HOMILY THIRTEENTH SUNDAY of ORDINARY TIME June 28, 2020

HOMILY   THIRTEENTH SUNDAY of ORDINARY TIME     June 28, 2020

          Everybody OK? I find this process of social isolation and containment to prevent getting the COVID-19 disease very limiting and frustrating. Anybody else experienced that? For example, I have not been out of state for several months, which is a new experience for me. I feel restricted, hampered, cooped up.   Anybody else have that sense?

          Life just seems to become more and more bizarre as we go through this. What we used to know is no longer true. Reality is off-kilter.  Odd. Which brings me to our Gospel today from Matthew, and specifically the paradoxical statement Jesus gives us: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”     Talk about odd! 
          Finding is losing, and losing is finding.  This is not a riddle because the statement is more basic than that.  It is rather a truth: a fundamental truth that Jesus first spoke 2,000 years ago.  And it is just as true now, and will be just as true 20 centuries hence when this church that I stand in will be, at best, an archaeological dig.
          This is a truth about the structure of reality for all times, in all places:  “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”  How does one “find“ or “lose” one’s life?  

          Who is in control of your life?  If you think you are, you are sorely mis-lead and badly mistaken.  For I am certain you neither arranged for, nor chose, the COVID-19 pandemic and all its effects. It happened without your choosing it, and will continue for as long as it wants, into next year, no matter how desperately you want it to leave.  Sorry.
          How does one lose one’s life?   Well, first stop pretending you are in control. You are not. Get over it.
          You did not choose to be born. You did not choose when to be born, nor where to be born, nor to what parents, and what situation of life, or health, or culture, or nationality, or gender or race or even religion. All that and much more is a given.  

          This means that there is NO basis for any feelings or belief that I am somehow better or superior to anyone else on the basis of my race, my gender, my nationality, my sexual orientation, or any other accident of my birth.   It was not up to me. 

          All we can do is to accept, to be grateful, and to give thanks.
          “Whoever finds his life will lose it.”
I take that to mean that when we start to think, erroneously, that we are in control and can direct the course of our life, we are setting ourselves up for a fall. You cannot control the dynamics of plate tectonics, hence not the occurrences of earthquakes, nor of tornadoes, nor floods, nor pandemics, nor so many other potentially life-changing events.  We are not in control.
          But Jesus also assures us, “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.“  Losing your life does not mean dying.  What Jesus means by losing your life means giving up the fiction that you are in control:  that your life, and all the circumstances of your infancy and childhood and your entire life are somehow yours by right, rather than the reality that they are all gifts.       From every breath you take, to your education, your friends, your talents and your abilities, your health and vigor, in short everything you have or ever had is a gift. A gift for you to use to live in the image and likeness of Jesus Christ.
          Finding your life means coming to the profound realization that you are loved by God, who willed you into existence for a reason, and that you have a special and unique mission, given to you by God.

          We need to let go of our need to be in control; in other words we have to lose our life, so that we can find our true life in service of Jesus Christ, and so truly be who we are created to be. Only in this way do we come to be truly alive.
          “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
          Paradoxical, but true. God bless!