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.