One of the songs that easily gets stuck in my craw and doesn’t seem to get unstuck is the Mississippi Squirrel Revival by the comedic songwriter Ray Stevens. It’s a little bit old but it’s just one of those songs that, as soon as I hear it, I chuckle and sing along and then I can’t get it out of my head after. I’ll find myself for days after singing it in the shower and whistling it as I walk. The context of the song, in case you’ve never heard it, is that a boy brings a squirrel to church one Sunday, an act that I discourage from happening in this church! But, the squirrel in the song gets out of the boy’s shoebox and runs all around church making the preacher think that this congregations has been touched by the Holy Spirit. The best verse, in my opinion, talked about when the squirrel when all the way down to the amen pew where sat Sister Bertha better-than-you who'd been watchin' all the commotion with sadistic glee. But you should've seen the look in her eyes when that squirrel jumped her garters and crossed her thighs. She jumped to her feet and said "Lord have mercy on me".
Have you ever met a Bertha better-than-you, someone lets you know that she or he is better than you in some way, whether it be richer or better looking or nicer or holier? I imagine we all have Berthas in our life. And, if truth be told, I have a feeling most of us have been Bertha better-than-yous at one point in our lives as well. Jesus, in our gospel today, cautions us against just such arrogant attitudes. He repeats one statement three times using different ways, all of which seem to say, “Don’t make religious performance too formulaic.” In other words, we shouldn’t believe that we have our relationship to God figured out. This is a challenge to all of us, perhaps especially to us who come to church and pray more so than those who don’t. We can get into the groove and start thinking that religious observance is about repeating formulaic morning and evening prayers, coming to mass on Sundays and praying before meals. We must be open to the possibility that God wants something else from us. And we must recognize our own faults and failures. If we turn our religion into a checklist of daily items to accomplish, we may not be allowing God to penetrate into the deepest recesses of our hearts to point out the times when pride, selfishness, or some other sin disturbed our relationship to God and our neighbor. We might just think that we do enough to please God and not care about the times that we don’t.
This is what frightens me about some new organizations connected to the church. There are some that have a leader who seems to claim to have all the answers. The leader may claim that she or he is just reading and utilizing texts that are part of the church’s tradition like the Bible and the writings of certain saints, but it is clear that it is the leader’s interpretation of these documents that prevail and that, oftentimes, her or his interpretation seems to make our faith into a list of dos and don’ts.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There are still things that God expects from us like praying our morning and evening prayer, coming to mass weekly, and going to confession at least once a year. But we much also remember that God doesn’t want us to be his pets that complete the obstacle course of life in order to get the treat of heaven. God loves us and wants us to love him back. God wants to be in a relationship of love with us and wants us to live our lives like we are in a dynamic relationship to him. God doesn’t want us to be Bertha better-than-yous who have everything figured out but, instead, he wants us to turn to him ever day and be willing to follow wherever he leads us.
