Journey's Weekly Homilies
Tom Kinzie - Journey Catholic
Community
January 20 - Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
(Is. 49:3,5-6, Ps. 40, I Cor. 1:1-3, John
1:29-34)
Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
Is this true? Does the world look as if sin has been taken
away? Are we closer to God and God's peace now than we were
then? Have the alienating illnesses that separate us from
God been healed? It doesn't always appear so. Is it a
work in progress? If so, why the delay? Have we not
the need, with the early church, to sing out, even so, come
quickly, Lord Jesus? Be with us. Make this world a
safe place for all.
Sometimes the best conversations are with strangers. It was
one of those recent, rare, somewhat sunny winter days when I sat
on a bench in the nearby Park blocks. I was at one end of
the bench and this man, whom I did not know, was at the other.
After a few hesitant starts we ended up talking theology.
Meaningful conversations with strangers, I find, are either about
sex or theology and, call it a kinky if you like, but I usually
prefer theology.
I don't remember the ways the conversation moved in and out but we
were finally talking about that insatiable hunger for God that
some people seem to experience. I remember it very well,
because this man, not much older than me, stared hard, first at me
and then at his hands and then he spoke very slowly and clearly.
He said, But this hunger for God follows me everywhere and it is
not the thing chiefly on my mind. He went on, what I want, my
friend, is to know that God hungers for me with a hunger that is
mad, like a lion's hunger in a parched, foodless jungle.
Well, that is a heck of a line from a complete stranger.
I wished I could have said to him something like, "that love
of God for you is here, now. If you want it it is already
yours." But such a thing needs to be said as part of a
longer conversation, like the on-going conversation we have here
in Journey.
It seems to me that so much of our lives in these fractured and
perilous times are about this hunger for love. I think of
the line in the song: Lovers in a Dangerous Time. It is a
hunger that wants to love and a hunger that wants to be loved.
It is a good thing if we can say this to ourselves and out loud to
each other. And often. It is a good thing if we can
name this hunger in our prayers during the silent starry night or
in the peculiar gray light that is morning. Just being able
to name this hunger clearly will make us softer and will begin to
smooth out the hard edges that keep us from each other, from our
truest selves, and from that mystery which we say is Love itself.
It is good if we can begin to find this Love in as many places as
possible. I was so moved by the baptism of Nicole Zacharias.
She looked so wonderfully beautiful and splendid in that white
baptismal gown. She held her head up so serenely during that
whole litany that it would not be too much to say she was like an
angel. I thought later, how odd it is that in some way we
were conferring grace on one whose young, beautiful existence is
already grace itself. Yet, we do know that there is much
experience between now and then, the now of her grace-filled young
life and the then when she begins to know with a growing certainty
that not all of this life will come so easily. Or, as
Julian or Norwich put it, when Nicole begins to know that life is
a full ripe mixture of joy and woe. Through all of that
growing awareness she will need a whole community to help her
learn to still say yes to Love, anyway. We can help her to
practice this yes in a hundred myriad ways so that she will never
forget. And helping her to practice this yes, we too will
continue to say yes, yes to life and Love.
For that Love is here waiting for us. When John the Baptist came
announcing, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of
the world," John was saying that there is a love so great
that when we are seized by it, and when we give ourselves to it,
it is as if the lies that blind and constrict us have lost their
power. The whole world becomes new when we are seized by
this love. Jesus is, as Thomas Keating puts it, the
explosion of God's love in the world. It can set us free if
we recognize it, respond to it, and are changed by it.
Though Love is here at every moment waiting for us we are so often
kept from seeing Love, and responding to it. There are political,
cultural and personal lies that blind us. We become
comfortable with them-like shoes that do not fit, but if worn long
enough we easily forget the pain. One gets used to them.
· The lie that revenge is the only course to justice.
· The lie that power is the only guarantee of truth.
· The lie that to have less is the worse thing that can befall
us.
· The lie that only some know the truth and any use of force,
physical or emotional, is justified to defend the truth.
· The lie that the way to protect ourselves is to hold on to what
we have.
· The lie that the fist is stronger than the open hand.
· The lie that to ask for forgiveness is a sign of weakness.
· The lie that evil exists only out there but has never found a
home within us.
How can these things be overcome? Such lies reach deep into
us. How do we dare to hope that there is a love stronger
than all of those? How do we cling to an unproven certainty
that Love will say yes to us and that we will still be able to say
yes to Love?
I return to that famous recluse Julian of Norwich who wrote,
"Prayer oneth the soul to God . . . and the woning place of
the soul is God." God's presence in the world is utterly and
completely transforming. We are in God and God is in us. God
is in the world and the world is in God. This is a
transformation which we must experience internally and which we
are to proclaim and witness to through our lives and beliefs
externally. How can we proclaim the biblical transformation of the
world unless we have experienced our own transformation?
And, how can our inner transformation be real if it does not speak
to the rest of the world? We must know, in the deepest sense, what
we are talking about. Otherwise, our words will ring hollow.
Our hunger for love and Love's presence is both transformation and
demand; it calls us to know and to be known by love, for love,
with love.
But we are left with the Lamb of God. That one who John says
takes away the sin of the world. How this can be and what it
calls us to become cannot be perfectly spelled out. I am
with the poet, who wrote, "My first rule: if I understand
something, it is no mystery." Here I want to simply
share four images of the lamb, all mysterious in a way. Play
and pray with them, as you will.
First image: In 1432 Jan van Eyck and his brother completed the
famous Ghent altarpiece. In the bottom center of the opened
triptych is the Adoration of the Lamb, a section in which is
painted an amazingly realistic lamb on the altar, blood flowing
from the lamb into a chalice. It seems astonishing; perhaps naive
to us, but it is an attempt to say that this mystery of Eucharist,
this lamb for us, is here in our life, now, available to us each
time we celebrate the meal together.
Second image: I had a friend who went to seminary the same time as
I did. In the non-liturgical tradition we were both a part
of there was always a great pressure to do something new and more
exciting each Sunday. He was determined to make Sunday
services more interesting in the little rural parish where he was
pastor. So, one Sunday, when he was preaching on the Lamb of
God, he had two or three of the little woolies in a small
enclosure up near where he was preaching. Unfortunately, the
lambs were not good listeners. They jumped over the
enclosure, bleated like deranged creatures throughout his sermon
and left their own little offerings all over the church floor.
That was the end of liturgical innovation at the Lick Creek Church
of the Brethren, Iowa.
Third image: The Japanese Christian novelist Endo wrote a life of
Jesus in which he described Jesus as the ineffectual one.
What did Endo mean? I think he saw Jesus as one without
coercive power. He did not force things to get done.
He was not, in the ordinary sense, a man of action. At his
death he seemed a colossal failure. He was, in a way, the
powerless, peaceful Lamb whose non-violent coming was Love itself.
And yet, is it not only the peaceful, non-violent lamb that can
take away the sin of the world rather than add to it?
The last image: The poet Denise Levertov helps us to wonder at
this lamb when she writes:
God then,
Encompassing all things, is
Defenseless? Omnipotence
Has been tossed away, reduced
To a wisp of damp wool?
. . .
is it implied that we
must protect this perversely weak
animal, whose muzzle's nudgings
suppose there is milk to be found in us?
Must hold to our icy hearts
a shivering god.
So be it.
Come, rag of pungent
quiverings,
dim star.
Let's try
if something human still
can shield you,
spark
of remote light.