David McKee’s Homily from September 29, 2024

THE TWENTY-SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

September 29, 2024

Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29

James 5:13-20

Mark 9:38-50

I want to begin this morning by dedicating this homily to a dearly loved departed friend who many of you knew:  Richard Schoenherr.  He died almost 30 years ago.  Richard and I spent an untold number of hours talking about many of the things I will be saying today.  I owe a great debt of gratitude to him.  I hear his voice often. 

Most days, in the early morning, I take a slow prayer walk in Owen Park.  These walks are usually quiet, peaceful and, at this time of year, filled with the subtle scent of Indian grass that has gone to seed.  A couple of weeks ago, I had a very different experience.  Right there, in the middle of the walking trail, was half of a rabbit.  It looked to have been freshly killed and dismembered, probably by one of the predators that live in the park:  owl, hawk, coyote, fox.  It was at first a shock to my system.  To witness nature “red in tooth and claw” certainly is not my reason for walking in the park.  It was quite unexpected and, in the moment, a horror.

After this shock, in the ensuing days, nestled into the safety and comfort of my desk chair, I pondered the significance of this experience, particularly in relation to today’s gospel text.  I came to realize that the words of Mark’s Jesus are only a little less disturbing than my encounter with the dismembered rabbit.  As his followers, for us to hear Jesus enjoin us to cut off a hand or a foot, or to tear out an eye is only a little less disturbing because they are words.  We experience these words filtered through many years of memories of hearing them repeatedly in church.  They are also filtered through our understanding that they are metaphorical, as well as set within an ancient Hebrew tradition of scriptural and liturgical hyperbole.  Even so, these words still have the power to disturb us, to unsettle us, to make us wonder about their real meaning for us in our own lives.  The horror of their literal meaning must not be the whole story.  For me, making sense of the deeper meaning of Jesus’s unsettling exhortation runs in parallel with my unsettling experience in Owen Park.

As I said, my initial reaction to seeing the dismembered rabbit was one of horror.  That was my first thought.  After that, a variety of second thoughts arose:  about the cycle of life, about the intimacy of predator and prey, about the intimacy of life and death, about how, out of necessity, life feeds on lives, about how life arises from death.  Many scholars of comparative religion and mythology have suggested that this disturbing, unavoidable reality of life-in-death and death-in-life is the core mystery that is the source of religion.  It is a deep stream that runs beneath all the religious traditions that have their roots in the practice of ritual sacrifice, including our own.  We old Catholics used to talk about the sacrifice of the mass.  Though we don’t use that language much anymore, still the image of the sacrificed body of Jesus is at the center, at the culmination, of our eucharistic prayer:  “This is my body given for you”…”This is my blood poured out for people everywhere.”  The mythic background of our eucharistic ritual has deep roots in ancient, pre-Christian traditions of the ritual killing, dismembering, and eating of a god.  Through this act, the participants are intended to experience the divine being, reborn and living in them. The root meaning of sacrifice is to make holy, to make sacred.  In addition to our liturgical practice, our scriptures are full of this imagery.  John’s Jesus tells us, “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”  The same Jesus tells us, “unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you do not have life within you.” The heart of our highest holy days, the Great Triduum, is the telling and reenactment of this cycle of death/crucifixion and life/resurrection.  Certainly not by accident, this all happens at the time of year when the new life of spring sprouts from the dead seeds of winter.  There are deep roots here, all the way back to when Homo sapiens first tilled the soil and planted the first crops, and maybe even farther back.

So, at this point, I say to myself, “David, it’s time to reel yourself back in from this extended riff on ritual sacrifice.  It’s time to return to Mark’s Jesus and what his words mean for us right here, right now.”  Well, to put it in straightforward terms, I think Jesus is exhorting us to sacrifice; to sacrifice anything that causes us to stumble; to sacrifice anything that causes us to be distracted from the one thing necessary:   our seeking God…to sacrifice anything that distracts us from seeking infinite union with the infinite love that creates, redeems, and sustains us in every moment.  Benedict of Nursia, our patron saint here at Holy Wisdom Monastery, speaks of this one thing necessary with his usual simple clarity.  Very near the end of his Rule, he exhorts us to “…prefer nothing whatever to Christ.”  Let me repeat that:  prefer nothing whatever to Christ.  Benedict’s “nothing whatever,” in an only slightly gentler way, smacks of the same shocking hyperbole with which Jesus delivers his message this morning.  They both are insistent.  Out of love and care for us, they implore us to remember that there is nothing more important.  They implore us to remember and take to heart the first Great Commandment:  “You shall love your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  They implore us to remember that, without a sacrificial commitment to this one necessary thing, we are vulnerable to our attachment to what in Buddhist tradition are called the Worldly Dharmas:  the temptations of gain-and-loss, pleasure-and-pain, praise-and-blame, fame-and-disrepute.  These distractions from The Way can be subtle and seductive.  Without realizing it, we are easily burned by their fire.  The path is narrow and rocky.  We stumble and fall over and over again.  We are, after all, imperfect, human beings.  And yet, in our stumbling, in our falling, we have the support of the second Great Commandment:  “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  In other words, we are not alone.  And, in other words, we can’t do this alone.  Our path of sacrificial faith is not just for ourselves.  Integral to the path of sacrifice is that we also are food for one another.  Our reading today from the Book of Numbers says it well:  each of us is, “…nothing at all but this manna…”

AMEN

Let us turn to our God in prayer…

For all the victims of war in Gaza, Lebanon, Israel, Sudan, and Ukraine, that they may find safety and peace, we pray…

For the leaders of all those nations at war, that they find the courage and compassion to seek in good faith a way to a cease fire and a lasting peace, we pray…

For the survivors of hurricane Helene, that they receive the help and hope they need to mourn those who have died and to rebuild their lives in the years to come, we pray…

For all the prayers listed in our book of intentions, and for all those we wish to mention now quietly or silently in our hearts ………….we pray…

Unfailing God, we seek you in light and in darkness, grace us with the faith to persevere together on our way into you, sustaining us in all our stumbling and falling, bourne by your love, now and forever, AMEN