Ordinary 30

The Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

_{Exodus 22:20-26, Psalm 18; 1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10; Matthew 22:34-40}

“You shall not molest or oppress an alien…” We don’t. We just build walls so they cannot enter or not allow their boats to moor at harbors. The Mediterranean Sea and the Rio Grande becoming graves for many aliens and refugees.

“You shall not wrong any widow or orphan…If ever you wrong them, my wrath will flare up,then your own wives will be widows, and your children orphans”. How many orphans and widows are beings created in Gaza Strip, Lewiston, Maine, Israel, Ukraine and the multiple ethnic, drug, and civil wars around the world?

“If you lend money to one of your poor neighbors among my people, you shall not act like an extortioner toward them…” How many nations and individuals are burdened by debt? Debt that they will never recover from and no one is offering relief while wealthy nations and financial institutions grow richer in power.

This is our world and its values and all of us to some degree participate in it.

When we reflect on religion, we often consider only that which is spiritual: our relationship with God, grace, eternal life, and prayer. What some people would call intangible. However, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are ethical religious traditions. They ground us in the realities of the broken human experience in which God dwells. The Hebrew Scriptures, the Gospels and the Qur’an speak of God and eternal life through our relationship with our neighbor. Love of God inseparably linked with love of neighbor.

Consider the criteria of the Son of Man in the parable of the judgment of the nations which we will hear proclaimed to us on the Feast of Christ the King days before Advent. At the judgment, we will be asked: whom did you visit and care for when they were sick or in prison? Understand prison in a broad sense of including not only people incarcerated by our penal system but imprisoned by people’s judgments, slander and bigotry. Whom did you feed physically, emotionally and spiritually? What strangers did you welcome? Whom did you clothe with dignity, garments, and respect?

What questions are missing from this interrogation? Is it not, all questions we consider religious? Judaism, Christianity and Islam take in the whole of the divine – human experience

Might not the questions of the judgement then be the best preparation for how we live the Season of Advent folding over into the multiple Feasts of Christmas? Recall, the Holy Family are strangers and aliens in Egypt. Mary was widowed. Shepherds are poor and estranged by the community. Jesus experiences the burden of loneliness and the weight of the cross. The children of Bethlehem are murdered and families are torn apart. Joseph and Mary are poor, their child being born in an animal stall.

Take away the angels and the songs, the lights and the glitter and encounter the reality of the story. The stories of Christmas are the stories of strangers and aliens, widowed and orphaned, and the poor today.

We need to ask ourselves…

Who are the strangers and the unwelcomed who cross our paths?

Why are they strangers and unwelcomed? Why haven’t we reached out to them?

Who are the widowed and orphans in our lives, that is, who are the defenseless in our lives?

Who are lonely seeking companionship and a listening ear?

Who is burdened in my life? How are they burdened and how might I offer relief?

Prayer, personal and communal. The sacramental life in which we encounter the living Jesus Christ particularly in the healing sacraments of Eucharist, Reconciliation and Anointing. Reinvigorating and deepening Marriage and religious vows and the commitments of Holy Orders and the single life. All this is part of the spiritual life. This is love of God but without addressing the alien and stranger among us, the defenseless and the poor, the sick, the imprisoned and burdened we are living an incomplete Christian life.

At their best, religions have offered humanity solace, hope, and the deepest of aspirations, joy and wonder. When incomplete, religious traditions can blind us to our true responsibility to God through our neighbor and become an excuse not to live fully in Christ.

The measure of a Christian? It is the alien, the widow, the orphan and the poor.