His Gift Our Choice, 4th Sunday of Lent

Today I want to talk about God’s free and open Invitation to each of us and our freedom (also a gift from God) to choose wither to accept his invitation or decline it.

I want you to keep in mind the parable about the king who threw a great feast and invited the usual cast of characters. He thought they all would accept his generous offer, but they did not.  Each had something better to do, more pressing, more important or it was just to much effort to go. Disappointed at the lack of interest the king ordered that everyone and anyone was to be invited; worker, beggar, thief, leper and outcast all were invited, and of course they came, and were rewarded with an abundance of good things.

 

In the first reading we hear - In those days they (Israel) mocked the messengers of God (those that did the inviting to God’s feast)

Infidelity upon infidelity, we are told, poured forth from the nation.

The whole power structure of Israel turned its back on God and his invitation to relay on him, to trust him. They decided instead to trust their wealth, power and arms and not God.

In time they found themselves let down by earthly power and might.  They were despoiled, walls were torn down, fields were destroyed, the temple left in ruins and their princes exiled.

By the streams of Babylon we sat and wept. The psalmist laments.  Tears stream from those who learned too late what it means to be unfaithful to God.

But, the good news (proclaimed by the prophets and Jesus himself) is that God, in the face of our infidelity, beyond all human reason, is always the faithful, loving father.

He is infinitely merciful and forgiving when we ourselves are not deserving of it.

St Paul declares “God who is rich in mercy because of his great love he has for us, even when we are dead in our transgressions.”

We are loved as children, unruly and defiant children, by a father who knows us better than we know ourselves.

Even in the shadow of sin, sin that we create in our lives, Jesus reaches out to each of us to bring us into the light, back home to our rightful and appropriate place as good faithful children of God.

This is an invitation to the gift of faith. 

We are not entitled to it, we cannot earn it or buy it, but, we can accept the invitation or we can turn our back to it.

God gives life.  It pours forth as Spirit, light and truth. 

But, he also gives us the freedom to choose to love him or not.

 Choose him, not with empty Sunday promises and sweet platitudes but with a real human heart, full of Spirit and alive, lived out in thanksgiving, gratitude and charity.

John sums up this gift in 27 famous words

“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life”

I could end here, perhaps I should, and give us 5 mins of silence to reflect on the fact that God, despite all the wrongs we do to each other and ourselves, despite all the pain and suffering we cause, despite our turning away from him, even denying him, God is always ready to forgive the repentant sinner for he is forever loving and faithful.

God is so in love with us that he sent his Son (not to condemn, which he had every right to do), but to save, to dwell among us, as one of us, to love us, to proclaim the Good News, and in the end, pour out his life for us.

We simply must believe.  Believe Jesus is our only Way, our only Truth, and our only Life.

Because, St John tells us whoever believes in Jesus will not be condemned.

Through our belief, we live in faith, hope, and charity.  We are driven by the same Spirit that drove Jesus, to be better people (better spouses and parents), we endeavor to be good without counting the cost or seeking the limelight.

We seek another kind of light.

 Faith (in Jesus), hope (in eternal life with God) and charity (reaching out beyond the pews) driving us into the world to evangelize in the joy of the Gospel.

But, here is the rub – In St John’s words “whoever does not believe has already been condemned.”

Because many of us by choice already live estranged lives, dictated, not by love, but by self-centered desires, ever changing motives, driven not by the Spirit, but by; greed, envy, pride, anger, and fear.

We do not cling to God, but we cling desperately to what the world offers only to find it is an illusion and a lie and even this lie is not enough or good enough, we forever thirst for meaning in darkness when we could be satisfied in the light of truth.

 last week we heard that only Jesus can satisfy us.

Jesus is the stream of living water, sustaining and refreshing, giving depth and meaning to our lives as nothing else can.

So we end up back at the beginning.

 We are invited by God to his great wedding feast, but so often we rather not be bothered, at least not now.

St John says

“And this is the verdict, the light came into the world but the people preferred the darkness to light.”

This is the startling truth – We choose to condemn ourselves!

Judgment is now and it is ongoing.

We do it to ourselves with no one else to blame.

We choose - darkness or light.

God always invites. He invites us again and again.  The Holy Spirit is determined that

we (clothed and in our right minds) can finally choose to accept the king’s invitation.

