David McKee’s Homily from March 3, 2024

Third Sunday of Lent

March 3, 2024

Exodus 20:1-17

1 Corinthian 1:18-25

John 2:13-22

Well, it’s been a difficult few weeks trying to come up with something meaningful to say this morning about our readings.  It’s one of those times when there doesn’t seem to be any common thread that ties the texts together; or at least I couldn’t find one.  Faced with that fact, I found myself attracted to the passage from Paul’s letter to the Christ-followers in Corinth.  Still, after reading a bunch of commentaries on the text, and pondering and taking notes distractedly for many hours, I couldn’t find what songwriters call The Hook:  that memorable musical phrase that we repeatedly hum to ourselves in the shower or while cooking dinner–what the Germans call an öhrwurm–literally, an “ear worm.”  I couldn’t find that key idea or phrase that grabbed me, that wormed its way into my mind and wouldn’t let go.  That was the case, at least, until I was gripped by the homily that Leora Weitzman gave us last Sunday; one of the finest I’ve ever heard in this assembly room.  Leora was talking about working as a tutor and how the sacrifice of her ego–in this case, sacrificing her need to say something profound to a student–how letting go of that need freed her to just listen to the student.  Out of that listening, more often that not, arose just the right thing to say; that thing that actually would help the student.  She went on to say, then, what was the real “ear worm” for me.  She said, “…for a while I fell into the common trap of thinking that sacrifice in general was a kind of currency that could buy things.”  This image of the constellation of practices that we call our spiritual life as a currency we use to buy things from God has kept coming back to me over the last week.  It has helped me make some sense of Paul’s strange, paradoxical riff on the perceived foolishness of the crucifixion.  As I understand it this morning, the mysterious message of the crucifixion is foolishness to Jews and Greeks, and, most importantly to us, because it explodes this “market exchange” view of our relationship with the Divine Mystery we call God.  I want to look more closely at how we are like the Jews and Greeks about whom Paul is preaching to the Corinthians.

We live in a culture that places great value on utility, on the usefulness of things.  Ideas, physical objects, and, all too often, people…all are valued because they are useful.  The fancy phrase is that they have instrumental value.  They are effective as instruments.  They are effective as means in our efforts to achieve other ends; to achieve ends that are external to the things themselves.  This rational calculation of means and ends is so familiar that we take it for granted; it is second nature to us.  It is how we navigate the finite world that is the field of action for our everyday lives.  We are constantly, mostly unconsciously, making decisions based on our weighing of the instrumental value of one choice or another.  The evolutionary neuroscientists tell us that we are hardwired this way.  We are wired to act based on our predictions of what is going to happen.  Successful prediction means successful adaptation and survival, and, thereby,  being able to pass on our genes to the next generation.  This is the ultimate goal from the viewpoint of natural selection.  On the ground, in our own everyday world, we live a life of anticipation, trying to stay at least a few moves ahead of the world.  For the most part, we are preoccupied with finding ways of controlling the present in order to bring about a desired future, or at least to be well prepared for what we expect is to come.  In the end, pleasure and pain are the primary values in this marketplace version of life:  things are valued to the extent that they maximize pleasure and minimize pain.  This is the ceaseless round of attachment to pleasure and aversion to pain which in the Buddhist tradition is called samsara.   When the Dalai Lama was asked what he thought was distinctive about Western culture, he replied that we have perfected samsara.  We have created a social, economic, and cultural system that is focused on maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, and, for the most part, we are very good at it.  In this sense, I think we are among those who are perishing, to use Paul’s words.  We are attached to, we are identified with, what is finite and impermanent. Elsewhere, Paul also repeatedly refers to this orientation to life with the Greek word sarx, which means flesh…the life of the flesh.

From this “perishing,” this samsaric, this sarx point of view, the message of the cross is, indeed, foolishness.  From this point of view, Jesus’s act of loving submission to an excruciating and humiliating torture and execution has no value whatsoever.  It serves no purpose.  It certainly is not a useful instrument in the pleasure-pain calculus that governs so much of our thoughts and actions.  Jesus enters into this complete emptying of himself without any anticipation of reward.  He doesn’t know what is going to happen, other than perhaps his death.  He submits utterly out of love, lovefor God and for the world.  He does it for love alone.  From the accounts of his passion in the garden of Gethsemane, we know that he would have preferred something different, but he doesn’t attach himself to that alternative.  He humbly accepts that this is the path that his Abba-God, the love of his life, is calling him to take. 

With reluctance, I’ll venture to say that this is what we are called to do as well.  I say “with reluctance” because I am as attached as anyone to the pleasures in my life.  And, I am as averse and avoidant as anyone to the pains in my life.  In trying to make sense of the cross, there is a temptation to see the sacrifice of the ego–the perishing, samsaric, sarx self–to see that sacrifice as a kind of currency in a transaction with God.  We want to fit our relationship with the Divine Mystery into the same calculus of pleasure-and-pain, gain-and-loss, success-and-failure, that governs so much of our lives.  We want to buy a ticket for grace.  Even in our spiritual lives, we want to stay in control.  But, the cross exemplifies the exact opposite of this attitude.  As Jesus says in John’s gospel today, the house of God is not a marketplace.  God’s grace is just that, grace:  a gratuity freely given regardless of what we do, regardless of what we experience in our finite life. 

To proclaim Christ crucified, to embody the crucified Christ in our own lives, means to realize, to enter into, the absurd reality that we have no ground to stand on.  We live and move and have our being in a Divine Mystery that is out of our control.  Every step that we take with genuine love is a step into the unknown–an abyss that has no meaning in terms of the wisdom of the world.  To walk the Christ path means to give ourselves away, without anticipation, without hesitation, to God and to one another, over and over again, heedless of cost or recompense.   As that great Benedictine, Hildegard of Bingen, said so beautifully, to be on the Christ path is to be “a feather on the breath of God.”