Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C …But if you think that crowd of award winners was criticized how much more the crowd that Jesus chose as his base: the lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors, and Samaritans. His valentines, his palentines, even more so, his \u201cegalentines\u201d \u2013 equal in dignity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":45899,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3119,3294,1321],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-plaza-new-ws","category-ars-praedicandi","category-homilies"],"yoast_head":"\n
by Fr. Edward Foley, Capuchin<\/em>
While technically it was a few days ago
by many folk\u2019s social calendars
and especially by those enterprising restaurants, boutiques
and spas who excel at marketing
this is still Valentine\u2019s weekend
but admittedly in somewhat of a diminished mode
Happily for the retailers the diminishment
does not seem to be in overall spending
Valentine\u2019s day still ranks
as number 3 in the consumer holiday expenditure rate
at 20 billion dollars
well behind Mother\u2019s day at close to 24 billion last year
and Christmas 2018 at maybe over a trillion dollars
On the other hand, that rising number in Valentine\u2019s Day sales
may simply be an indicator of inflated prices
not inflated interest
According to the National Retail Federation<\/a>
10 years ago more than 60% of adults
planned to celebrate Valentine\u2019s day
Today that number has drop to just over 50%
and young adult interested has dropped almost 20%
from 72% to 53%
Interest on the part of women is even lower
Apparently it\u2019s becoming a Guy\u2019s holiday
On average guys plan to shell out $339 on their beloved
while women averaged about $64
Part of the push back against Valentine\u2019s day
is seen in the growing attention to \u201cGal-entine\u2019s\u201d day
an idea spawned by a 2010 episode of the TV Comedy
Parks and Recreation<\/a>
The invention of the over-bubbly character Leslie
who wanted to celebrate the joys of female friendship
and the date: February 13th
Well the idea has taken off
Go online and you can find over 100 different kinds
of Galentine\u2019s day Cards
Even Hallmark has a lineup of 14 of them
There even seems to be the rumblings of
a male reaction to Valentine\u2019s day
Google \u201cpalentine\u2019s day\u201d and see with you come up with
The reason that I chronicle
at least a social shunning if not backlash
against Valentine\u2019s day
is not only because I got lost
in a research vortex on the topic
but also because our readings seem to be doing that as well.
It doesn\u2019t appear, for example,
that the prophet Jeremiah got the Valentine memo \u2026
and the first reading suggests he is not in a Valentine\u2019s mood
\u201ccrushed is the one who trusts in human beings\u201d
\u201ccursed is the one who seeks his strength in flesh\u201d
Well happy Valentines to you too
If we think we might run to the gospel for refuge
Luke starts out pretty well with the quartet of blessings
but then whacks us with a quartet of woes
to the rich
to the filled
to the laughing
to the well-spoken of \u2026
that must include those who got chocolates and Champaign
Clearly not much in the cupid spirit
but maybe this word of contradictions
this gospel of reversals
this set of beatitudes matched with what one writer called
\u201cwoe-i-tudes\u201d [1]
actually reveal something of the divine Eros
the eternal passion
the sacred heart of a creator
who in the most astounding reversal of all
has fallen in love with his own creatures
especially the marginalized, poor, erased and lost
That instinct is fueled by the way that Luke crafts his beatitudes
quite different from those we hear in Matthew
Luke has shortened the list from 8 to 4
and has added a series of \u201cwoes\u201d missing from Matthew
One credible explanation of this Lukan editing of Matthew
is that Jesus probably taught these sayings many times
and shaped the beatitudes to his listeners\/his audience
Now I don\u2019t want to suggest that Jesus was running for office
to be elected as messiah
but it is interesting to think of the beatitudes
as part of Jesus\u2019 basic stump speech
and like any good stump speech
it has central unchanging themes
but is appropriately modulated to the local context
If you remember
just a few chapters ago in Luke
Jesus was talking to the home town crowd in Nazareth
and while polite and initially affirming
they eventually concluded he went not just a little too far
but way too far
and tried to throw him off a cliff \u2026
in a few minutes literally from the pulpit to the precipice
But just two chapters later, he appears with a different crowd
not up on some mount as in Matthew
but down on the plain \u2026 on a level playing field
As womanist theologian Renita Weems puts it,<\/a>
Jesus addresses “people with very little to offer
beyond their enthusiasm and their devotion
but despite their poverty and need
they recognize the presence of something new and powerful”
Weems notes the desperation of the crowd on the plain,
“eager to sign on to any revolution that promises them a
share in the world in which they live.”
