Out of Control

8^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Cycle A

Is 49:14-15

Ps 62:2-3,6-7,8-9

1 Cor 4:1-5

Mt. 6:24-34

Every time I hear these readings I can’t help but think, “Yeah, right, easy for you to say. You knew the future, Jesus, so you didn’t have to worry about it. You knew how things were going to turn out tomorrow. I don’t. You’re God. You’ve never had to worry. I have to plan for the kid’s college and our retirement. I have to schedule production in the shop. I have to get ready for Lent and Easter. And tonight it’s my turn to make dinner. Haven’t even thought about that yet.”

But then I think; Jesus should have been the greatest worrier of all time, just because he knew what was going to happen tomorrow. He knew how things would end. He knew how people would treat him in the next town he visited. He knew he would go to bed hungry that night, sleeping underneath the stars. He knew they would kill him and he knew how they would do it. But Jesus didn’t seem to worry much, did he, except for that time in the Garden of Gethsemanie? Even then he gave up control of his own life and put it in the hands of his Father. The one person in history who was in complete control of the future and he gave it up, choosing instead to place his life and his fate in the hands of another.

Being a disciple is all about control. Who’s in control of your life, you or God? It’s a paradox that we are most in control when we give up control. Jesus didn’t mean that we are not to make plans for the future; just don’t live in the future. Don’t let it rule you. Just as it isn’t healthy to live in the past it isn’t good to live in the future, either. Because then you’re building your life on a dream. John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Funny how no matter how much we plan we are still helpless in the face of the future. And if we are constantly focusing on the future we can completely miss what’s happening to us in the here and now. You cannot control the future, just as you cannot change the past. The only thing you can control is how you will react to the present.

So much of life is out of our control. We can’t control the government, or our families, or even the weather. But we are also not supposed to just be carried along by events and live our lives reacting to things. We can only control our attitude towards events and other people’s actions. We can let them rule us or we can decide not to let them do so.

In the end the only one who’s really in control is God. And like Jesus, we need to trust. Jesus didn’t sweat the small stuff. We also need to have the attitude that some things really don’t matter very much, so we shouldn’t worry about them. We need to keep sight of what’s really important, and it’s not what to have for dinner. We’re not the sum total of our stuff, of what we own. We try sometimes to fill that hole in our souls with food and drink and material possessions. But those things are so transitory. They constantly need to be replenished, and so they can become almost addictive. And then we’re completely out of control, when our addictions rule us.

I know some people who let their addictions rule their lives. My mom refused to travel by plane because she wouldn’t be able to smoke for a couple of hours. And so she missed a lot of important events in the lives of her family and friends. A friend of mine has been unemployed for almost two years, yet he won’t entertain taking a job out of state because he worries he won’t be able to score some marijuana. And so he’s now in danger of losing his home. Some people give up control over their lives for stupid things, and if you let something control you like that of course you will worry that you won’t be able to get what you need. It can become an obsession and the center of your life.

And what do we really need, anyway? Will it matter what you had for breakfast the day that you die? Will it matter what you are wearing when you breathe your last? Will it matter that you’ve made plans to do something the next day and now you won’t be going? Strip everything away and determine what is truly important.

You cannot serve both God and mammon. We don’t see that word but once in the gospels. Mammon sometimes is translated to mean the world or materialism. The word actually shares a root with the Hebrew word that means “to entrust”. To what or to whom do you entrust yourself? To what will you be a servant? To what will you subjugate yourself? And you will subjugate yourself to something, whether you intend to or not. To what will you give up control? If I had a choice, I would rather give up control to someone or something I trust with my very life. Why would you do otherwise? Why would you give up control to something transitory?

Tomorrow/tonight we will be celebrating the Rite of Acceptance to two ladies who have chosen to learn more about the Catholic faith. They will stand before us with their sponsors and state that they accept God’s will for them for the future. And we will state our acceptance of them into our community. And we will bless them in a special way to help them along their journey. They have no idea what their new lives as Christians will bring. But they’re not worried, because they know they have us to help them along the way, and ultimately they have Jesus. As St. Paul says today, “Thus should one regard us; as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Now it is of course required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.” We have found these women to be trustworthy because they have placed their trust in the one worthy of our ultimate trust.

In the end it really is easy to give up worry. All it takes is a decision. The decision to be out of control. Let you be you and let God be God. Everything else will take care of itself.

