This is my homily for today, the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A. The readings for today are here.
One of my rules for living is, “When you have a good thing going, don’t mess it up.” For example: if you are in a good marriage or a good relationship, don’t mess it up. Don’t be unfaithful. Don’t even take the other person for granted. Cherish the other person, and work hard at the relationship. Because many relationships, once they’re broken, can’t really be put back together again.
The same goes for work. If you have a good job you enjoy, with a good boss and good pay, then don’t mess it up. Don’t slack off. Don’t steal from the company. Don’t commit any HR violations. Because once you’ve lost your reputation, it’s virtually impossible to get it back.
And yet, people do mess up good things. The sports world gives us many examples. Pete Rose, one of the great baseball players of my youth and later a major league manager, bet on games, even reportedly against his own team. He’s banned from baseball for life now. Barry Bonds, who seemed to be a surefire Hall of Famer, reportedly took illegal substances. He’s still waiting to get voted into Cooperstown.
Politics has many stories of people messing up good things. In the 1984 presidential election, Gary Hart won several Democratic primaries before word came out of his marital infidelity. His candidacy crashed and burned.
Probably all of us could name other examples, either of famous figures or people in our own lives, who had a good thing going but messed it up.
The tenants in today’s parable had a good thing going, and they messed it up, too. The landowner, who of course is God, set them up for success by building this wonderful vineyard. All the tenants had to do was their job – deliver the produce at vintage time. If they had just done that, all would have been well with them. But they didn’t just do their jobs; they did much worse. They disobeyed and rebelled against the landowner – in other words, against God. And at the end of the parable, Jesus’s listeners thought the right thing to do was to enact swift, hard justice upon these ungrateful, rebellious tenants.
Why do we do it? Why can’t we simply be grateful for the good things in our life, especially considering that we’ve received those good things as gifts which we didn’t earn? Why can’t we simply appreciate the good things we’ve been given, and work to sustain them?
To answer that question, we might go back to the proto-messing up a good thing. You’ll recall that God placed Adam and Eve in a beautiful garden he had built, Eden, filled with wonderful things. God would visit them in the garden. Adam and Eve were closer to God than any of us. How is that for having a good thing going? But they messed it up. Rather than obeying God, they listened to the serpent’s temptation. And they were cast out of the garden and sentenced to lifetimes of toil and pain.
That was the original sin. In a sense, all of us have inherited the bitter fruits of that original rebellion against God. We don’t want it to be this way for us, and we have this deep-down sense that it didn’t have to be this way.
The Good News for us is, God doesn’t want it to be this way for us, either. Even though we’ve messed up, he tries to call us back. And when we don’t listen, he tries again. That’s what this parable is about: he sent his servants, like the prophets in the Old Testament, to call us back. And when we rejected them, he sent us more servants. And when we rejected them, too, he actually sent us his Son, Jesus. And Jesus took our sins upon himself and died for us. That’s how much God’s Son loves us.
With God’s gift of Jesus, we’ve been given a good thing – the very best thing. That’s what our baptism is about: the spiritual stains of original sin from Adam’s and Eve’s fall are washed away in the waters of baptism. And Jesus comes into our lives.
But as good as it is to have Jesus in our lives, we can mess that up. It’s up to us. My spiritual advice for today is: be alert. Be on guard. Let us examine our lives to ensure that we’re living in ways that keep us aligned with God. It doesn’t happen by itself. If we just let human nature take its course – we’ll mess it up.
Because messing up a good thing isn’t just something that sports stars and politicians do. Any of us can do it. Just as any one of us can mess up a relationship or a marriage, we can mess up our relationship with God. We need to pray: ask God to help us do what’s right. We need to ask God to forgive us when we have started to mess up our relationship with him. And We need to receive Jesus in communion, so we can stay close to him.
We’ve been given a very good thing. Let’s not mess it up!
"Don't mess it up"; good advice, why can't we simply be grateful for the "good things in our life," as you say?
ReplyDeleteI have always taken the Garden of Eden story as allegory. I totally believe in original sin, original innocence, not so much. Maybe we were innocent for about five minutes between being proto-hominids and sentient beings with souls. Couldn't have been much longer than that.
Jesus exhorts us in Matthew 10:16 to be "...as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves." A lot of the time we succeed in being as trustworthy as snakes and as smart as pigeons. But God puts up with us anyway and tries to get us to be better.
It seems to me next to impossible to believe in the story of Adam and Eve as an historical account of "our first parents" (although I have had many exchanges with people, including Catholics, who are as convinced as fundamentalists that the human race originated with two and only two parents). The problem with dismissing the story as allegorical is that it takes the blame for the human condition off the shoulders of humanity's ancestors and puts it squarely back on God.
DeleteIf Adam and Eve did not freely choose to sin, and if the human story could not have been otherwise, then the human condition is as God created it. Interestingly, the Jews make very little of the story of Adam and Eve, and to some (at least) it is interpreted as human beings passing from childlike dependence to adult responsibility.