And Jesus seems to fuel that promise
even in the way he addresses the crowd
using the second person rather than the third
blessed are you, not blessed are those who, as in Matthew
because Jesus is speaking
intimately and compassionately to the crowd and
identifies with the crowd by standing with them
rather than above them
In a word, Jesus is speaking to his base
The poor and outcasts are his metaphorical valentines
If you follow entertainment media to any extent these days
you know we are in the midst of award season
According to the pros it begins in September with the Emmy\u2019s
and ends at the end of February with the Academy awards
In the September to February Span
There are almost 60 distinctive awards bestowed<\/a>
everything form the well known
Grammys and Golden Globes and Critic\u2019s choice
to the lesser known Dorian awards from the society of LGBTQ critics
to the North Carolina Film Critics Association awards
All of these awards are both sought after and contested
like the push back against Black Panther
winning big at the SAG and Critics choice awards
or critics slamming Cardi B
the first time a woman won Grammy as best rap album
But if you think that crowd of award winners was criticized
how much more the crowd that Jesus chose as his base
The lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors, and Samaritans
his valentines
his palentines
even more so, his \u201cegalentines\u201d \u2013 equal in dignity
Jesus privileges these poor, and hungry
weeping and disparaged
and goes after the rich and privileged
not because either group is necessarily
better or worse than the other
but because the poor reveal something about
the essential generosity of God
and the inhumanity among God\u2019s creatures
that is essentially contrary to God\u2019s will. [2]
Such shocking inhumanity in its myriad forms today
is the true national emergency we need to address
All of us do not experience the kind of poverty
that grabs the attention of Divine pathos
but there is one kind of vulnerability
marginalization
helplessness that we all know
and are largely glad to be done with
It is one that Jesus celebrates
as an image of a true disciple
and that is the state of childhood
I have been reading Robert Sapolsky\u2019s difficult but stunning book
Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst<\/em>
A third of the way through the book he offers a startling look
at all of the prenatal and post-natal factors
parenting, environment, nutrition, genetics and the like
that have a frightening impact
on whether we grow up healthy and well adjusted
or whether we are prone to underachievement
to violence, or even to mental disabilities
What is so heart wrenching about Sapolsky\u2019s narrative
is that children have no control
over those multiple biological and environmental factors
that will shape them for the rest of their lives
In the midst of reading Sapolsky
I ran across a reflection on today\u2019s gospel
from the always thoughtful Ron Rolheiser<\/a>
Fr. Rolheiser\u2019s seems to offer an alternative beatitude here
paraphrased as: \u201cblessed are the bed-wetters\u201d
Rolheiser reflects on visiting friends
whose four year old daughter was relentlessly teased
with a clever but cruel rhyme
because she still occasionally wet her bed
He writes:
The poor kid \u2026 flinched every time they repeated the rhyme \u2026
yet she was helpless to protect herself. She was exposed and
ashamed\u2026. she was angry, not so much at the other kids and
their teasing as at herself, at her weakness \u2026. Sometimes kids
are powerless to stop wetting their beds, long after they\u2019ve
matured enough to experience great shame in doing it.<\/em>
He continues:
To such as these belongs the kingdom of God. Jesus had just
such a child in mind when he made that statement. But generally
we misunderstand why the kingdom belongs to children. We tend
to idealize the innocence of children\u2026. That is not what Jesus
most idealizes in a child however. The quality that makes children
so apt to receive the kingdom is not so much their innocence as
their helplessness, their powerlessness to not wet their beds\u2026.
Very young children cannot even feed themselves, let alone
provide for themselves.<\/em>
He concludes,
I suspect that is how God looks at us \u2026. We grow up, grow more
responsible, and grow more capable of taking care of ourselves,
still we never quite achieve adequacy\u2026. But \u2026 in the face of our
inadequacies, we must begin to see ourselves as God sees us, a
child who cannot yet be fully responsible for his or her life. Then
our shame can give way to tender compassion.<\/em>
It is such compassion that Luke is attempting to stir up
In his own community, when he writes:
Blessed are the poor
the hungry
the inconsolable
the demeaned
And so we understand:
Blessed are the vulnerable
the children
the diminished
the border-dwellers
the dying
For they rehearse our past and our future
and reveal the God who sustained us in that past
and will sustains us in that future
maybe a future that is already upon us
If we but learn to acknowledge our own finitude
poverty, weakness and inadequacy
and reject the easy temptation
to oppress those whose poverty and weakness
and inadequacy
is more obvious than our own
But instead learn the Jesus way
to embrace, love and even serve them
and all whom society pushes to the fringes
and so create a new level playing field
a new band of beloved \u201cegalatines\u201d
through Christ our Lord.
Endnotes:
[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, Home by Another way (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 53.e
[2] Gustavo Gutierrez, “Song and Deliverance” in Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World<\/em>,
quoted by R. Alan Culpepper in The New Interpreter’s Bible, Luke<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"