November 6, 2022 (32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time)
/by Fr. Xavier Lavagetto, O.P.
(reflection by Chaplain Teresa Pleins below)
[This text is an automatically generated transcript. Some edits have been made. (updated 2022-11-08 5:28pm PST)]
Like Judaism, our roots, we are a church of tradition. We reverently hand on from one generation to the next. What we hold most dear. Now tradition is more than beautiful art and music. It is more than ritual action and ancient practices. For the church, capital T capital T tradition, is a dynamic. It is a divine presence. The Vatican Council wrote God who spoke in the past continues to converse with the spouse of His beloved Son, and the Holy Spirit through whom the living voice of the gospel rings out in the church and through her in the whole world. Yet too often, too many confuse our cultural heritage. With the living tradition, we can put so much emphasis on the small t traditions of culture, art and practice that we ignore the large capital T tradition of the experience of the Holy Spirit in the community of faith. The difference was brought home to me decades ago, when we first heard with shock that the Latin Mass was to be said in English horrors. I can still hear one woman’s complaint and shrill voice. If Latin was good enough for Jesus it’s good enough for me. I could only think oh, they so much for Jewish Jesus. But this is the lesson of today’s Gospel. The temple ruling Sadducees were traditionalists of an extreme sort. So conservative, that the only accepted the Torah, the first five books of Moses as authoritative and at the resurrection of the dead were not there. It was not true. Their reverence for Torah was greater than the unfolding experience of God. In Israel. They refuse to imagine God teaching his people deeper insights. After all, they were the high priest rulers of the Sanhedrin they had the answers. What did they have? To learn from pesky prophets? The limiting factor of revelation of course, is not just what God decides to reveal. It is also circumscribed by what people are able or willing to hear. They refuse to imagine God is a God of wonder and surprise. The Sadducees were grumpy lot in this life was as good as it gets. How did they shake their fist at death by having kids so decided to cease asked if the one woman married in turn seven brothers who gets hurt in the next life in the resurrection. This agencies could not accept what some Christians fear the development of doctrine of teaching. The living tradition is the Spirit leading the community through time to and always deeper understanding. The Spirit does in the church what Jesus did to the Sadducees he challenged them with a deeper insight He quoted the Torah itself and dares them to hear it with new ears. I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. And if Abraham Isaac and Jacob were not still living then it would have read. I was the God of Abraham. I was the God of Isaac. I was the God of Jacob. As Jesus explains, He is God not of the dead but of the living for to him all of them are alive. When God enters into relationship with us, everything changes. Life. Appears death can’t stop it. Sadly, the Sadducees loved control and security ritualism and certainty. They are contentious and judgmental lot. Sadly, they did not learn a very practical message. You become in eternity what you loved most in this life. Look beyond the little-“t” traditions to the living tradition of the Spirit beckoning, calling, nudging the community to a deeper identification and embodiment of the living Christ. Don’t forget, you become in eternity what you loved most in this life. Perhaps, perhaps we really should focus on the Spirit leading us into a deeper understanding of God, and a more understanding and deeper love of one another.
Teresa will explore further the fullness how we can all experience the fullness of God in our lives, and beyond.
by Chaplain Teresa Pleins
[This text is an automatically generated transcript. Some edits have been made. (updated 2022-11-08 3:48pm PST)]
Father Xavier just spoke about tradition with a capital T. Well, in this Gospel story Jesus is dealing with another capital T word. And that word is trouble. He’s just traveled from the northern part of Israel down to Jerusalem. His closest apostles were trying to do their best to detour him and change his mind about the wisdom of this venture. But Jesus is not dissuaded. He goes right to the temple. And in that temple he starts preaching against pretty much every religious authority in sight. It would be a little like walking into a lion’s cage and then poking the lion right in the nose. It’s going to cause trouble. The dispute in this gospel about the resurrection is with the Sadducees. But the Pharisees have already tried to trick him by asking if paying taxes to Caesar broke any of God’s laws, and the scribes and the priests and the money changers, they have all been disrupted by Jesus’s preaching. And so they lay traps for him to catch him in blasphemy or sedition. Either charge would have been enough to rid them of his presence. So they could just go on as before. Because they couldn’t imagine a messiah, like Jesus. They couldn’t imagine a life that would have to be shared with tax collectors, like Zaccheus, or with the poor widow or children or immigrants or those afflicted with mental illness, those imprisoned and condemned to death, the abandoned and the homeless. All of these were on the periphery of their existence. And they wanted it to stay that way. They couldn’t imagine being on an equal footing with them. That all of these were loved by God. Were children of God had God’s life in them and would have that divine life forever and forever.
Just couldn’t imagine that at all. I wonder if we do any better I’ve invited Elisa and Ivan to share something with us that may help us imagine the life that God promises to us and to all people.
The Fettucia is called also the plan of God is a gift shared by our children’s religious education program with all of us tonight.
So if Elisa and Ivan could come here, they have something to show us. You know what I’m going to have you start up by Father Xavier Can you do that? Because it’s very long.
Go all the way to Father Xavier. He’s really nice and he will not bite you. Okay, there you go. Ivan is going to walk to the very back of the church.
And we teach the children about the time, God’s time. This represents billions of years and a truth be told he would go all the way out to the main quad.
There are three great moments that are represented in this: There’s the moment of creation, that loving act of God that prepares the cosmos, the heavens and the earth the plants and the animals and all of us. And then there’s the moment of redemption. When God sends Jesus to live among us, right to model a life of compassion, to live, to die and to be resurrected. The last part in this long stretch of time is the Parousia. That’s the great moment still to come, when Christ will return and God will be all in all. It fulfills the promise.
Now, creation and redemption have already been written. We know that history. Or at least we know parts of it. But the Parousia, that part is unknown. We don’t know what will happen we don’t know what will happen in the next second let alone the next 200 years 500 years that history is still being written at every moment. And who is writing that history. Who’s writing the history? It’s us right it’s all of us here. It’s all of its outside everyone who’s alive. Our lives might only represent a very tiny, tiny increment on this timeline. But we are hardly insignificant because we’re connected both to creation and to the end of time. Think for a minute think about someone you know who’s died. Maybe someone your family or just someone that you’ve admired. How are you connected to that person? How will you carry this person’s life on in your life?
What voice can you give to their dreams? How does their life continue to bring you life? What role does the ancestors play in our world? And when you die and I die as we all will, whom have you loved who will speak and act in your name, who will carry on your dreams? Our lives may only be maybe a 10th of a centimeter, this tiny on this Fettucia but what we do, and think and feel and move in the Spirit, what we do matters. We are writing salvation history with every breath we take.
A very long time ago, Jesus got into trouble. He got into trouble so that we would have hope today. Can you imagine living today living your life as hope for both now and for the future of all God’s children? Amen.
