A Spiritual Veggie

23rd Sunday A
"Where two or three are gathered in My Name, there am I in their midst"
Matthew 18:20

There is a wonderful story about a family with one house rule that always was strictly enforced: everyone's plate had to be cleaned at every meal, without question or discussion of any kind. And the rule included vegetables. At first, the children griped a lot, but soon they fell in the spirit of the rule and eating every morsel on the plate became almost automatic to them. Moreover, the rule began to pay great dividends for the children after a sign was posted in the school lunch-room. It read: "No dessert until you show your empty plate." The children of that family had no problem with that lunch-room edict, and the eleven-year-old even found a way in which to turn it into a fantastic enterprise. This was revealed when his father stumbled onto a cigar box loaded with $38 in small change tucked away in the boy's bedroom closet. The parent had no notion of how his eleven-year-old son had come into such a sum. Fearing the worst, he asked the boy about it. "I earned it at school," the boy explained. "The other kids pay me to eat their vegetables. I charge a nickel for spinach, ten cents for broccoli and fifteen cents for cauliflower."

That, I am told, is a true story, and an excellent one to remember when we are tempted to question God's silence. We pray and we pray, and we wait and we wait for some comforting answer but we hear no response and we ask "Why?" "Why doesn't God answer our prayers?" Or we come here to Church for worship and prayer together and we hear the Gospel Lesson teaching us that Jesus is right there in the midst of it when two or three are gathered in His Name, and it all sounds very appealing, but nothing is happening. Here we are in God's House, in God's Presence. Jesus is in our midst, and nothing is happening. It's all very ho-hum and humdrum, just like last week and the week before that. Why? I suspect the answer for many of us is that we are not eating our own spiritual spinach. We pray that our lives will be enriched. We want peace of mind and soul. We want to live inspired lives, to grow and develop to our full potential. We want fulfillment. We want the new life that Jesus and the Gospels and the sermons are always promising us. In short, we want the truly good things in life but we do not want to pay the price. We want our lives to soar on undernourished wings. But we'll never get off the ground that way. Distasteful as it may seem, we simply must eat our own spiritual spinach or there will be no spiritual growth, no effective prayer experience, and no happenings here in Church when two or three, or three hundred are gathered together. Week after week we can assemble here as we have today, but if we are not eating our own spiritual spinach we are not gathering together in Jesus' Name. And we shall continue to move from this uneventful worship and prayer experience to the next, and the next, and the next ...

You cannot have your dessert until your plates are clean! The most important thing you can do with your life right now is to embark on a plate-cleaning inward journey, deep down into the center of your being-the point of direct encounter with the love and the power and the Grace of God. We are talking about that deep, deep level where the soul is laid bare, where the real stock-taking occurs, where the spinach is swallowed and the plate is picked so clean you can see your reflection in it as clearly as when you do the dishes with Ivory Liquid. We are talking about that deep, deep level at which you can see yourself as you really are and where you can make honest decisions about your life, about who you are and what you ought to do. We are talking about that deep, deep level where the cost of fulfillment is revealed as the bitterest of all spiritual spinach: change. To admit that you will be unable to enrich your own personhood, fulfill your life, become the beautiful, unique human being God created you to be unless you change radically, is a bitter potion for you to swallow.

Into the midst of His People Jesus came. He announced the Good News of a loving God who would bring them to fulfillment. Through who He was and what He did He revealed to His People the image of the God of Love. He offered Himself as the Supreme Model for a proper response to their loving God. And His People decided that He must die. They couldn't stand the love of God in their midst. Jesus had made it clear that in order to follow after the Model they would have to make radical changes in their accustomed life-styles. They needed to change their ways of relating to one another and to outsiders. And they could not stand it. They refused to let go of things-as-they-were. It threatened their security, their ego, their pocketbook and their spiritless, rigid religiosity. Jesus came with the Good News that a loving God was offering them a better way. Life would be enriched by a whole new spirit, a whole new value system. Their lives would be raised up, out of the pit of purposelessness and on to a new level of lasting meaning. All this would come to those who would repent (i.e., change radically) and follow Him. But they could not stand that spiritual spinach. And so they nailed the Prophet to a tree and He died in their midst.

Do we want a dead Jesus or a live Jesus in our midst? Do we opt now for things-as-they-are or for things-as-they-ought-to-be? Go down deep, where you can see and feel and embrace the living Christ in your midst. And ...

-If you are involved presently in a relationship or a habit that is potentially destructive to yourself and others, then decide down at that deep, self-revealing level whether or not you are going to change all that

-If you are involved presently in a business or a job that profits from the deception and exploitation of other human beings, then decide at that deep self-revealing level whether or not you are going to change all that

-If you are a self-righteous person, grown used to condemning others out of hand, then decide at that deep, self-revealing level whether or not you are going to change all that

-If your family life is sick for want of your love and compassion and forgiveness, then decide at that deep, self-revealing level whether or not you are going to change all that

-If you are a person who is content to have an abundance of material resources while others have not even the means of survival, then decide at that deep self-revealing level whether or not you are ready to make a radical change in your attitude toward the poor and the downtrodden

At a high school commencement exercise, one of the senior girls delivered a closing prayer which she herself had written. The young woman began to read her prayer at that time when the confusion and the shifting at the edges of the crowd begins, as people's thoughts turn to the parking lot. But, as the prayer unfolded, the noise quickly subsided and a miraculous silence settled over the crowd. It lasted until the last word of the prayer was uttered. Here is a portion of that prayer:

Dear God, grant us one thing before we leave the sheltered reassurance of our childhood. Show us Life. Not an empty, shallow world of shallow people and shallow dreams, but real life ... For we have known the bliss of childhood as well as the passion of adolescence now. We've heard the cry of babies, and we've seen the fear of death on a soldier's face. We want to change the world but we don't know how. We want to throw our arms around our brothers but our hands cannot reach. We want to break the bonds of conformity that tie us to the ground, but we're not strong. Smile on us when we drink from the waters of truth. And, when we are old, reassure us that our struggle helped to make the world a world of peace, compassion and wisdom. And please don't let us die without ever having lived ... May we feel God's love always in our lives!