Patchwork

8^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Cycle B

Do you remember the Levi’s ad that ran a couple of months ago? It opens with a young guy beating up a new pair of jeans. He rips them, stains them, burns them, then he gives them to his girlfriend as a present before he goes away on a trip. She looks at him with love, because he has just given her his most prized possession. He really must love her, too! After he gets on the bus he takes off his sweat pants and behold, the original worn jeans are still on him! He made up a fake pair to give to his girlfriend so he wouldn’t have to give up the originals. We get the idea that those jeans are his favorite possession. They have a lot of history to them. He’d never part with them, even for love.

Oftentimes our most prized possessions are the ones that bear the most scars. They are the ones that have gone through hell with us, and each rip, tear and stain has meaning. There are holes in the cloaks of our lives, but we’d never dream of getting rid of them for new ones. We’d rather patch them over and over again, and each new patch becomes part of the history of the cloak, becomes part of our torn lives.

Jesus says it would be foolish to repair an old cloak with new, unshrunken cloth, because the tear would only get worse when the patch pulls away from the cloth. We patch the holes in our lives with new ideas, with a closer walk with the Lord, and with deeper relationships with our families and friends. When we repair the tears in the cloaks of our lives, we don’t throw away our pasts, we add to them. New ideas and ways of living must conform in some way to our old lives. But if we haven’t tested those new ideas, haven’t washed them first, they could only make the tears worse. We can’t just scrap who we are. And as time goes by, those patches become an indistinguishable part of the cloak, until we have to patch it once again.

Jesus never dreams of just throwing away the old cloak and getting a new one. Today, we don’t patch things; we give the old clothes to the St. Lawrence thrift store and buy new ones. But there are some things we don’t part with easily. We’d rather patch them up and keep on using them. Relationships are like that. People are hard to throw away.

Relationships tear a lot of holes in our cloaks. We even use the phrase, “We need to patch things up”, when talking about hurt relationships. But we don’t just go out and get new friends when we get hurt. And we can’t get new family. We’re stuck with them. So we’d rather patch them up. When people we love die or are hurt, our lives are really torn up. But we don’t ignore the holes. We don’t leave our lives in tatters. We patch them with the loving memories of the ones we’ve lost. We cover our hurt with the richness of what those people have added to our lives. And it’s all those patches, all that history that make the cloaks of our lives so comfortable. Like an old pair of jeans.

It’s the same with the church. Catholics usually don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater when some crisis arises. When the fabric of our church cloak gets torn through scandal or outside attack or when we lose sight of the gospel, we don’t run out and start a new church. We renew the one we have. We don’t scrap our history and make a new start from scratch; we build on the traditions of 2000 years and reform ourselves. The church didn’t experience a reformation only in the 16^th century. There have been hundreds of major reform movements throughout the centuries. And many more smaller transformations and renewals have taken place, and are still taking place today.

Many of our reformations have taken place because new ideas have arisen, both within the church and in society. We have had to address the ideas of the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and the violent upheavals of the 20^th Century, many of which tore holes in the fabric of the church. Through it all we have never lost sight of what has always made us church. We have never thrown away our core beliefs and the centrality of discipleship in Christ Jesus. When new ideas arise, we test them, wash them, put them through the wringer, until they can be safely added to the cloak of our Tradition. The cloak itself never changes; it only becomes better and richer as we add the patches that are necessary. To be holy is to be full of holes.

We patch our holes with people. Good people. People who see the clarity of Jesus’ gospel with fresh eyes. Oftentimes our most prized moments as church are the ones that bear the most scars. Coincidently, the most traumatic crises in our history have produced the greatest of our saints. Our cloak is extremely tattered and worn, but we keep on patching it because we’d never dream of getting rid of it. Worn as it is, it is still ours.

We can’t run away from our history, both as a people and as a church. We must learn from our mistakes. Every patch we add to our cloaks is a reminder that there was once a tear there. If we had just replaced the cloak and not mended it we wouldn’t have those reminders. When Jesus appeared to the disciples in the upper room on Easter Sunday, his glorified body still bore the scars of his life and death here on earth. The disciples knew him because of the evidence of his history. Thomas didn’t want to just see the risen Lord to be convinced, he wanted to actually touch the scars of his crucifixion. He didn’t believe in a completely new Lord, he believed in the same Jesus he knew before. Thomas knew and loved that Jesus because he himself was part of the cloak of Jesus’ life. He was one of the holes that Jesus had patched.

As we enter into Lent this week, we remember that we are an imperfect people, both individually and as church. We are called to recognize our imperfections and to commit ourselves once again to reconcile ourselves to God and to one another. Just as our patches remind us of the holes that were once there, Lent reminds us that we have been healed, and will always be healed, if we only take the time to mend.