I hear the whisperings of many: “Terror on every side! Denounce! let us denounce him!” All those who were my friends are on the watch for any misstep of mine.
Jeremiah 20:10
Oh, the deadly power of a fragile whisper! Its insidious influence seeps into souls, germinates, and grows into fictional suggestions, untested prejudices, and effective shunning by the “in” set.
Whispers are the emanations of fear – we may fear what is different, what we cannot control, what challenges us, what actually exposes pretense in us.
Jeremiah and Jesus encountered the ugly entanglement of such whispers. But they were not trapped because they believed.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy: We pray their prayer for ourselves and for all who suffer the persecution of “whisperings”.
The LORD is with me, like a mighty champion: my persecutors will stumble, they will not triumph. O LORD of hosts, you who test the just, who probe mind and heart, Let me witness the recompense you take on them, for to You I have entrusted my cause.
Poetry: A Word – Emily Dickinson
A word is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just Begins to live That day.
Music: from Handel’s Messiah: He trusted in God that He would deliver him
I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives how to know the LORD. All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD, for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.
Jeremiah 31: 33-34
My Uncle Joe was full of life – a little wildness, a little wisdom, and a lot of love. Only seventeen years older than I, he was more like my older brother. His mother, my grandmother, died when I was almost three and he was twenty. One night months later, after partying with his buddies, he came home with a big tattoo on his upper arm something like this:
There is a whole psychology around why people get tattoos, but I think it boils down to expressing something that’s otherwise inexpressible. The tattoo was Joe’s way of holding on to someone who had anchored his life.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
In our first reading, Jeremiah kind of tells us that if God had tattoos, our name would be one of them. We are inscribed on God’s heart in an inexpressible covenant of love. Let’s live so that, if our hearts became visible, God’s Name would be clearly etched there as well.
Poetry: I carry your heart – e.e.cummings
i carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart) i am never without it (anywhere i go you go, my dear ;and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) I want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
Alleluia, alleluia. A great prophet has arisen in our midst and God has visited the people.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our readings carry the themes of Hope and Restoration.
Jeremiah tells the people that, even after all they’ve been through, God has an age-old love for them and therefore will not abandon them.
Jeremiah continues with a description of the future coming of the Savior, promising that Israel will be restored:
Yes, a day will come when the watchmen will call out on Mount Ephraim: “Rise up, let us go to Zion, to the LORD, our God.” For thus says the LORD: Shout with joy for Jacob, exult at the head of the nations; proclaim your praise and say: The LORD has delivered the people, the remnant of Israel.
Our Alleluia Verse announces that this expected Savior has arrived in Jesus Christ, the Divine Shepherd, Lord, Guardian and Redeemer whom Jeremiah describes in our Responsorial Psalm.
Alleluia, alleluia. A great prophet has arisen in our midst and God has visited the people.
Matthew’s Gospel today, which can seem a little contentious in tone, actually demonstrates the surprising truth that Jesus came not only for the sake of Israel, but for all people — for us.
We are all beneficiaries of God’s age-old love for us.
Poetry: You are the future, the great sunrise red – Rainer Maria Rilke
You are the future, the great sunrise red above the broad plains of eternity. You are the cock-crow when time’s night has fled, You are the dew, the matins, and the maid, the stranger and the mother, you are death.
You are the changeful shape that out of Fate rears up in everlasting solitude, the unlamented and the unacclaimed, beyond describing as some savage wood.
You are the deep epitome of things that keeps its being’s secret with locked lip, and shows itself to others otherwise: to the ship, a haven — to the land, a ship.
Music: I Have Loved You – Michael Joncas
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine;
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine.
Seek the face of the Lord and long for him: He will bring you his light and his peace.
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine;
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine.
Seek the face of the Lord and long for him: He will bring you his joy and his hope.
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine;
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine.
Seek the face of the Lord and long for him: He will bring you his care and his love.
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine;
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our readings convey compelling stories and life-changing miracles.
The passage from Jeremiah tells the tale of the false prophet Hananiah. He didn’t tell the people the truth. He was a kind of ancient “prosperity preacher” who spun a message similar to one we might hear today.
Prosperity theology (sometimes referred to as the prosperity gospel, the health and wealth gospel, the gospel of success, or seed faith)is a religious belief among some Protestant Christians that financial blessing and physical well-being are always the will of God for them, and that faith, positive speech, and donations to religious causes will increase one’s material wealth. Material and especially financial success is seen as a sign of divine favor.
Wikipedia
Prosperity religion in centered on “me” and what I have to do to have “enough” and “more than enough” material goods and spiritual assurances.
Alleluia, alleluia. One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.
In our reading from Matthew, Jesus acts out the true Gospel. It is centered on others,especially those in need.
