Ordinary 4

The Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Zephaniah 2:3, 3:12-13; Psalm 146; 1 Corinthians 1:26-31; Matthew 5:1-12

We’ve all frantically gone looking for lost keys. We rummage through our bags, our pants pockets, check the counter tops, the bowl we usually throw our keys in when reentering the house. Our minds race through the day, what we did, where we went. When we get really desperate we call on Saint Anthony.

Then relief. There they are! In the microwave. Lying alone, quietly staring back at us. They were never really lost. They were just where we last left them.

“Seek the Lord,” Zephaniah cries out. Why? Have we misplaced God? Where did you last see God? Isn’t God always where we last left him? Lying there waiting for us. Yes, we leave God about; thoughtlessly somewhere. We get bore with God. Other people, activities, things grab our attention, devour our time, we look up as the lights of life’s Times Square draws us up. It’s all so exciting. Some of us think they are above all this but they are not. God quietly slips from our hands, we don’t even notice we’ve left him behind as we grasp something else.

“Seek the Lord,” Zephaniah strongly insists. But the prophet also demands that we seek out justice and humility. Why? Might it be because they are the paths to finding God?

Why do we at times let God slip from our hands?

Humility does not mean graveling in the dirt. It is not degrading ourselves before God, denying that we are worthy. That attitude is an insult to the God who created us in the self–image of the divine. Humility is not a denial of our worth but an acknowledgment of where our worth comes from. Humility is an attitude in which we are aware of our need; that we are dependent on God.

Humility is difficult for Christians who have been raised in a society that is built on the idea of independence, of picking yourself up by the boot straps, the immigrant belief of the “American Dream” – and a dream it is – which for many people has remained elusive.

How many people who are homeless, hungry or just on the edge of poverty will not go to a food pantry because they are ashamed; not willing to acknowledge the depth of their neediness? Pride is the source of many a hungry night. How many of us here who have never had need of a food pantry would go to one if we had to?

It is so easy to let God slip from your hands if you never acknowledge that you need God; need God for spiritual gifts, for emotional insight, for basic human needs, to overcome our worst tendencies and sins, our loneliness and fears.

“Seek God.” “Seek humility.”

“Seek justice.” Justice is another virtue that is difficult for Christians raised in our culture. Our American sense of justice is not equivalent to God’s biblical sense of justice in which an adulterous woman is picked up, dusted off and quietly sent home; where Saul a persecutor of the early Christian communities is chosen as the principle preacher of the Gospel, where the last are treated like the first; where a murderous Moses is chosen to lead God’s people; where a guilty thief on a cross is treated as innocent; where sinners are loved and those who fulfill commandments, rubrics and law are chastised.

Our response is “God is not fair.” And you would be correct by our standards.

But our sense of justice which often results in in justice is not the justice we are called to seek out. For us justice is when a court rules in the plaintive’s favour. If not, it can be understood as racist, as homophobic, xenophobic and result in more hatred and violence.

The justice Zephaniah calls us to seek out is a justice that heals, that offers not only forgiveness but restoration of the person who is harmed and the perpetrator of the evil. A justice that is, as Pope Francis has offered us, “a field hospital”. It is a way of approaching each other and the complex situations of life not out of condemnation or revenge but out of Gospel values.

Consider the pathway Pope Francis and Cardinal McElroy of San Diego are walking in relation to LGBTQ people. It is the same path we all need to walk in regard to refugees and immigrants,  women, people’s whose ancestral lands are being devoured by corporations and the rising waters of climate change, by people who experience hate and violence.

There is good reason why Jesus taught us to pray for our enemies and those who persecute us. Seeking justice and living it out may be the most difficult of the three searches Zephaniah insists we enter upon.

Is that why there is that curious word in the prophecy?

Seek the LORD, seek justice, seek humility;

perhaps you may be sheltered on the day of the LORD’s anger.

Perhaps?

For Zephaniah there are no guarantees there is only the search.