Memorial of St Joachim and St Anne,
Parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Readings of the Day: Exodus 33.7-11; 34.5b; 28 / Psalm 103.6-13 /Matthew 13.36-43
"The Lord is kind and merciful."
We join with the psalmist of old to proclaim
this truth of who God is this evening.
This truth is expressed in our reading from Exodus
of Moses meeting God in the tent.
Here, in this man-made space,
Moses and the Israelites come to consult God.
But the ironic beauty of this encounter
is that God deigns to dwell in this tent,
conceived in human thought and fashioned with human hands.
Even more delightful is God speaking face to face with Moses,
“as one man speaks to another.”
And in this conversation, God reveals Godself
as “a merciful and gracious God
slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity,”
whose goodness extends not only to the Israelites saved
but to all generations to come.
God’s decision to dwell with Israel
enlarges the tent that Moses pitched:
it is not just a place of encounter.
God in kindness transforms limited, human craft
into the boundless sacred ark, God’s dwelling place,
not only for Godself but for humankind to be with God always.
In this place, then, Moses not only comes to know God
but stays with a merciful God who saves humankind
for nothing less than eternal covenant.
“Widening the tent”
can help us better celebrate today’s feast of Joachim and Anne.
We know nothing of them scripturally.
But tradition invites us to meditate on Joachim and Anne,
as God’s faithful people.
In their prayer, charity and fidelity, they call our attention to
God’s quiet invitation that we necessarily widen
the tent of our human faith
to welcome the messianic saving action
of a kind and merciful God into our lives and the world.
But widening our faith-filled lives,
this space where God dwells in you and me,
can only come to be if we dare to heed Jesus’ words
as they are really meant in today’s Gospel,
“Whoever has ears ought to hear.”
What Jesus’ call is is for us to open, expand, broaden ourselves
to and for God, in ways God only wishes.
We who have ears so often claim
that the parable of the weeds and the wheat
is about the good and the evil, the dutiful and the disobedient,
the saved saints and the unsaved sinners.
About two groups of people:
those who will be admitted into
and those who will be cast out
of communion with God.
I’d like to think that Jesus speaks more profoundly about God
who saves all, including ourselves, in kindness and mercy.
I’d like to believe that if Jesus were here,
he would challenge all thus:
listen, hear, understand:know that each and everyone, including you,my beloved companions,are filled with weeds and wheat.Weeds smother, suffocate,the wheat from growing to its full potential.Your weeds diminishyour giftedness to widen the tent of your life and faithto God and for others,and in this way, to live to the full.
So, we who have ears cannot help but hear
in today’s readings, a call to pause,
to reflect honestly on, and to grow up from this:
we build our own tents
-- tents communal, political, racial;
-- tents patriarchal and sexual;
-- tents theological.
And yes, there in these spaces, we will indeed find God
for God is always present to us.
But could it be that in these very tents,
shaped by reason, culture and prayer,
God is,
in God’s continuing kindness and mercy,
challenging us to enlarge,
to broaden, to widen even more these spaces
for God to be God,
and for us to be a little more human, and a lot more divine?
This is the final homily I preached to Xavier Jesuit Community this summer.
photo: farmlands by adsj (french countryside; july 2009)
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