Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

I don't know about you, but the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 flight and moon walk made me think of the amazing advances in science then and since.

It also reminded me that I used to enjoy air travel. Now flying seems a hassle. For example, it seems the seats are getting smaller or I'm getting bigger. Have you had that experience? And I miss the humor of airline personnel in the good ole days. I remember a captain who announced, “We’ve reached cruising altitude. I’m switching to autopilot so I can chat with you all during the flight.” Or this one: “Feel free to move about the aircraft, but please stay inside. It’s a bit cold out and if you walk on the wings it affects the flight pattern.” Yes, I say, bring back airline humor.

The word of God takes us back in our imaginations over thirty-five hundred years. Abraham is talking/praying with God about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. These two cities symbolize corruption, cities grossly inhospitable and perverse. Abraham here engages in a spirited conversation with God about justice: why should the innocent suffer with the wicked? Abraham almost appears brazen, but that openness indicates the closeness of his relationship with God.

We know the end of those two corrupt cities. Some scholars say they were destroyed in a catastrophe, probably an earthquake. Anyway, the story challenges us to ask ourselves, do we have a relationship with God? How do we pray? As a close friend? A distant relative? Or a stranger? How do we engage with God?

Paul, in his letter to the Christian community at Colossae (in western Turkey), speaks about the new identity we have through the waters of baptism. We have become sons and daughters of God our Father, heirs to the kingdom of God, graced by God to live a life worthy of our calling. God, through the death and resurrection of Jesus by the power of the Spirit, forgives us unconditionally so that we can live in relationship with God. Paul may be asking whether we live a life worthy of our calling.

In the Gospel according to Luke, the disciples want to know how Jesus talks to his heavenly Father. Jesus talks to God like a trusting son or daughter with a parent, like a close friend with another close friend.
Jesus urges us to be persistent in prayer, to go on asking, seeking, knocking, even though our heavenly Father already knows what we need.

There’s a pattern to prayer that Jesus taught us in the Our Father.
Here’s a paraphrase. We pray thoughtfully:

Our Father, because we are family, sons and daughters of God, heirs to God’s kingdom;
Your name be honored and reverenced everywhere;
May your kingdom of justice and peace and freedom permeate everyone;
And may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Satisfy our basic needs: food, health, home, livelihood, a good peaceful society.
Forgive us for the things we do wrong as we forgive those who wrong us.
And protect us from evils that will jeopardize our relationship with you, God.

This is the pattern of prayer Jesus gave us.

The word of God today in Genesis and Luke invites us to reflect upon prayer, and the word in Paul’s letter invites us to reflect upon God’s unconditional forgiveness so that we can live in relationship with God forever.

When I think of modern examples of forgiveness, I recall Nelson Mandela, who spent nineteen years as a political prisoner on Robben Island, off Cape Town, South Africa. He was forced to do hard labor in a quarry, at least six hours a day. He ate little and lived and slept in a six by five cell. That he overcame hardship, that he saw the glory of God not only in his fellow prisoners but also in his jailers, was remarkable.

When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, he asked all South Africans—black and white and colored—to seek not vengeance for injustices done through apartheid but to seek reconciliation and forgiveness with one another. That he was able to do this after years of hardship and cruelty and injustice was even more remarkable.

Mandela said he wanted to be remembered as an ordinary mortal (with all the peccadillos that go with being mortal) but with qualities that are within reach of ordinary people, like you and me. If Jesus could forgive, why shouldn’t he. And if we can’t forgive on our own, God simply asks us to participate in God’s gift of forgiveness. Nelson Mandela recognized the possibilities for greatness within human beings, for forgiveness and peacemaking.

We are all sinners, Pope Francis reminds us. The third chapter from the book of Genesis, the so-called fall from grace, is really a sketch about how we sin: through ingratitude, self-absorption/narcissism, the arrogance that believes that we can get along without God. “Sin” is one of the most basic terms in religious vocabulary, as common as “grace” and “God.” Sin means being “without,” “out of sync” in our relationships with God and our fellow humans, missing the mark in the pursuit of our authentic self.

It’s interesting to note that the only people who really upset Jesus were not sinners but hypocrites, those who refused to see anything wrong with their own prejudices, those who had no sense of a need for repentance, those who were smug about who they were.

But Jesus offered forgiveness aplenty to those who admitted they needed it. Amazing things are possible if we allow the Master to lay his forgiving hands upon us, an image captured powerfully in a poem by Myra Welch.

Poems can be prayers. Here are some of my favorite lines from that poem about a violin whose tune changes:

…Many a person with life out of tune
And battered and scarred with sin
Is auctioned cheap to the thoughtless crowd,
Much like the old violin …
But the Master comes, and the foolish crowd
Never can quite understand
The worth of the soul and the change that’s wrought
By the touch of the Master’s hand.

May the touch of the Master’s forgiving hand change us.
And may the touch of our forgiveness change our fellow human beings.