Picture the moment. Jesus has been gut-punched by the barbarous murder of his beloved friend and cousin John. He wants to be alone to mourn. Watch him, in your heart’s eye, as he rows alone across the lake to a place of longed-for solitude. Every swish and pull through the water is a memory of John, is a hope and fragment of the dream they shared. Every oar’s dipping is a word with his Father to understand the “why”.
And yet, on the lake’s other side, where the needy crowd has found him out, he sets his own need aside. Jesus heals. He feeds. He teaches. He IS for the other not himself.
His words summarize what his actions model. He tells the gathered people that he has fed their bodies – met their material needs. But there is so much more to spiritual wholeness. Every word from the mouth of God — even the word that John had died — every word brings grace, and the call to feed and heal the world around us.
Alleluia, alleluia. One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.
Poetry: Not By Bread Alone – James Terry White
If thou of fortune be bereft, And thou dost find but two loaves left To thee—sell one, and with the dole Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.
But not alone does beauty bide Where bloom and tint and fragrance hide; The minstrel's melody may feed Perhaps a more insistent need.
But every beauty, howe'er blent To ear or eye, fails to content; Only the heart, with love afire, Can satisfy the soul's desire.
Alleluia, alleluia. Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
( Dear Friends, I have just come home from the funeral of one of our Sisters – a beloved, holy, humble human being – full of love, generosity and joy. I would love to offer today’s reflection based on the power of her Home-Going Ceremony. But I need more time to let that brew in my heart. So, since I am running quite late, I am offering an edited reflection from two years ago for today’s reflection. But, trust me, you will be hearing soon about the miracle of Sister Margery Lowry.)
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, Jeremiah and John the Baptist are living out the meaning.of Psalm 69.
Each of these great prophets has been ensnared by the civic evil of their times, personified in Old Testament princes and New Testament Herod and Herodias. The power structure surrounding each prophet stood in direct contradiction to their witness to God’s Word. Those structures, when confronted with a sacred truth, tried to overwhelm the messenger, like quicksand swallows an innocent traveler.
Rescue me out of the mire; may I not sink! may I be rescued from my foes, and from the watery depths. Let not the flood-waters overwhelm me, nor the abyss swallow me up, nor the pit close its mouth over me.
Psalm 69 raises to our prayer the reality that such struggles continue in our time. We live in a wonderful but still sinful world where every person decides, everyday, where he or she will stand in the contest between good and evil.
The decision is sometimes very clear. At other times, the waters are so muddied with lies, propaganda, greed, fear, bias. and unexamined privilege that we feel mired in confusion or resistance.
But I am afflicted and in pain; let your saving help, O God, protect me. I will praise the name of God in song, and I will glorify him with thanksgiving.
Psalm 69 throws us a rescue line in today’s final verse:
See, you lowly ones, and be glad; you who seek God, may your hearts revive! For the LORD hears the poor, and his own who are in bonds God spurns not.
The steady path to truth lies with those who seek God among the humble and poor. The humble are the ones through whom the Lord speaks. They are God’s own. Jeremiah and the Baptist understood this truth and preached it by their lives.
We might examine our lives today in the light of their witness and the message of this challenging psalm.
Poetry: Beginners – Denise Levertov
‘From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea—‘
But we have only begun
to love the earth.
We have only begun
to imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope?
—so much is in bud.
How can desire fail?
—we have only begun
to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision
how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.
Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?
Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?
Not yet, not yet—
there is too much broken
that must be mended,
too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.
We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.
So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,
so much is in bud.
Alleluia, alleluia. I call you my friends, says the Lord, for I have made known to you all that the Father has told me.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our readings begin with Jeremiah’s heartfelt lament.
Woe to me, mother, that you gave me birth! a man of strife and contention to all the land!
Jeremiah 15:10
The cry reminds us of Isaiah’s words heard during Lent to describe Jesus’s Passion, words which inspired a magnificent aria in Handel’s Messiah::
He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with sorrow. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Isaiah 53:3
It is not always easy to be a “friend of God”. These scriptures paint a clear picture of the prophet’s painful path – whether Jeremiah, Isaiah, Jesus, or today’s prophets like Pope Francis. There will always be enemies who, for the sake of their twisted self-interest, attack good with evil.
But there is also always hope. God is with us, a stronghold of Mercy, as our Responsorial Psalm tells us:
But I will sing of your strength and revel at dawn in your mercy; You have been my stronghold, my refuge in the day of distress.
O my strength! your praise will I sing; for you, O God, are my stronghold, my merciful God!
Psalm 59: 10-11; 17,18
Our Gospel assures us that, though at times costly, there is no treasure greater than God’s friendship.
The Kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells everything to buy that field.
