18th Sunday

18th Sunday Ordinary
August 1, 2004
"Vanity of vanities!... All things are vanity! Here is one who has labored with wisdom and knowledge and skill, and yet to another who has not labored over it, he must leave property." (Ec 1:2, 2:21-23) "Think of what is above, not of what is on earth." (Col 3:1-5, 9-11) "But God said to him, 'You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong? Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves but are not rich in what matters to God." (Luke 12:13-21)
The readings this week all address one of the most difficult of all spiritual precepts: the futility of our tenacious pursuit of and attachment to material wealth. Jesus, responding to someone asking him to adjudicate a dispute about an inheritance, roughly rebukes him and then tells this parable about the man who was elated about how much wealth he had amassed, and his anxiety about preserving it all. His reply does not make the pursuit of earthly and spiritual goods mutually exclusive. But, he warns about excessive anxiety over how much we need, and where we place our security and ultimate hopes. Apparently, this was no less a problem two millennia ago than it is now. We all know that we cannot take our accumulated property and wealth with us, but we seem to continue to act as if we can.
Almost every day I check my little retirement account, marking minor ups and downs with delight or anxiety depending on the direction of the changes in the market. Then I realize it could all go away in a moment, and the Spirit reminds me about where my real wealth is. Recently a family we know lost their home in a fire in which no one was hurt. The couple reportedly said, once over the shock, that it was a great loss, but that it was only things. I and they know, when pressed by the reality of the uncertainties of life, that the only thing that endures is love. This is what "matters to God", the only real treasure.
Many of us have been following the recent financial difficulties in the church, brought on by lawsuits connected with the aftermath of clergy sexual abuse. We worry about what will happen to the properties and material goods which we have worked hard to acquire for the sake of the mission of the church. In our anxiety we may be tempted to blame the victims or the perpetrators for creating these problems.
Jesus' words "you fool..." can as easily apply to the church as to individuals. In truth the church's possessions can as easily be an obstacle as they are a means to the spread of the gospel of Christ. Our history is complete with abundant examples of this fact. Reform and repentance is costly and usually only happens when we are forced into it by unavoidable circumstances. We may be forced, by our own shortsightedness, and the demands of justice to actually live without many things we have thought necessary.
Loris Buccola

17th Sunday

17th Sunday Ordinary
July 25, 2004

"But he still persisted: "Please, let not my Lord grow angry if I speak up this last time. What if there are at least ten there?" He replied, "For the sake of those ten, I will not destroy it." (Genesis 18:20-32)
Ask and you shall receive... If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heavengive the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?" (Luke 11 1-13)


Father Abraham "bargains" with the Most High to spare the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, gradually getting God to agree to do so if only for the sake of ten good people. The Patriarch's prayer is a conversation with an intimate friend. In his day it would have been unheard of to imagine that someone could have this kind of easy conversation with God. The gods of his day were meant to inspire submission, fear and awe. Abraham is polite, respectful and persistent, as if speaking with a kindly Father.


Jesus, in response to a request from a disciple, teaches us how to pray. First, he gives us the "Our Father", which most of us memorized as children, the prayer which is imprinted on our hearts even if we often fail to pay attention to what the words mean. He then gives an example from everyday life about the importance of persistence in prayer, comparing it to someone who gets what they need by being a pain in the neck. He compares our relationship with the Father to a parent who cannot resist a child's request for food.


Prayer is a conversation with the Most High. It is most efficacious when done in the spirit of an intimate relationship where no request is "too much". We also know that often our prayers seem to go unanswered, especially when we ask for specifics. Note in the gospel that Jesus promises that our Father in heaven will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask. We are not promised that every whim, even every heartfelt desire, will be answered with some miraculous cure or transformation. The Spirit taught me this lesson early in my disease. When I pray for a cure it creates anxiety; when I simply converse with the Holy Spirit with an attitude of awe and gratitude I am almost immediately at peace.


We are promised that the Holy Spirit of the Father will be with us consistently through whatever pain or difficulty life presents us. This is the prayer that never goes unanswered, the heartfelt desire for and awareness of the compassionate, nurturing presence of God. The purest prayer is the one which asks to be conformed to the image of God, regardless of what life dishes out in spite of all our best efforts to make things come out right. We are taught many places in our tradition that this prayer itself is a gift from God. We are not praying to change the mind of the Most High about anything. We are praying to be reminded of that presence which in truth never goes away.