As an agnostic, I can't help feeling that if there is a Creator, the world we see as we look around us (particularly with Israel at war, earthquakes in Afghanistan, Evangelical Christians seeing Trump as some kind of savior, and so on, and so forth) this is not what God would have wanted for his creatures.
I have no idea why an omnipotent, all-good creator would put up with the world we have today, but Christianity with its concept of original sin just doesn't explain it adequately.
I guess I view original sin as a "necessary fault". A certain amount of self-interest and an instinct for self defense was and is necessary for survival. It's problematic when taken to extremes as it quite often is.
DeleteI think the Incarnation was always God's plan A rather than plan B to deal with this, to add the necessary correction to free will. Trouble is we've still got free will. We have to want to be better.
That's interesting about the Jewish view of the Adam and Eve story as humans passing from childlike dependence to adult responsibility. Sometimes humans have a hard time getting to the adult responsibility part.
I see the Adam and Eve story as a myth. It provides a mythic explanation for the truth that humans fall short of what we could be. Importantly, it attributes a spiritual dimension to the fall-shorted-ness of humanity.
DeleteThe secular alternative, I guess, would be: if only we can find the right formula for distributing and sharing wealth and the goods of the earth; if only we can invent and disseminate the right technologies; if only we can get everyone to see that peace is better than war; if only we can devise the optimal ways to govern ourselves - if only we could accomplish those things, then all problems will be solved.
The Christian response would be: yes, we should try to pursue those things. But - if there is a spiritual dimension to our falling-shorted-ness, then unless we also attend to the spiritual root cause, we won't be able to extricate ourselves from perpetually falling short.
Btw, I suppose everyone here is tuned into this already, so at the risk of stating the obvious: I don't believe, and the church doesn't require me to believe, that the creation stories in Genesis are literally true.
DeleteIn a recent homily, I talked about the Tower of Babel and referred to it as a myth. Afterward, a parishioner questioned my characterization. I don't think he was a biblical literalist per se; but I think he had the notion in his brain that myths are untrue. I told him that one of the purposes of myths is to preserve and convey truth. He seemed to accept what I said and walked away, but I don't know whether I actually converted him to my view of myths :-)
I will add that he is somewhat of a conservative Catholic. That may be pertinent because Evangelical Christianity has some influence on the conservative precincts of the Catholic church, primarily because of culture-war affinities. Some conservative Catholics also are suspicious of what is now mainstream biblical scholarship, perhaps because some conservatives these days are suspicious of scholarship and the academy in general, and perhaps because Catholic theologians often seem to be opposed to the institution, and the institution is (or was, until Francis) perceived to champion conservative views.
Jim, thanks for saying that. I don't think any of us here think that we are obliged to believe that Genesis is literally true, but a lot of Catholics do. And not just because of the influence of Evangelical Christianity. They aren't tuned in to biblical scholarship that much. Going back to grade school days, I'm pretty sure that the nuns who taught me pre-Vatican II believed in biblical literalism, it was certainly part of our grade-. school catechisms. I think probably kids in the lower grades are still taught that way, with Bible stories. We had one of those illustrated Bible story books for our kids with the animals marching two by two into the ark. I mean you're not going to give them Raymond Brown and Teilhard de Chardin at that point. Hopefully in high school religion classes they get into some Biblical exegesis.
DeleteI just remember a conversation with our oldest son in junior high years who was outraged about God slaying the firstborn sons of the Egyptians in the Exodus account. It was personal because he was a firstborn son. I think we were able to get him to look at some things seriously but not necessarily literally.
A lot of Catholics back in the day (and maybe still?) didn't realize the extent which the modern popes, including Pius XII, supported biblical scholarship.
I am intimately connected with this universe, certainly physically. There may be 10^18 universes where things are perfect and God makes sure everything is nicey nice. But I wouldn't exist in those universes. And those universes couldn't make a me or an us. If God is infinitely creative and loving, everyone that can happen will happen. The imperfect universes will be created, too. With the imperfect original sinners. And God, hopefully, will somehow make up the difference. Regarding original sin, we definitely have made a world that's a lot nastier than it needs to be.
ReplyDeleteI like that take, Stanley!
DeleteISTM that tenants seized on a method to get the whole enchilada thru increasingly sinful means. You get greedy for what's not yours, you become inured to what's right, and somebody ends up dead. See any episode of The Sopranos.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the parable invites us to examine what we do to "get ahead," and whether that blinds us to injustices we commit for our own advancement?
Jean - I love it.
DeleteFWIW, these parables in Matthew are susceptible to anti-Semitic interpretations. I considered talking about that, but it didn't feel like the right time. Of course, given that war broke out in Israel (if it is war; perhaps it's a massive terrorist attack spurring a military reaction), maybe it was timely.
A prob w historical or current events approaches to Scripture is that it points to problems with "those people back then" or "these people over there," as if we can be let off the hook for whatever we're doing.
DeleteIf the parable is about us as workers in God's vineyard, the story becomes symbolic of the chaos that ensues when we forget we are working for God, not ourselves. Despite its crudity and ham-handed satire, The Righteous Gemstones strikes me as an extended riff on that theme.