Father Edmund Adams O.S.B. '57 preached the following sermon on Reunion '08 Weekend:
26th Sunday in Ordinary Time/Cycle A
28 September 2008
"It's unfair." In the passage from Ezekiel, the Lord repeats and rejects his people's whining complaint that his ways are unjust. Last week, Isaiah quoted the Lord's declaration that his ways are not our ways nor our thoughts his thoughts. The context for that was the divine mercy and forgiveness, a quality not noticeably characteristic of the human race.
The two versions of today's opening prayer both speak of the Father's power being revealed in his mercy and forgiveness. In one, we say "you show your almighty power in your mercy and forgiveness." In the other, we say "in your unbounded mercy, you have revealed the beauty of your power through your constant forgiveness of our sins." Our ways are not his ways. When could we ever find beauty in the human use of power? The divine power is revealed in mercy and forgiveness. Human power exhibits itself as abusive bullying, ambitious greed, and egocentric self exaltation. Yet these are not signs of true power but rather symptoms of weakness and fear of others. Show me a bully and I'll show you a coward.
It is not only our ways, our use of power, that are different from God's ways, but also our thoughts, our attitude toward and motivation for power, that differ from God's thoughts. We seek, pursue, and defend power for ourselves; God does not need to seek or defend his power against anyone. He does not have to prove anything. We cannot think of power without thinking of power over others, control of other people and events, enforcing our self-interested will-or, at best, pet policies and projects of our own. God's power is, in one of the prayers, called the power of his love, which we pray that he may put into our hearts. Two views of power, and ours may sound better fitted to our world of (Darwinian) struggle and competition than the power shown in mercy and love.
St. Paul, instructing the Philippians, did not think so. He exhorts them to think and act with the mind of Christ Jesus, moved by the Spirit of God, the love of God, in ways that contradict human inclinations. To live by the life of Christ in tenderness and sympathy is to reject all competition and rivalry among ourselves, to reject all conceit and devotion to our own self-interest as we imagine it in our alienated self-absorption. Instead, having the Spirit of God in common, driven by the divine love, we are to act with mutual encouragement and compassion, putting the interests of others before our own, acting in concord, harmony, and unity of mind and purpose. To follow Paul's exhortation here would show forth true power, a power that has beauty and has nothing in common with the pettiness of our ways of power.
In saying that we must have the mind of Christ Jesus, Paul explains what that means. Jesus was and is, from before all time, divine, one with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Yet he let go of divine power, never used it for himself in life or in death. The only power he retained and used was the power of divine compassion and the mysterious humility of God. Yet this was more than enough to move and transform hearts and minds, to bring forgiveness and reconciliation, and to change our world forever. That power reflects, as all that Christ said and did also reflects, his and our Father, his ways and his thoughts. But we are afraid to rely on this kind of power, to give up the offensive and defensive weapons of our kind of power in a dangerous world, no matter how futile these prove to be.
The poet Robinson Jeffers showed that fear when he warned his sons to flee from the urban centers of early 20th Century America and told them above all: "boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master. That is the trap that catches noblest spirits - that caught, they say, God when he walked on earth." In living by the mind of Christ and the ways of our Father, there is no promise of freedom from suffering or of success in our ambitions. There will be both pain and joy - authentic pain and authentic joy - but there will be nothing mean, petty, or phony about our lives. And, unlike the humanly powerful, we will never be alone.
