Introduction: Leon Hooper SJ
For this morning’s prayer, we planners, with some uneasy laughter, stumbled over variations on the theme that God calls us to “recklessly love our enemies” or, maybe a tad softer, we are called to “playfully love our enemies.”
The “loving our enemies” came from our Lukan version of the Sermon on the Mount, with Luke’s insistence on our loving those who hate us. The “recklessly’ or “playfully’ part of our theme comes from the dangerous recommendations of Luke’s love commands and from 1 Samuel’s description of the relationship of Saul and David. We found the combination of 1 Samuel and Luke 6 a bit amusing and, also, a bit terrifying. Amused and terrified, we sing of our merciful God.
Opening Prayer:
Good to be back with you folks. As best I can recall, the last time I prayed with a formal PAX gathering was Theo’s thanksgiving eucharist, around the first of December. Following that, for two and a half months, I had planned to avoid Washington: a week in Leon, Wisconsin (the unincorporated township where my sister and brother-in-law reside) and at least two weeks in Devilan, County Mayo (Ireland). And then there could have been Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
But Omicron happened. Very quickly we’ve all had some catching up to do – both God-wise and bug-wise. More is required of us. It seems that our God wants us to grow even as a church in ways we haven’t anticipated. Pope Francis is sparking a conversation called a Synod – a people constituted by conversation, a community made different by that conversation.
You folks are saving your Synodal powders for your Lenten prayer. Yet even now, our God will teach us to hear and to speak, allowing our voices to be shaped and sustained by the Mercy – and the Justice – of our God.
So, let us pray that the author of these stories will similarly be the author of our hearing these words. Lord our God, speak to us, speak within us, speak between us. Make us your body. Make us your cry of joy, your cry of pain, your word spoken to your Father/Mother. We join our hopes with yours.
1st Reading: 1 Samuel 26: 2, 7-9, 12-13, 22-23
2nd Reading: 1 Corinthians 15: 45-49
Gospel: Luke 6: 27-38
Homily: Leon Hooper SJ
The word of the Lord – in the form of Hebrew history, the psalms, and the Good News proclaimed by Luke – has been spoken to the planning group, then to us as a community. What do we hear? What can we become in that word? What of the Lord’s becomes us if we listen closely?
First, some of the saints who have heard these combinations of 7th Sunday texts have been seized by strong, if only incipient, calls to either civil or religious nonviolence. David was not non-violent, but there is in his dealings with Saul a notion of God granting sacred dignity to a human person, a dignity that, with development, can be extended to full strategies and commitments to nonviolence as worthy of pragmatic and, even, principled adherence. Some find here the beginning of human rights. God given rights, that can’t be taken away. But the possibility is still faint. Women’s rights, for example, are still very far away.
Secondly, others have questioned just how authentic are lines such as:
“Give and there will be gifts for you: a full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, will be poured into your lap.” The whole second paragraph beginning with “be merciful as your heavenly father is merciful” seems to be a backing away from the self-giving of the call to turn the other cheek. What of mercy and our children’s turning the other cheek?
And, thirdly, if we planners were not overly impressed with absolute nonviolence derived from 1 Samuel, or with Luke’s absolute embracing of enemies, we planners did find something we liked in Samuel. That which did seem most to grab us planners was, strange to say, the humor of the 1 Samuel’s rendering of Saul’s with darkness.
As the book of Samuel has it, the camp was not the only meeting of Saul and David in the inky darkness – one scene caused by the setting sun and the other by entering a deep cave. In chapter 24, Saul and a few friends go deep within a cave to, as the texts insists, to “relieve” themselves. While thus relieving themselves, David and his supporters themselves enter that cave, and now have the opportunity to damage Saul and friends where, as they say, it hurts. David, however, chooses to cut away only a tassel from Saul’s shirt. Once again displaying non-violence, at least toward human body parts, if not toward clothing. But the challenge to Saul’s masculinity has been placed.
Now, of course, cutting away a tassel from Saul’s shirt was not a serious military strategy. It is a form of mockery, challenging Saul’s masculine power, highlighting the Davidic claim that bad, dumb spirits had control of Saul. But one can imagine millennia of 12-year-old Jewish lads wincingly trying to choke down laughter at their first hearing of Saul’s tasseled fate.
Over the next few months, we will hear some things that edify us, but also things that make us wince. Let us not forget to find the humor in some of it, the humor that opens up a bit of distance in us that allows us to see goodness in that which appears so alien (via Molly).
Footnote: With our readings playing with the notion of vulnerability in darkness, I tried to work the following story into the Saul’s darken cave: At 1:14 in the early morning, on January 3, I woke up standing half into a darkened and dry bathtub, holding – just temporarily – onto a wall-mounted towel rack. ….. Vulnerability in love commands?
Meditation: Whistling Swans, by Mary Oliver
Do you bow your head when you pray or do you look
up into that blue space?
Take your choice, prayers fly from all directions,
And don’t worry about what language you use,
God no doubt understands them all.
Even when the swans are flying north and making
such a ruckus of noise, God is surely listening
and understanding.
Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul.
But isn’t the return of spring and how it
springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?
Yes, I know, God’s silence never breaks, but is
that really a problem?
There are thousands of voices, after all,
And furthermore, don’t you imagine (I just suggest it)
that the swans know about as much as we do about
The whole business?
So listen to them and watch them, singing as they fly.
Take from it what you can.