Notice that the person patiently plans to buy the whole field, not just the one discovered gem. Friendship with God never exhausts its hidden surprises. There are always more treasures in the field as we grow deeper in God’s love.
I have seen the sun break through to illuminate a small field for a while, and gone my way and forgotten it. But that was the pearl of great price, the one field that had treasure in it. I realise now that I must give all that I have to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Music: The Field – Kristene DiMarco (Lyrics below)
What do I have but Jesus I have found no one Like Him All the World has loses its Appeal When He Stands beside me
[Chorus] The World can keep its Praises All its Riches and its Treasures ‘Cause there’s nothing Like His Presence to me And man may give their Favor All their Fleeting awe and Honor But there’s nothing Like His Presence to me
[Verse 2] What do I have but Jesus Nothing I’ve gained Compares His Friendship is all The Strength I need To never grow weary
[Chorus] The World can keep its Praises All its Riches and its Treasures ‘Cause there’s nothing Like His Presence to me And man may give their Favor All their Fleeting awe and Honor But there’s nothing Like His Presence to me
[Outro] I bought the Field And I keep digging up More Treasure It turns out it’s here in the ground I could never Measure Is there even a Cost if I end up Holding Heaven Oh, the Beauty of Living In Your Presence
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, Jeremiah images Israel as a bride, the sacred betrothed of God:
I remember the devotion of your youth, how you loved me as a bride, Following me in the desert, in a land unsown. Sacred to the LORD was Israel, the first fruits of his harvest; Should any presume to partake of them, evil would befall them, says the LORD.
Jeremiah 2: 1-3
These passionate verses portray a heartbroken and angry God lamenting Israel’s ingratitude and unfaithfulness.
Be amazed at this, O heavens, and shudder with sheer horror, says the LORD. Two evils have my people done: they have forsaken me, the source of living waters; They have dug themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that hold no water.
Jeremiah 2:12-13
This reading from Jeremiah is about a loss of innocence, and the spiritual fragmentation it can bring. Our Alleluia Verse, on the other hand, leads to a Gospel that proclaims the restoration of an “eternal innocence” rooted in “knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven”.
Alleluia, alleluia. Blessed are you, God, Creator of heaven and earth; you have revealed to little ones the mysteries of the Kingdom.
There is a human innocence that comes from not knowing any better, a kind of blind trust that hasn’t yet been “burned”.
But don’t confuse “innocence” with naïveté.
The Gospel innocence Jesus describes isn’t blind and it isn’t naive. It does know better. It recognizes and chooses the cost of a faithful life. That recognition and choice yield a profound spiritual freedom that is the ultimate innocence.
Blessed are your eyes, because they see, and your ears, because they hear. Amen, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.
Matthew 13: 16-17
Poetry: The Divine Image – William Blake
from The Project Gutenberg
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God our Father dear
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is man, his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart ;
Pity, a human face ;
And Love, the human form divine ;
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine :
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew,
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.
Music: U2 – A Song for Someone from Songs of Innocence
When you listen to this highly poetic song, could God be your “someone”?
Alleluia, alleluia. The seed is the word of God, Christ is the sower; all who come to him will live for ever.
Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our first reading recounts Jeremiah’s call. Oh, and it has a sovereign ring to it, doesn’t it! You can almost hear trumpets accompanying the words:
The word of the LORD came to me thus: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you, a prophet to the nations I appointed you.
Jeremiah 1: 2-3
Long before Jeremiah knew, the Word had been instilled in him. At the appointed time, God called for that Word to bear fruit.
At our creation, God breathed the Divine Word into our hearts too. Jesus says it was like a farmer planting seed. And our humble, patient Creator waits to see if we turn out to be rich soil.
A sower went out to sow.
… some seed fell on the path,
and birds came and ate it up.
Some fell on rocky ground,
…. the sun rose it was scorched,
Some seed fell among thorns
which choked it.
But some seed fell on rich soil,
and produced fruit,
a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.
Whoever has ears ought to hear.
(from Matthew 13: 1-9)
When Jeremiah heard about the Word in his heart, he didn’t immediately have “ears to hear”. At first, he resisted:
“Ah, Lord GOD!” I said, “I know not how to speak; I am too young.”
Jeremiah
Every day, God continues to call forth the fruitful Word from us. Sometimes we resist. Our lives can be a little rocky, thorny, or we might just be off the path a bit.
We also might make excuses to ignore the call of grace:
too young
too old
too tired
too busy
too afraid
too weak
We might just too … too… too ourselves into spiritual quicksand!
Our beautiful psalm tells what to say instead of our “too”s:
For you are my hope, O Lord; my trust, O God, from my youth. On you I depend from birth; from my mother’s womb you are my strength.
My mouth shall declare your justice, day by day your salvation. O God, you have taught me from my youth, and till the present I proclaim your wondrous deeds.
