1st Reading: 1 Kings 19:16, 19-21
2nd Reading: Galatians 5:1, 13-18
Gospel: Luke 9:51-62
Homily: Leon Hooper SJ
May the grace and peace of our lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, in the fellowship of the holy spirit be with you. In our readings for this 13th Sunday of Ordinary Time we will hear and pray about Elijah and Elisha, Ahab and Jesebel, Jesus, James, and John. Three wannabe disciples. Paul and the Holy Spirit. And twelve pair of oxen. To do right by them, let us pray.
Lord our creator and redeemer and sanctifier, today we once again hear of and open all that we are to the power of your love, your care, your holding us in the palm of your hands, We are yours and we belong to one another. As we hear of you in our human past, draw us into your divine future.
Three points to this homily:
1st point: Happy high summer. Most everyone I know is on vacation. This past week, my sister, Rosalie Anne, moved into Georgetown University’s Jesuit residence, with me, for a four-day visit. To do so, she drove for a couple days from and, then, a couple days to, her and her husband’s home in Lacrosse, WI. This was the second time she has driven the distance since the onset of Covid.
A couple decades ago, soon after our parents both died, she and I decided that each time we got together for any length of time, we would put aside a block of private time to talk, laugh, cry, pray about our 75+ years together. All of this was and is, for both of us, in part, a way of trying to make amends to our parents for the silence of teenager years.
So, for the private moments of last week’s sojourn, our topic was the four years bookended by my leaving home, then her leaving home. Or, somewhat in the vocabulary of today’s readings, our dealings with various late teenage calls to grow up – our successes and failures, our presences and absences to one another.
Now, liturgically, ordinary times (as in the 13th Sunday of same), are opportunities to look back at our collective past in the Lord. Especially during the summer’s “ordinary-times”, our first readings usually come in two varieties: historical and agricultural. Today’s Old Testament reading from 1 Kings has a bit of both –which our planners picked up on. We talked about oxen and furrows, cutting out of the sod 12 synchronized furrows, without a huge amount of success. None of us had cut a single furrow, much less 12 at a run.
We had more luck with history: kings and prophets/politics. From 1 Kings we heard that both Elijah’s political and his religious dealings were rather bloody, that he was instrumental in killing kings and prophets, and that he even fought prophets both the Yahwistic variety and the Baalist variety. Finally, when Elijah had had enough of that brutality, he demanded of Yahweh that he be allowed to pass on his mantel. In the face of that demand, Yahweh first reminded Elijah who God is. God is in charge of earthquakes, but is not the earthquake; is in charge of hurricanes but is not the violence of hurricanes, not a fire. Rather. Yahweh is most fully present in the gentle, soft, gentle, murmuring sound.
It seems in fact that Elijah tamed God, made more gentle by way of historical/political metaphors. Only secondarily is God a warrior.
One of Elijah’s earlier evangelizing tricks had been calling down from heaven fire on the bad guys. Jesus’ disciples recommended the same trick against the bad, inhospitable Samaritans. Jesus wanted none of it. Notice that here, just as the later Elijah, our hero (Jesus in this case) goes gentle on us. And rebukes the fiery disciples.
This is all the more remarkable, since Jesus and his disciples had just turned toward Jerusalem, a place deadly dangerous for Messiahs. Jesus and his disciples, men and women, might have been going to Jerusalem nonviolently, but they weren’t going to a nonviolent Jerusalem. And that violence, that pain, that resulting fear plays out in the brutality of Jesus’ response to offers of discipleship. “No one who looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
No one who looks back is fit for the kingdom of God, or
Let the dead bury the dead.
Discipleship costs. It can brutalize the disciple. It can require its own forms of rebuke and exorcism for the sake of the kingdom. While Foxes have holes; Birds have nests – Disciples bear instability at the least.
2nd point: At liturgy planning sessions, I usually listen rather closely to the initial discussion of the readings, and to discussion of any PAX happenings or gossip. I keep attention fixed until we come to a theme. At that point I start to phase out, drawing arrows and underlining on my own notes. The rest of the group usually goes on to search out possible music.
Now, I will admit that I should for a variety of reasons pay more attention to the music, particular the lyrics. But I don’t. It was because I did such a dropout that a week later I couldn’t make sense out of Who/What Guides your Plow?
When I paid attention to mass sheet, my short answer to who guides is “I guide my plow,” until I grind it up as kindling for a two oxen goodbye banquet, as with Elisha. The longer answer is the Spirit is the force that takes on my flesh, my self-indulgence, as Paul describes. That is, the reconstituted, burned up plow powered by the spirit of God.
And where is all this talk about Spirit? Well, it is in the songs and creeds the planners planned for, the songs to which I paid little attention. If you want the theme most clearly – listen closely to those creeds and songs.
3rd point. One last point, just to sharpen our sense of the Spirit of God visible or maybe just hiding in the summer mist. Complex things and events that are held in God’s hands, even if our God disagrees with them:
- Visiting sisters, available parents and grand parents
- Gun control
- The brutalizing and/or engracing of children (via media)
- Those with stakes in Roe v Wade
- Participants in Jan 6 committee
Meditation: Everything Falls Away, by Parker J Palmer
Parker’s poem is informed by what William Stafford wrote:
There’s a thread you follow.
It goes among things that change.
But it doesn’t change.
-William Stafford
Poem on next page
Everything Falls Away, by Parker J Palmer
Sooner or later, everything falls away.
You, the work you’ve done, your successes,
Large and small, your failures, too.
Those moments when you were light,
Alongside the time you became one with the night.
The friends, the people you loved who loved you,
Those who might have wished you ill,
None of this is forever.
All of it is soon to go, or going, or long gone.
Everything falls away, except the thread you’ve followed,
Unknowing all along.
The thread that strings together
All you’ve been and done,
The thread you didn’t know you were tracking until,
Toward the end,
You see the thread is what stays as everything else falls away.
Follow that thread as far as you can
And you’ll find it does not end,
But weaves into the unimaginable vastness of life.
Your life never was the solo turn it seemed to be.
It was always part of the great weave of nature and humanity,
An immensity we come to know only as we follow
Our own small threads to the place where
They merge with the boundless whole.
Each of our threads runs its course,
Then joins in life together.
This magnificent tapestry –
This masterpiece in which we live forever.