18th Sunday after Penetcost
Sermon- 9-27-26- Matthew 21:33-32
Waking Up to Find God’s Love Was Always Already Everywhere
God is love. This is a statement from scripture (1 John 4). It is also my lived experience, and our conviction as Episcopal Christians. Jesus came to train us to see and help us to experience God as love, pervading all things, transforming all things. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and mystic who trained as a paleontologist and geologist, claimed that “love is the very physical structure of the Universe.” As Franciscan Priest and globally recognized teacher Richard Rohr points out in his book The Universal Christ, “that is a very daring statement, especially for a scientist to make. But for Teilhard, gravity, atomic bonding, orbits, cycles, photosynthesis, ecosystems, force fields, electromagnetic fields, sexuality, human friendship, animal instinct, and evolution all reveal an energy that is attracting all things and beings to one another, in a movement toward ever greater complexity and diversity–and yet ironically also toward unification at ever deeper levels. This energy is quite simply love under many different forms.” (P. 69, universal christ)
Rohr goes on to give two excellent definitions of love. Love, he says, is “the attraction of all things toward all things, a universal language and underlying energy that keeps showing itself despite our best efforts to resist it.” And, he teaches, love, which is a paradox, is “A flow of energy willingly allowed and exchanged, without requiring payment in return.” (p. 70-71, universal christ). Only love creates future possibilities for the greatest good of all concerned, even and especially when things go wrong. Love transforms pain, betrayal, and violence, creating a positive future of redemption instead of retribution. God, who is love, transforms mistakes into the highest good for all. No other power can do that besides love.
In today’s reading, Jesus scolds the religious leaders for not believing in the way of righteousness that John the Baptist had taught. But what in fact was the way of righteousness that John taught, that Jesus wants us to follow? One interpretation, that of the chief priests and the elders of the people, was to focus on what would give a teacher such as Jesus proper authority, and to focus on moral behavior and correct religious belief, which to them automatically excluded tax collectors and prostitutes. But for Jesus, they were missing the point. This was not the way of righteousness that John had taught. And by the way, this is in no means a unique criticism of Judaism. The same thing happens in Christianity, and in many other religious traditions. Rohr teaches that “early-stage religion tends to focus on cleaning up, which is to say, determining who meets the requirements for moral behavior and religious belief. But Jesus throws a wrench into this whole machinery by refusing to enforce or even bother with what he considered secondary issues like the Sabbath, ritual laws, purity codes, membership requirements, debt codes, on and on.”
So, if, for Jesus, correct moral behavior and religious belief are not John’s “way of righteousness,” which the religious leaders and others should follow, then what is? What is the “way of righteousness” that Jesus preached and practiced? It is the way of love. As Rohr teaches, religion, at its best, should help us be more aware, more conscious of God’s foundational love, which permeates all reality, which is “the very physical structure of the Universe.” As Rohr teaches, “it’s more about waking up than about cleaning up.” Rather than focusing on moral behavior or correct beliefs, Jesus focuses on waking us up to God’s foundational, omni-present love. Moral behavior and correct beliefs are nice side benefits of being aware of that love. But they are not the starting point: they are the result.
Jesus, in today’s reading, could be understood to be telling the religious leaders, and also us today, “stop focusing so much on teaching people to clean up, on the letter of the law, on moral behavior and correct beliefs, which Jesus dismisses earlier in Matthew (15:3, 6-9) as only ‘human commandments.’ And stop your busy judging of tax collectors and prostitutes. You don’t know their stories. You have no idea what they’re going through, what their childhoods were like, what challenges their life-journeys are currently facing. Instead, bring the ever-present reality of God’s foundational divine love ever more into your consciousness. Wake up to the reality that God, who is love, is literally all around you, infusing all humans, all creation, the entire universe, and transforming pain, mistakes, and violence into the highest good for all beings. As a side benefit of your increased awareness of God’s permeating love-presence, you will naturally practice much higher moral behavior and correct beliefs. But that is only a side benefit, not the starting point. The starting point is resting in, and being aware of, God’s love. And look, these tax collectors and prostitutes have already started doing just that. They may have had painful childhoods, but they have started letting God’s love soak in. And it has already started transforming their hearts. Out of the pain and sorrow in their lives, God is starting to bring joy and new life. They are learning to surrender to the power of God’s love, and thus to embody that love.
And that’s what God is inviting us to do too. We must become aware of, and surrender to the power of, God’s love, so that we naturally embody it. God’s love is the answer. The more we dwell in God’s love, the more we become re-connected with who we truly are, we enter the flow, and we re-learn to embody that love as part of God’s healing answers to the world’s problems. We join the flow of love-energy. And our whole life gets swept up in the river of God’s love and joy. That’s what God wants for us. Not the frustration and the pain of trying to get it right, to clean ourselves up, and always failing. God wants the freedom of surrendering to God’s love, like these tax collectors and prostitutes have already started doing. May we indeed learn to become aware of, and surrender to the power of, God’s love suffusing the whole universe, that it may restore us to alignment with God’s presence within us, that your kin-dom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.