Loris Buccola

16th Sunday Ordinary

16th Sunday Ordinary
July 18, 2004

"The Lord appeared to Abraham... as he sat at the entrance of his tent... Looking up he saw three men standing nearby" (Genesis 18:1-10)
"Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing." (Luke 10:38-42)
• Father Abraham has a vision on a hot day. We can imagine him snoozing in the shade of his tent, the Most High appearing to him in a dream, then waking up to the "reality" of these divine messengers. He and Sarah both were in old age, still hoping for a child, and they are promised that their hopes will be fulfilled.
• I am struck with the coincidence between Abraham's vision of God and the appearance of divine messengers in human form. Dream and awakening seem to be fused together into one reality. Most of us have had similar experiences in which it is at least momentarily difficult to distinguish the two. In fact heaven and earth are much more of a single reality than we sometimes realize. How often, on a daily basis, are we "visited" by someone in our life who comes along just at the right time, a divine presence in human form. I often think of these people in my own life as my angels, bringing me help, reassurance, comforting presence. Periodically, Jane and I throw them a party with free food and drink, something like Abraham preparing a sumptuous meal for his visitors to welcome, acknowledge and thank them. Perhaps the "miracle" of the fulfillment of Abraham and Sarah's hopes is not so miraculous after all if we could see how closely heaven and earth, divine and human, time and eternity are tied together.
• Jesus' encounter with Mary and Martha illustrates something similar. Jesus is approached by Martha who is complaining that she has to do all the work while Mary sits around talking with him. In the Christian theological tradition this has been taken as a teaching about the superiority of the contemplative over the active life of discipleship. As if the two could be separated in reality. I personally wonder how I would survive without the Martha's in my life. Spiritually productive human activity always contains an element of simple awe and wonder in the presence of God. Martha was being corrected at a moment when she was out of touch with this. We might notice that she is not scolded for doing helpful things, but for being anxious and worried. We don't hear what Jesus may have said to Mary about getting up to help out.
• Just as Abraham's experience brings together time and eternity, action and contemplation (he and Sarah did get up to welcome and prepare a meal for the three men), so Martha and Mary together represent life in the presence of God. Everything we do and experience happens in the context of the interplay between earthly and heavenly realities.

15th Sunday

15th Sunday Ordinary
July 11, 2004

"If only you would heed the voice of the Lord... it is not up in the sky... nor across the sea... it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out." (Deuteronomy 30:10-14)
"Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "What is written in the law? How do you read it?" He said in reply, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself." He replied to him, "You have answered correctly; do this and you will live." (Luke 10:25-37)
• The selection from the Torah expresses in a beautiful and succinct way the nature of our moral relationship to the Most High and to each other, if we would desire to pursue a true religious and spiritual path. The divine law is written on our hearts. We were created in the image of the Most High, including an internal image of our creator's goodness, love and hunger for justice.
• This teaching was a great advance in its time over the "law of retaliation" which dictated "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth". We know, both from this teaching and from the many sayings of Jesus including today's, that God's measurement of justice is not based on vengeance, but on love, forgiveness and compassion.
• Jesus' story of the "Good Samaritan" comes at the end of a conversation with a teacher of the Law in which Jesus uses the man's own answer to educate him, and then tells a story to make his point. The Samaritan, one least expected to demonstrate compassion because he was a despised foreigner not acquainted with the subtleties of "religious" legal requirements, follows the divine law of love written on his heart. Again, it is the outsider who teaches us about the ways of God. Small wonder that Jesus, like so many of his prophetic forerunners, provoked such opposition from official circles of religious authority.
• As with so many other stories from the scriptures, all of the participants can be applied to us metaphorically. We can see ourselves individually and collectively as the person beaten at the side of the road, bleeding and ignored; as the aloof zealots sure of their correctness, passing by unconcerned; as the compassionate and generous Samaritan ignoring urgent business to care for the oppressed.
• Jesus' final reply to his questioner, "do this and you will live" suggests that not to do so will result in spiritual and religious death. What if we were to take this teaching seriously and abandon the long outmoded "justice" of vengeance and retaliation? More specifically, how might our views about the proper consequences of criminal behavior (international, national and personal) be transformed? Is it really possible for us who choose the religious and spiritual path of life to ignore the law of love and compassion written on our hearts?
Loris Buccola