Journey's Weekly Homilies

Journey Catholic Community
Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time Mt. 15: 21-28Is. 56: 1, 6-7 Romans
11:13-15, 29-32
August 18, 2002
Tom Kinzie


In scripture there are words that act like code.  Once we hear the words we’re supposed to know what the rest of the message is.  Widow, stranger, foreigner, and parentless children are such words.  The message is that how we treat such persons, persons who have no standing in the community and therefore are the weak and the poor, will be a sign of God’s justice and of our relationship with God.

In today’s readings we hear it is the very ones outside of the community who are to be seen not simply as the other, but as having a special place in God’s dealings.  We see that the foreigner does justice.  We hear that the Jew and the Gentile alike are partakers of God’s mercy.  We are told that the Canaanite woman shows great faith.  The other is not in some permanent distance from God and us.  Indeed, the other may become for us the very sign of God’s grace.

Who is the other in our world?  What causes us to keep distance from the other?  I believe that the clutter and clamor of our culture can keep us isolated and keep us from recognizing our common humanity.  The language of special privilege and entitlement abounds in our culture. A heart cluttered by our culture’s constant messages of advantage and superficial abundance will begin to believe as if such privilege were a right that we must defend with the power of life and death against anyone who might encroach on our abundance.

I don’t understand this, but my wife Avril actually likes to clean. This is a considerable mystery to me.  I cannot fathom it and I am afraid immature aspects of my character begin to show their ugly faces when even the topic of cleaning is broached in our family.  I do it, but I do it with great reluctance.  So I fear that I have let whole areas of my life become cluttered and get away from me.  When I was a pastor I received a call from a teary sounding deacon telling me that the church office had been burglarized and that the burglars had ransacked the place.  Could I please hurry up and meet him and the policeman at the church, the deacon asked. I scooted over there in haste, fearing the very worse.  When I walked in the office, and saw there the deacon and the policeman, I realized immediately
that the destroyed office my deacon had tearfully described was exactly how I had left it the night before.  Too embarrassed to say anything else, I nodded slowly and said, “Yes, this is very bad indeed.”

It was just a few days ago, thankful for the results, but still not an enthusiastic cleaner, when Avril found in a desk that had been ignored for years, a little carrying bag.  I looked at it and realized it contained my passport from 1984—almost twenty years ago.  I hadn’t looked at the thing for years.  I opened it and I gasped.  Someone else’s picture had been put in my passport!  Of course it was I.  There I was, clean shaven, lots of brown hair on top of my head, and at least twenty pounds in that past.  It was like meeting a distant relative that I could not quite remember.  Maybe
you have experienced something similar; we see ourselves but we do not recognize who we were or who we have become.

This who I believe we are.  We live out of the immense and mysterious time of God.  It is a mystery this immeasurable vastness of the universe and it is a mystery how we are connected to that vastness.  For we are of the same matter as that kind of stardust that exploded 16 billion years ago.  That matter began to coalesce and became a huge lump of stuff that eventually became the earth, 4 to 5 billion years ago.  An almost incomprehensible and miraculous thing then occurred.  Exactly the right conditions, the right molecules, the right distance from the sun, the right mixture of hydrogen and oxygen occurred.  And at this perfect time the beginning of cellular life occurred some 3.5 billion years ago.  That stardust continued to evolve and change and grow in complexity, but it was not until 200,000 years ago that the beginning of the human family emerged.

If the history of the universe were placed in a one-year calendar, then the first human would not have appeared until 10:30 p.m. on December 31.  This means Abraham and the era of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs would make their appearance at 11:59 p.m. on the last day of the year. Sometimes this kind of information makes me feel so small, less than a speck of dust in the boundless space of the universe.  But lately, I can also feel connected to this universe knowing that everything that is comes from the same incredibly dense matter and this matter comes from God.

There is continuity from the first cosmic explosion in a sea of silence, to the formation of life and DNA, to the human being and our consciousness that begins to express itself in the stories of faith and meaning.  That continuity is the love of God.  Imagine a kind of cosmic hum that goes out through all things, that enlivens all things, that shapes all things, is the spirit of all things.  We say this presence of God before time, all through time, in our bones and ground of all that is even after our time is finished is the presence of Love.

Part of God’s love is expressed in a desire for justice, a desire that the followers of God hold so close to themselves that it would be impossible to tell the story of their lives without expressing this commitment to justice.   For justice is the Love-ordering of earth, a way of living with others and with the planet in which love is expressed in terms of equality and respect for the other (whether air, water, plant, animal, or human).  The other, the stranger is never completely other, but is to be seen as part of our story and our story is to be a part of their story.  Justice is the expression of
love in action.  To live justly is to place our lives before God who is Love.  It is to say that we want to be a part of that story in all of it ages, in all of it glory, in all of its forms.

There is now in this country such a rush to arms and planning for war.  What we do not hear is the human cost of such planning.  It is not that the leader of a certain Middle Eastern nation is a virtuous man.  From what I have read he is far from it.  And I have met refugees who were tortured or hounded and exiled by Sadaam Hussein ’s secret police.  The history of the Kurds under Sadaam Hussein is brutal and unjust.  Still we must ask, how many lost lives is Sadaam Hussein’s removal from power worth? A few dozen?  A few hundred?  A few thousand?

Sometime after September 11, Arundhati Roy, the author of, ”The God of Small Things,” wrote, “Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away.  But if it is to be contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations, with other human beings, who, even if they are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven’s sake rights.”

In the vast story of the universe, within this vast sea of God’s creative love, the other is not a stranger, is not foreign, is not a dog, and is not even purely other.  The other is more like us than not.  Like us, the other is a part of earth’s story and like us the other is a note in the cosmic song. We must resist every temptation to talk about the other as unfortunate “collateral damage.”  Such talk is morally messy and dirty and confuses statistics with the lives of real people.  If we do not oppose such thinking and speaking we will become a people who see a picture of ourselves and we will not recognize the people we have become.  We will become foreigners to our own understanding of ourselves as people of God.

Instead, let us do such justice as is worthy of the God who calls us into being.  Let us not be confused by the clutter of our lives or the distractions of this culture.  We know who we are and we can be known as a people of great faith, a people whose faith refuses to acquiesce to the catastrophe of violence and war.  Let us pledge not to be silent when people are spoken of as if they were mere numbers.  Let us be gentle but courageous.  Let us as a community study Pax Christi’s “Vow of Non-Violence” that is printed in this week’s newsletter and see if this is something we need to live by.  Let us speak the truth, as we know it, with grace and with strength.  Let us have prayer services for peace.  Let us join with other churches to stop this spiral to war.  Let us pledge our lives to resist, if
we must, the violence that distorts God’s love.  For God’s love became the universe, became the stars, became a planet, became life, and became human.  And Jesus, the prophet of non-violence, is this human name.