is nonetheless light at the end of the tunnel. Tomorrow only begins with our dreaming today! Now is the time for dreaming a new future.
Now I admit; these readings are not the ones I would’ve chosen to celebrate today’s picnic and the coming adventure. … Yet they are a good reminder that doing religious stuff with an unchanged heart is not what Jesus wants.
The Pharisee’s accuse the disciples of failing to be real Jews. “Why do your disciples not follow the tradition of the elders but instead eat a meal with unclean hands?”
Now Moms should object to today’s example. …. I want my plates clean, and my kids hands washed! … But there is a world before the knowledge of germs, the Pharisees’ washing wasn’t about cleanliness; it was about ritual purity. It wasn’t about merely keeping law, but erecting a fence of more laws, lest any commandment be broken.
Sadly, the attempt to be free from the smallest, littlest, minutest infraction easily blinded them to what really mattered. Making more rules only causes more walls of separation. ... They concentrated on what they should avoid and not who they should become. … James had it right: Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction.
The Pharisees wanted the people to live the same purity code required of temple priests so they could be a truly priestly people. But only the elites living in cities had a chance. Peasants and itinerants like Jesus with his merry band did settled with far less. Water needed for ablutions was scarce, and people regularly came into contact with dead fish, dead animals, and other pollutants. (John J Pilch)
We forget that such codes have a social function. Those practices identify and bind a person to his group. They’re like clue. What you refused to eat, what you couldn’t wear, what objects you could touch, what you had to purify identified you and bound you to your group.
We Catholics once abstained from meat on all Fridays. … It marked our reverence for the Lord’s passion, … or did it really? … It didn’t make us more generous or compassionate. We groused at it but we took a perverse pride in being different. … It was being different in the wrong way, and it tempted us to believe we had done enough.
We’ve all experienced such zealots who strive to be pure, good and holy, but drive one crazy by becoming small, harsh and insensitive! St. Teresa of Avila called it out: “God save me from sullen saints.”
Thank God such codes don’t exist, or do they? … Is wearing a mask really an onerous limitation of liberty? … I thought it was about caring for others. … But for some not wearing a mask proclaims their belonging to a group or political persuasion; even while it ignores medical science at a deadly cost. … We are still tempted by group purity codes!
Slicing and dicing the text weakens Jesus’ message: [D]o you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?" (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, "It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."
Flips those vices around and you have a picture of a virtuous, noble person who makes the world, not just their group, better.
Jesus is calling for a revolution of heart, a building of character and establishing a community that blesses all. They make every group better. But it begins with their connecting and serving; their fire enflames others’ goodness.
I’ve known too many people who don’t grow spiritually because they are so focused on trying to conquer some failing. They don’t ask: Lord where would you have me today? They are always trying to stop a vice instead of intentionally living the virtue that makes for growth.
Begin each day with the question: Lord, what do you ask of me today in my Church community? How can we live the Jesus adventure together?
A lot of work has gone in the background of the Catholic Community at Stanford. … We formed a Dream Team to dream. We are forming our Pastoral Council, the ICC, the Intercommunity Council. We are looking for groups in hospitality, mentoring, restorative justice, serving the homebound, Catholic Relief Services and more. We are looking for dreamers and dreams; who will become leaders? What if we all saw ourselves as Jesus; ministers inserted into the University?
We’ve been blessed. I still mourn the loss of Lourdes Alonso who could no longer afford to live here; she was so beloved and is much missed. We are blessed by two new extraordinary women: Sr. Gloria Marie Jones who served here with Fr. Patrick LaBelle and Sr. Regena Ross. And while they carry the torch of faith and love, we need each one of you to carry it setting the world ablaze.
Take a couple of minutes, ask yourselves and each other: What is God asking me and asking us to build up the community and be a torch of faith and love. You will find papers on the window at the side of the house to put down your ideas and volunteer. It is time to build again.
