Richard Bollman, S.J.
6th SUNDAY of the YEAR, C, 2010
Jeremiah 17:5-8; Luke 6:17-26
"Come to Know Your Heart"
Today’s Gospel,
and the selection we hear from Jeremiah’s prophetic teaching,
are alike in this: they both set out contrasting ways of life.
The contrast calls us to look at our own basic values,
what do we trust, what do we pass on to our children,
what is our bottom line of reliance.
Or, closer to the words of the Bible,
where have you placed your heart?
What do you imagine to be your source of blessing?
In between these readings, we follow the letter of Paul to the Corinthians,
continuing chapter 15, where Paul affirms so strongly
the resurrection of Jesus as the core of our trust.
Remember, Paul is a Jewish scholar who preaches Christ
because he had an experience of the risen Jesus.
That encounter was as vivid to him
as was the eye-witness contact of the 12 apostles.
So let us listen to be encouraged in our own faith,
and to be called to know our own hearts, insofar as we can.
HOMILY.
Where is your heart. What is your real source of blessing?
That’s the question raised by what we hear from Jesus
in this most famous of his teachings.
And the question comes to us in a mixed crowd.
Like the first group of followers who listened to Jesus.
Like the early community of Christian believers who heard Luke’s Gospel.
some rich, a Roman merchant or two, a senator’s wife,
some poor, laborers, widows, perhaps slaves looking for a new life.
If we take this as a private question, a magazine interview you do at home,
we tend to think our private ingenuity will have the answer already down.
our heart is with our children or our profession, our hobby of sailing,
or our gardening or our service work, all that we initiate and inspire and achieve.
But listen in to the questions here where you come on Sundays.
We listen with friends and strangers, rich and the poor.
We are here with those who search for jobs and those who are securely retired,
with struggling young families, with women and men who have given their lives
in professional service for healing, teaching, mediation,
and we listen among those who wonder about Church, who feel a little marginal.
Maybe they’ve been ignored by the hierarchy,
or wounded by earlier encounters with church authorities, or their boss, or spouse.
We are the rich and the poor. The secure and the unsteady.
And we are a very odd a bunch, 21st century Christians who join up on Sundays
because this congregation of friends and more or less strangers
opens the door to some privileged way of hearing and responding to life.
Where is your heart in this mixed crowd?
Here’s my direction with this question.
I want to say that it’s important to trust your poverty rather than your wealth.
Allow for aches and uncertainty that you might feel
whenever the name of God comes up.
Allow for your questions and your anger, your empty places.
Get to know your darkness, your questions, your actual life: it is welcome here.
I wish we could say that on a poster somewhere:
come in, especially if you don’t like Church.
Not because we have a great show,
but because this is the essential poverty of spirit that Jesus Christ longs to meet.
This is exactly the congregation he addresses:
the poor and the wondering and the messy.
Come with your need for help, for companionship, for hope.
I have heard that people meet people here,
and that such an opening becomces a doorway for meeting God.
I have heard that people get interested in service,
or maybe their children’s faith here, how to assist and pray with them,
and this starts to create a wave of wonder in our own selves.
It opens up: what do I believe, how am I behaving,
how am I called to make a difference?
And who can walk with me as I want to talk with my family or learn to pray?
I say this with a little trepidation, as if you might turn to me for all the answers
since after all I have the microphone.
No, I’m wanting to tell you what the Gospel says,
that when we trust our riches and abundance, when we are satisfied with things,
we will ultimately go hungry, we will be lonely and cut off.
It is in trusting our poverty that the kingdom starts to make sense.
(I think that’s why Jesuits tend never to answer question,
but try instead to help you find better ones!)
The Jewish tradition calls us to a radical trust trust in God the Lord:
the alternative is a wasteland, a darkness, as Jeremiah says,
we are cut off from the source of life.
In the Gospels that source is announced by Jesus
as the Kingdom of God, or the Reign of God,
which is a present reality, breaking through in Christ who is with us.
This is the ground of things, the way things are, and we get close to it
in our poverty, our willingness to be present with our heart as it is.
I remember some years back the death of a teenager here, in a fluke accident,
wanting to say something not to insult his parents or take away the tragic loss,
and what you mainly find to say is this:
in your loss, look around here. We will walk with you,
we’ll stay awake to help as we can
and continue a faith in life, in your life as parents even yet.
So, come along up close to your apprehensions,
your questions, your need for companionship
and you start to come close to your poverty.
Don’t turn away, don’t try to fill it up with artificial riches.
Years ago I came across an essay about these matters
by the American theologian Monica Helwig.
She asked the question "Do the Poor Understand the Gospel Better"?
Some of you have experience of this reality: it is the heart of any encounter
you might have working in Harlan, or Central America, you’ve spoken of it:
the quality of the faith and trust that opens up among the poor.
But take it on for yourselves. In your own poverty.
Here are just five of fifteen elements of the faith of the poor
that Monica Helwig lists. These she sees among communities
that have had some conscious faith, that are not just reactive or violent.
The poor know that they are in urgent need of redemption.
The poor know their dependence on God, and on powerful people,
but also their interdependence with one another.
The poor expect little from competition and much from cooperation.
The poor can distinguish between necessities and luxuries.
And finally, the poor listen to the Gospel as good news, not a threat or a scolding.
Where is your heart, the prophet asks.
Where do you place your trust, Jesus asks?
The even more important questions is this: where is your poverty?
Where does it burn and pain you, embarrass you even,
where does it look for companionship?
And there is the kingdom of heaven.