 

 

 

3rd Sunday of Lent

From the creation of the cosmos to this very moment and until the end of time, God in his infinite love and fidelity has given us every gift and blessing.

He has revealed himself in surprising and profound ways and never more so then in the law, given to Moses as the Ten Commandments and most completely in the fulfillment of that law; the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In both the commandments and Jesus God gave us the way and the means to our salvation.

 

The Ten Commandments  (three for love of God and seven for love of neighbor) are so well known that we sometimes take them for granted.  They have become trivialized either by making them saccharin platitudes or narrowly defined goals, but they are neither.

 

The Ten Commandments are not the end of our obligation to God's covenant, but the beginning, the groundwork, of our daily ethical and moral life, it is our daily response to God's call to love him more deeply and to love another more unreservedly, especially the poor and the marginalized.

 

These ten things are not facts to memorize or a list to keep in order, they are not rules to confine us by their narrow observance, they are to expand us as we live them in their deepest and widest aspect. God never restricts us, but gives us opportunity upon opportunity to grow ever more human.

 

Jesus taught that the commandments are an invitation to turn the table on what the world expects of us. They surprise us and compel us to act beyond our complacency or the ok routine we fall into. They remind us that faith is not settling in and locking the doors behind us, but opening them wide to all in need.

 

The Temple in Jesus' time had become more of a gate keeper, hiding God within and keeping those that searched for God outside.

 

Jesus knew that the law and the temple was not about restriction and exclusion, but about possibility and inclusion. He showed this in his life by touching the untouchable, table fellowship with tax  collectors, forgiveness and friendship with prostitutes, hanging out with fishermen and not Pharisees.

He spoke clearly about expansion and inclusion of the Law in the Sermon on the Mount when he said you have heard it said, you shall not commit murder, but I tell you shall not be angry with a brother or sister.

 

The Temple system had become the sign of this narrowness and exclusion. It had become spiritually bankrupt and caught up in the precision its cultic practices. 

The of course, Temple worship was correct and fruitful in its way.  Each group of worshippers had their proper place or court; men, women, the Gentiles.

The sacrificial system ran smooth with its money changers, turning Roman coin into Temple currency, and its sellers of approved sacrificial animals.

But, in all this hustle and bustle something was lacking or forgotten or ignored. It was too much business as usual.

 

Jesus, as a sign of this complacency within God's own house choose to physically disrupt that routine business of worship. In the Spirit (the same Spirit that drove him into the wilderness" Jesus drove off the money changers and the sellers.

 

Those in authority asked Jesus what was the meaning of this. What gave Jesus the right to interfere with the temple. Show us a sign.

Jesus tells them – destroy this temple and in three days. I will raise it up.

 

Nobody understood what he meant.  They thought he meant the concrete temple.

 It would not be until the resurrection of Jesus that the disciples in the Holy Spirit that they had received from Jesus, remembered that day the event and understood he was speaking about his body.

They came to believe after Easter that the temple was no longer the house of God.

God was and is present in Jesus himself and now, through the Holy Spirit, in his body, the mystical Body of Christ, the Church. 

Not in the brick and mortar church. God is present not in cement, in her sacraments, and in her choices and actions, aligned to the fulfilled commandants.

And, because the ordinary and the routine is not good enough, not nearly good enough a response to God's gift of his Son for our Salvation,

not a good enough response to the commandment, to honestly love God and selflessly love neighbor ( including our enemies, if we believe Jesus)

We must go beyond the expected and routine to respond to God's love for us.

Nothing less than a total commitment to love, by our committed lives of Faith, Hope and Charity.

 

 

We as Church, in our liturgies and in our community, and individual Christians, in our daily lives, should imagine Jesus not only cleaning out the Jerusalem temple, but also cleansing our own inner temple, challenging us to expand our idea of faith and embrace kindness and mercy as the norm, to go beyond the routine obligations to find the deeper meaning of what it means to be loved by God and what our human response should be to that amazing infinite gift.

 

We need to realize that the Law of Moses, even the Church herself, as important and essential as she is not the end point – is only the beginning.

She is not where we rest on our laurels, but where we roll up our sleeves to do the necessary work.

Jesus always reminds, gently and not so gently, that it is not the routine habit that matters but the depth, the truth that lies beneath and beyond the ordinary response -

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so we might have life.