What follows is my homily this Sunday for the Emmaus Inclusive Catholic Community, which continues to meet monthly even though we lost our Roman Catholic Woman Priest, Ruthie, last Easter. Tune in for more about the Emmaus Community next Sunday.
The Sunday scriptures both last week
and this week have spoken about what it takes to be a prophet – last week we
heard about Jonah, the prophet who didn’t want to go to Nineveh (Jonah
3:1-5,10) but finally did (after taking a detour through a fish’s belly), and
this week we hear about Moses (Deut. 18:15-20) begging God to appoint a new
prophet to the Israelites. It seems that hearing God’s voice and seeing God’s
fire got to be too much for Moses, and he was afraid he’d die if it kept on
happening. Moses and Jonah found that hearing and responding to what God wants can
pretty challenging. Does that resonate with you at all?
And then there’s Jesus, the Son of
God, the most connected prophet of them all. In today’s reading (Mark 1:21-28)
the people are enthralled by him, saying, “He speaks with authority! Even the
unclean spirits obey him!” And the excitement around him builds, and his fame
spreads, at least until he starts challenging them to look at their own lives.
Being a prophet IS hard work, because
you can’t be a really good prophet unless you’ve done the work that gets your
own ego out of the way and unless you know who you’re talking about, like
Jesus clearly did. Both Moses and Jonah weren’t quite up to the challenges God
set for them, but Jesus managed to hear God’s voice and see God’s fire and
speak God’s truth because he knew himself to be God’s child, God’s beloved, and
he trusted God to take care of the rest. Moses and Jonah seem to have developed
small “God complexes” thanks to their egos – saying to themselves, God wants
this, but maybe it would be better if I did it my way – and they got steered off
course a few times.
I’m guessing that’s because it’s just
too easy to second-guess God. When things are moving along smoothly and life is
going according to our plans, prayers of thanksgiving and praise flow
naturally. But when God asks for things that seem chaotic and beyond our control,
our egos spring into action to try to fix things. Maybe we harden our hearts a
little. We make excuses, we come up with alternate plans, and we forget how to
listen to what God really wants and do it God's way. For me, prayer usually goes out the
window when I jump into fix-it-myself mode.
But Jesus spent a lot of time
listening to God. He prayed so that he could go with the Divine Flow instead of
what his ego told him. The only thing he ever said that sounded like
second-guessing God was when he said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me?” But I think what he was really
doing was showing us that it’s okay to be human, to have doubts and fears, as
long as you leave everything in God’s loving hands. That’s the ultimate
challenge. Which he accepted and fulfilled, on that cross.
I’ll admit to having second-guessed
God many times in my life, never with good results. The most recent is in
dealing with my youngest child, who came out recently as a non-binary,
asexual teenager. Jay has gone through a legal name change now so that their
legal identity fits who they feel that they are, neither a boy nor a girl, but
somewhere in between. Jay is Jay.
Unfortunately, through it all, my "God
complex", my ego, kept insisting that Jay was just passing through a phase, or attention-seeking,
or going through teenage self-esteem issues and insecurities, and that they’d
get over it, given enough time. In the meantime, I took on a lot of guilt and self-blame
for Jay’s “being this way.” I was second-guessing God, not believing that God could
make my child different gender-wise, and feeling that it was my fault somehow.
How is a person who was raised with a bible that announces in its first few
pages, “male and female God created them,” supposed to get their mind around
gender identities outside of those two boxes?
Short answer: by putting aside my own
ego, and a bible written by humans who don’t really understand the huge heart
of God, and by not second-guessing God. By understanding that God has a much
wider view of humanity than most humans ever will. God made Jay, and Jay’s
experience of being non-binary isn’t my experience or the experience of most
people I know, but does that make it impossible? With God, all things are possible.
Jay is a young adult who is coming to
know themself and their way of being in the world, a really wonderful kid with a huge heart, a creative spirit, and a marvelous sense of humour. So getting my ego, my education, my background and my religious upbringing out of
the way and accepting Jay as God made them is what I believe God has been
asking of me for quite a while already. It just took me some time to get the
message because I was scared, like Jonah and Moses. I wasn’t entrusting the
situation into God’s loving hands because I was afraid that God was asking too
much of Jay, and of me.
And don’t get me wrong – God is asking
a lot. I worry for Jay. I know that our world operates out of those female and
male boxes, and that there are many people who are afraid of the kind of
diversity that God is giving us through people like Jay. I’m afraid of the
backlash from those fearful people. But Jay is brave, and is teaching me to be brave, to
set my ego aside and trust our Creator who made Jay as they are. Just as Jesus
trusted God with his life.
I started by talking about prophets
and their struggles. And I guess my point here is that we are all prophets in
one way or another. God calls all of us to set aside our biases and egos and
let God work through us rather than in spite of us. That’s what Jesus did. We
may not think of ourselves as prophets if we aren’t out there challenging the world.
But if prophets are those who bring messages from God to people, isn’t that
what we are all doing by living the gospel? We are called to trust, to set our
egos aside and to let God work through us, even in ways like the one I've just shared with you.
So where is God asking you to set your
ego aside and trust -- so that God’s will, that Divine flow, can be revealed to others through you?
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