Open to change

 This is my homily for today, the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A.  The readings for today are here.

Recently some friends invited Therese and me to their home for a get-together.  They’re good friends of ours, and I like their company.  But when the day of the event arrived, I sort of didn’t want to go.  I had had a long week, and I was tired.  I wasn’t in the mood for socializing.  I just wanted to plop into a La Z Boy at home, lie back with the footrest up and my shoes off, and watch a ball game, or a golf tournament, or something equally unchallenging.  I told Therese she might be going without me.

But then, at the last minute, the good old Catholic guilt went to work on my conscience.  If this couple was nice enough to invite me over, it seemed a little churlish to refuse to go.  And it didn’t seem quite fair to send Therese there by herself to make my excuses for me.  So I summoned up the energy to put on a clean shirt and I headed over there with her.

And if you know anything about human nature, you know what comes next: it turned out that I had a wonderful time.  I was so glad I went.  It was way more enjoyable than staying home and falling asleep in front of the television set would have been.  I had thought that what I needed was to stay home and be a bum, but honestly, I do that a lot during the pandemic.  It turned out that it was good for me to make a change to my routine.   

Often, change is good for us, even when we resist it.  For most of us – well, really, all of us – our lives fall short of perfection.  If we want our lives to get better, we must be willing to make changes in our lives.  Sometimes that even means making changes to ourselves.  Better yet, we must be willing to allow God to work his changes within us. 

And yet most of us resist change.  We fear to change things up in our lives.  We may be unhappy in our jobs, but we don’t go out and find another, better one.  Or we may be in a relationship with someone who isn’t very good for us, but we don’t do anything about it.  Or we may be unhappy with where we live, but we don’t do anything to improve our housing situation.  Or we know we should lose weight, but we don’t.  Or we know we should go to the doctor or the dentist, but we don’t.  Some of us are quite ingenious at coming up with reasons not to change.  If we poured that same energy and ingenuity into actually making positive changes, think how much better off we’d be.

If things in my life ever have gotten better, it’s because I’ve made changes, sometimes despite my best efforts to avoid or delay them.  I quit smoking.  I started going to church again.  I went to confession after a hiatus of several decades.  I married Therese.  I went to graduate school.  I became a deacon.  All those decisions have made my life better in one way or another. 

All those things were *choices*.  I could have continued to smoke.  I could have dithered about asking Therese to marry me.   I could have stayed home every evening rather than going to graduate school.  And so on.  I’m far from being the person that God knows I can be, but I would have to say that, had I chosen otherwise than I did about those important matters, I’d be a lesser and a worse person today.  Our choices make a big impact on our satisfaction and our flourishing. 

Of course, we can make bad choices, too.  We can make things worse for ourselves.  We can choose to be binge drinkers or to take addictive drugs.  We can choose to steal from our employers or to be unfaithful in our marriages.  We can choose to spend all our money as it comes in, rather than saving for our retirements.  Just as our good choices can make our lives better, our bad choices can make our lives worse.

Today’s Gospel passage is about making choices and embracing change.  The first son said he wouldn’t go out to work in the vineyard, but, as Jesus put it, he “afterward changed his mind”.  Those three words, “changed his mind”, pass by so quickly that we may miss their significance.  Those three words describe a monumental change of heart which is nothing less than a transformation.   Somehow, disobedience was transformed into obedience, and what might have been a rift in the family instead became a strengthened bond.  How did that transformation come about?  Did the first son’s conscience nag him, just as mine nagged me about the relatively trivial matter of attending the couples’ get-together?  Did some kind, wise person intervene to talk with that son, bringing about a change of heart?  Did the son engage in introspection and prayer?  Those are some of the ways we can be induced to change, in order to find the path to righteousness.

The other son changed, too – but in the wrong direction.  He said he would go work in the vineyard, but he changed his mind, too, and didn’t go.  In doing so, he added to his father’s burden – now the father must deal with a disobedient son, a son whose word cannot be trusted.

If we’re going to be disciples of Jesus, we must be willing to change.  If we don’t change, we’re not succeeding.  Because conforming ourselves to God doesn’t come naturally to us.  It doesn’t just happen by itself.  Left to our own devices, what comes naturally to us is the worship of counterfeit gods, like money, or power, or illicit physical pleasures, or worst of all, worship of ourselves.  Left to our own devices, we start treating others as objects to exploit, rather than as persons as good as ourselves, endowed with the same human dignity we possess and entitled to the same respect we’re entitled to as creatures of God.  We must be open to changing, and then changing again.  Every day, we must be ready to turn back to God.

“But,” you might object, “change is hard.  It’s stressful.  It takes energy and commitment.  I don’t feel up to change today.”  I hear you.  And I would make two comments about that.  One is, you’re spending mental and psychological and spiritual energy, simply by deciding *not* to change.  To say, “I am not going to change today,” is to make a choice, too.  Whenever we turn away from God’s will, we’re not staying in neutral.  Turning away from God always involves turning *toward* something that is less than God, and worse than God.  There is no maintaining the status quo when it comes to this.  Either we’re rowing in the right direction, or we're drifting in the wrong direction.  Sometimes, we're paddling as hard as we can in the wrong direction.

My second comment is, we don’t have to do this by ourselves.  God will help us to change the things in our lives that must change.  One of the best ways I know to be open to healthy, holy change is to pray.  One very simple way to do it is to start each day by praying, “Come, Holy Spirit, into my heart today, and change me.”

When we think we have everything figured out, and we’re on the straight and narrow highway to heaven – that’s when we should start to worry.  Every day, we must be open to God coming into our hearts to change us.