Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 16, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Some seed falls on rich soil
A sower went out to sow. Some seed fell on the path, and birds came and ate it up.
Richard Rohr says “hatred holds a group together much more quickly than love and inclusivity.”
Some of the seed fell on rocky ground, where it had little soil. It sprang up at once because the soil was not deep, and when the sun rose it was scorched, and it withered for lack of roots.
Rohr mourns the foolish way we project our own sin on others.
Sadly, the history of violence and the history of religion are almost the same history. When religion remains at an immature level, it tends to create very violent people who ensconce themselves on the side of the good, the worthy, the pure, the saved. They project all their evil somewhere else and attack it over there. Something has to be sacrificed. Blood has to be shed. Someone has to be blamed, attacked, tortured, imprisoned, or killed. Sacrificial systems create religions and governments of exclusion and violence. Yet Jesus taught and modeled inclusivity and forgiveness!
The way out of this horror story has always been the same. I must take on responsibility for my own sin. I can only be relieved of that responsibility by the forgiveness God gives generously and always. Denial is not just a big river in Egypt; denial kills me!
Rohr tells me that forgiveness demands that I open my eyes:
I must see God in the other, I must access God in myself, and I must experience God in a new way that is larger than the “Enforcer.”
For me to rest in the heart of God, I must be my brother’s keeper and know my own unworthiness from the position of loved child and created one. “Only say the word and I shall be healed.”
Some seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it.
How about an idea from This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley?
The energy I expend forbidding others to walk through the door of community is only matched by the energy I expend competing to stay inside myself. But no one ever perceives the doorkeeper as needing an invitation themselves!
Riley is fascinated with the way Jesus creates community out of nothing.
Sometimes, it cracks me up to think of the stories that describe Christ just boldly inviting himself over to people’s houses for dinner. Roaming around telling people to stop everything and follow him. Multiplying food, but making everyone sit down in groups to eat it. He knew how to make his own belonging.
And, oh yeah, I love the idea of trying to do something of the same, making our own belonging. Creating inclusion out of nothing wherever we are, whoever we’re with, using whatever we’ve been given, but especially our smiles, our touch, our friendship and our love: the love God has planted inside us to grow into such a time as this.
Because some seed fell on rich soil, and produced fruit.
(Isaiah 55, Psalm 65, Romans 8, Matthew 13)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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