Psalm 71: 5-6; 15,17
Poetry: Two poems today – one from Wendell Berry and one from me. His is way better. 🙂
The Wild Geese – Wendell Berry
Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer's end. In time's maze
over the fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed's marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.
If You Are Mother – Renee Yann, RSM
If you are Mother, God
don’t let us hurt ourselves;
keep freedom in us
as freedom,
not as willfulness,
so that we grow
even if we must grow down
like a dark, hidden root.
Remember,
if life dies in us,
You change. We are not
isolated seedlings
you left somewhere
in lonely hope one spring.
You are the ground, and the
growth, and the growth’s nourishment.
When we green, it is You
who thrive.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, as we inch closer to Holy Week, we meet both a very troubled Jeremiah and Jesus.
The Prophet Jeremiah Weeping Alone on a Hill (from the Wellcome Trust)
Jeremiah, the Old Testament mirror of Jesus’s sufferings, bewails the treachery even of his friends:
I hear the whisperings of many: “Terror on every side! Denounce! let us denounce him!” All those who were my friends are on the watch for any misstep of mine.
Jeremiah 20:10
That’s really raw, because you can get through almost anything in the company of true friends.
Jesus Weeping Over Jerusalem by Ary Scheffer (1795-1858)
Jesus came as a Friend and hoped to find Friends of God by his ministry. And he did find many. But not all.
It takes some work to be a true friend of Jesus. Some didn’t have the courage, or generosity, or passion, or hopeful imagination to reach past their self-protective boundaries – to step into eternal life even as they walked the time-bound earth.
In today’s Gospel this band of resisters project their fears and doubts to the crowds around them. The evil sparks inflame the ready tinder of human selfishness. The mob turns on Jesus, spiritual misers scoffing at the generous challenge to believe.
Jesus pleads with them to realize what they are doing:
If I do not perform my Father’s works, do not believe me; but if I perform them, even if you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may realize and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.
John 10:37-38
But Jesus and Jeremiah, though troubled, are grounded in God. Our Responsorial Psalm captures what might have been their silent prayer:
Poetry: The following transliteration of Psalm 18, composed by Christine Robinson, might help us to be with Jesus in his moment, and in our own moments of fear, anxiety, or doubt.
I open my heart to you, O God for you are my strength, my fortress, the rock on whom I build my life. I have been lost in my fears and my angers caught up in falseness, fearful, and furious I cried to you in my anguish. You have brought me to an open space. You saved me because you took delight in me. I try to be good, to be just, to be generous to walk in your ways. I fail, but you are my lamp. You make my darkness bright With your help, I continue to scale the walls and break down the barriers that fragment me. I would be whole, and happy, and wise and know your love Always.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, danger continues to escalate for Jesus.
Our first reading from Jeremiah foreshadows Jesus’s situation. Some powerful people didn’t want to hear what Jeremiah preached. And we can understand why: Jeremiah prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem because of Israel’s unfaithfulness. It’s a message that was hard to swallow.
The core of Jeremiah’s teaching was this: You people have to change. This is not the way God created the world to be.
But the people couldn’t listen. They had let the skewed reality of their lives become normal and needed. They couldn’t accept the world of mutual love and justice that God imagined for them.
Jesus meets the same kind of stonewalling.
In today’s passage, the hard-hearted rationalize their resistance:
“The Christ will not come from Galilee, will he? Does not Scripture say that the Christ will be of David’s family and come from Bethlehem, the village where David lived?”
But their antagonism isn’t really about geography and lineage. It’s about blind comfort in a world balanced toward their advantage. It’s about the fear of grace-inspired change.
Isn’t it the truth that we’ll use almost any argument to resist what demands our conversion? I understand why these guys “each went to his own house”, as the Gospel says in closing. They took refuge from grace in the little roofed pretense of their own control.
They didn’t have the courage to open their hearts to Jesus. Do we?
Poetry: LOVE IS THE MASTER – RUMI
Love is the One who masters all things;
I am mastered totally by Love.
By my passion of love for Love
I have ground sweet as sugar.
O furious Wind, I am only a straw before you;
How could I know where I will be blown next?
Whoever claims to have made a pact with Destiny
Reveals himself a liar and a fool;
What is any of us but a straw in a storm?
How could anyone make a pact with a hurricane?
God is working everywhere his massive Resurrection;
How can we pretend to act on our own?
In the hand of Love I am like a cat in a sack;
Sometimes Love hoists me into the air,
Sometimes Love flings me into the air,
Love swings me round and round His head;
I have no peace, in this world or any other.
The lovers of God have fallen in a furious river;
They have surrendered themselves to Love’s commands.
Like mill wheels they turn, day and night, day and night,
Constantly turning and turning, and crying out.
Lavish Mercy 