6 OT C To believe in God even if we don’t benefit from it.

Friends

Peace be with you.

Do you participate in an activity that you don’t really get anything out of? I Now before anyone answers me “Yeah, your homilies!”, I’m only asking because we are hard wired to do things because we get something out of them. I think about an episode of the TV sitcom The Office involving the two main antagonists, Jim and Dwight, and something called classical conditioning. In this particular episode, each time Jim turns on or reboots his computer and it makes the Microsoft tuning on sound, he offers Dwight a mint. We are led to believe he does this for several weeks or even months until, one day, Jim turns on his computer and Dwight instinctively holds out his hand to receive a mint and Jim looks at him confused. Dwight also seems oblivious to the fact that he’s been classically conditioned that, when he hears the sound, he assumes he is going to get something positive. One of the reasons I put effort into my homilies is because I appreciate people who thank me for them or tell me that something I said really helped them with the death of a loved one or helped them through a difficult time. So I can’t really use this as an example of something I don’t get anything out of even if some of you may say that. Some people may say being a parent can seem like something you don’t get anything out of. You work all kinds of hours to provide a nice house and nice clothes and the kids get mad because you’re never home. Or you spend hours preparing a nice meal for your kids and they snarf it down in 10 minutes and complain that you made corn instead of carrots. I’m sure all of that is true but I also hope there are other times when they do remember to get you something nice for Valentines Day (Remember kids. Valentine's Day is Monday. Get your parents something nice) or when you see them succeed and realize it was because you made them do their homework or made them practice hitting and catching a baseball rather than letting them goof around all Saturday staring at their phones. Or it may take until you finally get grandchildren to realize that having children was worth it. Regardless, I feel like most people find being a parent to be something where you do get something good out of it. I worry that police officers may feel that they don’t get a lot out of their job quite often. I’ve had a couple of homilies recently where I have used police officers as foils in my jokes. We’ve recently seen, even in our local media, pretty severe criticism of the police. I would guess it would be quite difficult, one minute, to arbitrate disagreements between arguing parties and, five minutes later, patiently be explaining to an angry person why they can’t squeal their tires going fifty miles per hour past the grade school, and, five minutes after you get the ticket written and are working on the associated paperwork, responding to an accident involving an injured individual’s family who can’t understand why no one stopped that idiot squealing his tires and going 50 miles an hour through town before he hit their father. It has to feel like a rather thankless job at points. I do hope they know how much we appreciate their hard work and dedication to fairness and justice.

I would guess, if we were honest, one of the reasons we stay in the church is because we find some part of it rewarding. It may be because we have the hope of eternal life in heaven if we are a part of it. Or it may be because we feel like it makes us better people by having a moral code. However, I know, for some people, they feel invested in keeping their parish open and the reward comes in knowing that, if they show up, there are parishioners still coming and still a reason for the big bad mean Archdiocese not to close their parish. Remember a few years ago when we counted the number of people in church during the month of October? I can remember seeing people who were spotty, at best, in their Mass attendance in the other eleven months, making sure that they came every Sunday during the month of October. One year, I decided to have the ushers count every week and just put the average in for the October count in the hopes that those people would come every week. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. And I was told I needed to put the numbers for the weekends in October and not just the yearly average. Well, I tried…

Each of our readings, in one way or another, asks us if we could still be faithful if there was no reward. It’s most obvious in the first reading from the Prophet Jeremiah where the good guys, the holy ones, are those who trust in God rather than in human beings. They are those who don’t live by today’s morality or the fashion of the moment but seek the truths that are deeper and more profound. This theme gets picked up by our Lord and deepend to explain that, to drink deeply from the stream of holiness means being poor, hungry, weeping, and being hated by the world versus the people who desire the esteem of men, who are rich, filled, laughing, and have people speak well of them. Jesus is juxtaposing those who are yearning to receive a reward with those who have already received it by saying we need to yearn for something better.

St. Paul, in the next part of his First Letter to the Corinthians, gives us a rather interesting illustration of this by continuing to deal with factions in his little community. Some give credit to their faith to him, while others do to someone named Apollos, and others to St. Peter. St. Paul has to constantly remind the Corinthians that it makes no difference who told them the Gospel first because their allegiance is to Jesus Christ not one of his apostles. In today’s second reading, we can more clearly hear the real challenges these factions pose to the unity of the community. Some within the community believe that you can call yourself a Christian but not believe in the resurrection. Last week, in the second reading, St. Paul began explaining why this was not compatible when he explained how the resurrection was revealed. He gave a list of all the people who saw Jesus was resurrected, including himself as the last and lowest of them all. Today, he builds on that list by asking if they think everyone, including himself and St. Peter, were liars. If so, he asks, what is the point of Christianity? The problem for the people who doubted the resurrection was that it was in contradiction with their philosophies. For some Greek converts, their philosophy separated out the terrible evil body from the good soul so that the resurrection could only be spiritual in nature. For some of the Jewish converts, the concept of the afterlife meant purely a sleeping in heavenly peace in what they called sheol. The reward these folks desire is to have a better, more nuanced, understanding of Christiantiy than those other people who were trained by other apostles. They want to think they are better because they have a better understanding from whoever trained them or whatever philosophy they were taught before they became Christian instead of having to change their hearts and minds to be a follower of Jesus. St. Paul says to them that the resurrection of Jesus changes everything because, as Jesus and Jeremiah alluded to in the first reading and gospel, it means we seek eternal rewards over temporal ones.

It leaves us to ponder a couple of questions. Do we think of faith as something that deserves immediate rewards, like an answered prayer or warm fuzzy feelings from a hug from God? Do we think of faith as something where people will look up to us because of a squeaky clean life or a strong moral compass? Or do we think of faith as opening us up to the deficiencies in our lives, as showing us why we are truly poor, what we hunger for, what we are mourning for and where we yearn too much for the esteem of people, in other words all the places in our lives that are really gaps that only God can fill?