Do Your Portion of the Wall

Without cost you have received;
without cost you are to give.

On Wednesday this last week,
I had the privilege of going to Paris, France
to give a presentation at a college
called the Collège des Bernardins.
It is an 800-year-old university campus
built for the Cistercian monks.
In the heyday of the University of Paris at Sorbonne,
this was a seminary where the Cistercian monks gathered
from all over the world, it was a place of study.

Since then, it has been many different things.
At one point it fell into disrepair,
and it was even a prison for a time.
The Archdiocese of Paris reclaimed it
and made it into a new kind of learning center,
a place where culture meets faith.
They have concerts, they have evenings of culture,
and the seminarians of the University of Paris
now live there again, back to the seminary days.

I was there because they were inaugurating
a year-long series on the Pope's new encyclical,
Magnifica Humanitas,
to talk about artificial intelligence and humanity.
I was asked to give the inaugural address.
It was a fantastic honor.
What was interesting is that the French
are a little bit suspicious of artificial intelligence.
Truth be told, they are suspicious
of almost everything American,
but artificial intelligence in particular.

It was fascinating, because the conversation led to talking
not so much about artificial intelligence,
as what this means for humanity.
What does it mean for humans to flourish?
What does that conversation look like?
It really was a mirroring of the document
that Pope Leo announced.
And I cannot help but think of the two biblical images
that Pope Leo gives us in this document:
the Tower of Babel
and the rebuilding of the city of Jerusalem by Nehemiah.

With the Tower of Babel,
the people build it circular and inward,
focusing on themselves and their own pride,
with no reference to God.
But in the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem,
Nehemiah calls the people to pause
and discern how they would do this.
Then each one was called
to build the section of wall in front of their home.
Each had a role to play.

What makes humans flourish, according to Leo,
is participation,
is relationship,
that we matter to each other.
The common good is that we recognize
the dignity of every human person.
And that is the very theme
we are picking up in today's readings.

Jesus is telling us that the harvest is abundant,
but the laborers are few.
And He is calling others
to participate in His ministry.
He calls the Twelve,
each according to their own gifts,
to build, in a sense,
their own part of the wall of His ministry.

But what is very important in this passage
is to see the movement that takes place.
Jesus first notices the people,
and His heart is moved with pity.
Now, the translation there is a bit weak.
The Greek would look more like this:
His gut was moved with compassion.

The best analogy I can give
is when a parent sees their child
get sick, or stumble and hurt.
The parent immediately comes
and draws straight into the heart of the child,
grabs the child, picks it up,
holds it, and takes care of it.
It is a gut reaction.
There is no rational movement there.
It is just instinct.
It comes from the gut.

And that is what Jesus is saying:
you are called to be moved.
He does not just see it.
He sees it, is moved with compassion,
and then He moves to action.
He heals the sick and casts out demons.
And of course, He calls the disciples
to do the very same thing.

But He also calls each one of us
to do the same thing.
That is the movement we are called to make.
First, to notice the suffering of others.
To take note of what other people are experiencing,
to be moved with compassion,
to notice their plight,
and to let our gut be affected,
to see that and to care.
And then we are called to move.

Now, let us face it.
The harvest is abundant!
We are in one of the wealthiest places in the world
here in Silicon Valley.
I know you do not always feel that way,
but the world tells us
we are in the wealthiest place on earth.
And the day before yesterday,
we just made our first trillionaire.
Woo. Great!
Not that any of us are feeling that.

But as a result of that,
we have just made several billionaires
and multiple millionaires in our area
who are part of this.
But what defines us
is what we do with what we have.
That is what is really going to matter.
And that is true for all of us.

It is what we do with what we have,
both materially, yes,
but also with our time, my friends.

Can we notice, for example,
the elderly person in our parish
who is lonely, whose phone never rings,
who is looking for some companionship?
Can we be moved with compassion
to reach out and simply be present to them
and say hello?
Maybe it is our own grandparents,
who are not in this area but somewhere else.
A phone call or a message
would go a long way to heal their loneliness.

Or is it that young teenager
who is overusing technology
and now has anxiety
about what they should look like online?
Can we be present to them in their world
and assure them that they do not need the virtual friends,
because they have the physical connection
right in front of them?
Can we love them where they are
and ease their anxiety?

Or can we notice that homeless person,
the one who maybe looks okay
but is struggling to put things together?
Yesterday I was up in Sacramento
at the ordination of a young friend of mine,
and I stopped at a gas station.
I was having a conversation
with an Asian woman standing beside me,
chatting away as my gas was filling the car,
and then I realized she had a bag full of bottles.
She left me and went to the trash can
to pick out more bottles and cans.

It was 100 degrees yesterday.
And I thought to myself,
how desperate can you be
that you are looking for five cents
on every one of those cans?
How hard it would be to make ends meet
just doing that.

I know we cannot solve everyone's problems.
But what we can do is notice them and care,
be moved with compassion for them.
And maybe the only thing to do
is to have a conversation with a person like that,
and give them a few dollars
to make the day a little easier.
We cannot solve all their problems,
but we can care.

The Pope's encyclical is about recentering on relationship.
Jesus is always about relationship with one another,
that we are one human race,
that we are all His children,
and that we are called
to attend to each other.
This is not somebody else's task.
Each one of us has been given
our own portion of the wall.

I am not asking you to go to another country.
I am asking you to do your portion
of the wall of Jerusalem here,
what Pope Leo calls the city of God
and the civilization of love.
Because in the end, my friends,
the only thing that matters
is how well we have loved one another.
That will be the ultimate judgment of our lives.
Not on how well we have lived,
not on how much we have accomplished,
not on how many titles we have had,
but on how well we have loved
those who came in contact with us.

So today, let us hear those words once more.
Much is given, and much is received.
We are asked to give
as much as we have received.

Without cost you have received;
without cost you are to give.