Sunday Homily, September 23, 2012, 25th Ordinary Time B
Readings:
Wisdom 2, 12, 17-20, Let us beset the just one.
Psalm 54, The Lord upholds my life
James 3, 16-4, 3, Where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder.
Mark 9, 30-37, Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me.
Wisdom observations:
What: One of the 14-15 books of the deutero-canonical books of the Bible. Not OT nor NT, but in between and the subject of controversy over the centuries. The “in between books.” Were they really part of the Bible or not? How do you know? Catholic church accepts the books.
Subject matter: the book makes use of traditional Jewish material, as well as ideas borrowed from Greek philosophy, in order to teach that God rewards those who are faithful to him.
Author: not Solomon, but a Jew living in Alexandria, Egypt who wrote and spoke excellent Greek. The book is sometimes called “The Wisdom of Solomon.”
Date: ca. 100-200 before Christ. How do we know these facts? Because of text analysis. For example, while the author wrote in Greek, he uses phrases and expressions that have a Hebrew flavor. Also, he mentions rulers and places that reveal date and locale.
Our Selection: what a wicked person thinks should be done with a good person–beat & kill. This links up with the suffering servant poem from 2 Isaiah last week. Jews think the good person getting beaten is the Jewish race/nation. Christians think the person is Christ.
James: presents a pretty negative image of people. What would be a compassionate image?
Says the child, “Numero uno or last??”
This morning I would like to talk about receiving the child, in particular the inner child. I also want to say a word about being first or last.
The very Thursday night I arrived home from our backpacking trip Rosemary & I went to see Most Happy Fella at the Irving Arts Center.
The play is about a guy named Tony, middle aged Italian American, successful wine maker from Nappa Valley, and a shy bachelor.
He eats in a restaurant one evening in, say, Chicago. He likes the waitress and leaves her a note with his tip, despite his shyness. They begin a long distance correspondence and start to get close. Both are looking for partners. She does not remember him from the evening at the restaurant.
They decide to exchange photos. Tony, who has been taking a lot of risk because he is so shy, is afraid to show her his picture. He thinks he is too old & too ugly. So he sends her the photo of his handsome young farm foreman. The foreman has already told Tony he is planning on moving on anyway.
So Tony and his girl decide to wed at the farm. On the day of her arrival and the big wedding, Tony discovers that the foreman decided to hang around for the wedding & party. Tony loses it. He goes out, rolls his pickup, and almost kills himself.
Meanwhile, girl arrives and thinks the nice foreman is the groom. In fact, they get rather enamored of each other. Then Tony is brought in on a stretcher and they actually do the wedding. Guess what happens then. I’ll tell you at the end.
Let me make 2 observations about Tony.
First, Tony might have had ambitions about being numero uno, but he really thought he was the last, a loser, ugly, and old. His challenge: get away from thinking best or worst. Just accept Tony as okay.
Secondly, when Tony let himself leave the note for the waitress, he was letting his inner child out for a minute. In his correspondence he was letting that child play. The child wants to be loved and to play. Trouble was, the child was not used to getting out and was afraid. So he tries the picture trick.
We can resemble Tony. Thinking I am first, numero uno in anything, or last, both are traps. I would propose it is irrelevant. I am okay just as I am.
Like Tony I have an inner child. Want to know what the child wants? Just watch our kids here. To be loved and to play.
So, two questions today:
First, where do you think of yourself, first, last, or just okay?
Secondly, how do you let your own inner child out to play?
What happened to Tony? He eventually became a most happy married fella, despite some complications.