12 June 2007

Tasteless & Dark, we are useless

10th Week OT (Tues): 2 Cor 1.18-22 and Matthew 5.13-46
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, University of Dallas

Where is your flavor? Where is your light? Have you gone stale? Dim? Tasteless and dark? Or do you season well everything you do with Christ’s love, season well everyone you meet? Do you shine out before others the wonders our Lord has done for you? Does your presence push shadows into the light? If not, why not? Tasteless and dark, you are useless to the Lord. To be stale and dim in the faith before the world is an anti-witness, a testimony at cross-purposes with the gospel. Instead of proclaiming in word and deed the freedom of God’s mercy, the boundless possibilities of our Father’s love, instead, being tasteless and dark, we confirm the prejudices of this world’s blackest hearts and most ruthless minds: God is a fairytale best left to children’s books. We know this is a lie. But do we live lives—out there!—in a way that provides ample, positive evidence that God is not a fairytale or a brutal projection of our desire to control chaos or a figment of a collective subconscious wish for an eternal Parent?

In other words, do you live out there in the same way you worship in here? Out there, do you love Christ openly? Freely? Do you proclaim with the words of your mouth and the work of your hands the glory of God? Do you show others The Way to eternal life in Christ? Is it plain to everyone around you that for you Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life? Do you exude the peace of Christ, the obedient YES of Mary, the remarkable surrender to divine providence of Christ’s final minutes on the cross? Do you live and move and have your being in God, living day to day trusting in His promises, believing His faithful YES’s and knowing that, though you and I are not perfect yet, we are, in Christ Jesus, being perfected for a life that glorifies God forever?

What is your light and what is your lampstand? My questions to you here should not be heard as a kind of Christian fundamentalism. I am not pushing a “Jesus alone is enough” spirituality. Our Catholic faith is never about Me and God. It is always Us and God. And in that “us” each of us exercises a nature unique to the person, a set of gifts and talents combined in a way that will, once used for the benefit of others, cooperate with God’s will for each of us and perfect His love in each of us. Your light is your set of gifts, your bag of talents given to you to glorify God. Your lampstand is how you choose to use those gifts for our good. And as a member of the Body, any perfection in God’s love for you is a grace for me and everyone else in the Body. When I grow in holiness, so do you. When you are healed, I am healthier. Let’s be thorough here: when any member of the Body is diseased, the whole Body is sick. If salvation is not about Me and Jesus, then neither is sin just about Me and Jesus. Look not, Lord, on our sins but on the faith of your Church.

Your light must shine before others! Not for your benefit alone but for all of us out here who fail so regularly, who fall so frequently, who need the whole Body for strength to go on. Tasteless and dark, we are useless to one another. This doesn’t mean moral or spiritual perfection right now. It does mean that we have promised at baptism to show Christ to anyone who looks our way; to show him as faithfully, as fully as our current progress in holiness will allow. And it means that do so with a spirit of work, working to understand His Self-revelation; working to clarify and know more deeply His wisdom; working, always working with the gifts of the Spirit—intellect and will—to purify ourselves of narcissism and disobedience so that we may come to be servants worthy of serving Him and one another.

Where is your flavor? Where is your light? You must shine before others, so that we may all see Christ more clearly.

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