Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time – Deuteronomy 4:1-8; Psalm 15; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-23
I’ve been reading Pope Francis’s wonderful new encyclical, Laudato Si, “Praise be to You,” and I wanted to share a little of the opening chapter with you. It’s so rich and interesting, and it connects so well with the readings today.
This isn’t an encyclical about climate change. It’s not about global warming. It’s about the gospel, it’s about Our Lord Jesus Christ and how we are called to follow him.
The Pope begins by quoting his predecessor Saint John Paul, who called us to what he called “ecological conversion”–who warned us that too often we seem “to see no other meaning in our natural environment than what serves for immediate use and consumption.”
He quotes Pope Benedict, who wrote that we need to “eliminate the structural causes of the dysfunctions of the world economy and correct models of growth which have proved incapable of ensuring respect for the environment.”
He goes further back into the tradition, to St. Francis, his namesake, who long ago called us to see the natural world as our brother and our sister, to love creation because of its beauty, because it is made by God, and to care for creation as the source of all the material goods we are given to use but too often squander and hoard and destroy.
Here’s the second paragraph of the encyclical:
“This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she groans in travail. We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth; our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment.“
So much going on here, so much to reflect on: that everything we know about sin, everything we know about grace, everything the Lord taught us about who God is and who we are, all of it is grounded in creation. Literally: grounded. Is the ground. The ground itself. From the beginning, from the first human being, formed of the ground, of the mud. That’s what the name “Adam” means in Hebrew. It means “mud person.”
The call is to humility: “humility,” from “humus,” the earth.
The call is to humility: “humility.” form “humus,” the earth. That’s the call of the readings today.
In Deuteronomy the Lord tells the people that they can enter in and “take possession of the land,” but only by observing the commandments, by staying within limits, within boundaries. The whole story of Israel is the story of a place, of a land, of a particular ecology and landscape. And the covenant code that Moses brings down the mountain is not just about attitudes and beliefs but about behavior in that place, and specific behavior, having to do even with livestock and the care of the crops and the distribution of goods, and this isn’t trivial or silly. It’s a way of saying that God is present in everything and that everything we do matters. It’s a way of saying: be “wise and intelligent people.”
It’s the theme picked up in the letter of James, that we “be doers of the word and not hearers only,” and because we have bodies, and because we eat, and because what we eat and build with and wear comes from the earth we walk on, this means acting in specific, concrete ways: not just thinking good thoughts and not just having the right beliefs but doing very specific things: caring for orphans and widows. Caring, not in the abstract, but with our hands. Giving our bread.
The Gospel today is all about living in the marketplace and how to handle the kettles and the jugs and about our own inner ecology, our inner energies and systems and resources, the evil and greed and malice and deceit that come from within us and that defile us and defile the world around us.
So the focus is on action, in the world, where we actually live, and it’s about the violence we do to this world, and it’s about the way we abuse this world.
But it’s also about changing our fundamental attitudes, deep down. Laudato Si isn’t about climate change, isn’t about global warming, but about this deep evil in all of us and in the culture we’ve created: “the notion,” as Pope Francis puts it, “that there are no indisputable truths to guide our lives, and hence human freedom is limitless.” We’ve forgotten that we didn’t create ourselves. We’ve forgotten that we do not belong to ourselves. We belong to God.
Or here’s another quote from Pope Benedict—Francis is always quoting Benedict: creation is harmed “when we ourselves have the final word, where everything is simply our property and we use it for ourselves alone. The misuse of creation begins when we no longer recognize any higher instance than ourselves, when we see nothing else but ourselves.”
This is it. This is the fundamental attitude that the encyclical is addressing, because this is the fundamental attitude that Jesus is addressing, is fighting. It’s why he was killed. It’s what killed him.
Whatever else it was and is, we can see the Crucifixion as an ecological disaster, the greatest ecological disaster of all time.
Whatever else it was and is, we can see the Crucifixion as an ecological disaster, the greatest ecological disaster of all time.
So let me ask you this week not to think about recycling or hybrids or coal-fired power plants but about your husband or your wife, or a child, or a friend. To watch yourself as you talk with them and be with them. And to see what I find in myself, too: that too often I instinctively treat these people I love as my people, as objects, as resources I can exploit for my own immediate needs and gratification: to make me dinner or to pick something up at the store or to compliment me or to feel what I feel and think what I think. I use them. I defile them, if only a little bit and only in my mind, but this matters. It has consequences.
“The one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord, “the Psalmist says today. “Who thinks the truth in his heart and slanders not with his tongue”: “who harms not others nor takes up a reproach against his neighbor”; “who lends not his money at usury and accepts no bribe against the innocent.” This is what the new encyclical is about: it’s about us. It’s about the choices we make every day and the attitudes we have as we make them. It’s about sin, and it’s about grace.
It’s about Christ, in whom “everything in heaven and on earth was created, things visible and invisible”; who, “though he was in the form of God did not deem equality with God something to be grasped but rather emptied himself”—as we must, too. As we must, too.
If the Lord of all can limit himself, we can limit ourselves.