Swimming in Love and Not Knowing It

You think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets,
not to abolish but to fulfill the law.

 There is a great story told of a little fish in the ocean
swimming around trying to figure out where the ocean is.
He comes up to this older, wiser fish and says,
“Where is the ocean?”
The old fish says to him, “You are swimming in it.”
The little fish is confused.
He says, “But that is just water,”
and continues to swim on.

He continues to ask this question of every fish that he knows,
each time getting the same answer,
and he remains confused.
Then one day he gets washed up on the shore
and as he is gasping for air,
he looks out and he sees the vast ocean
and he says, “Ah, the ocean.”
And he gasps his last.

 The reason I tell that story is because I think it reminds us
that we are swimming in this world of ours, so to speak,
in God’s love and we do not realize it.
We are like that little fish going around
asking where is God’s love
when it is the very thing we are swimming in.
It is the very thing which sustains us.
The only thing that keeps us going is, in fact, God’s love.

 Yet, we continue searching for God’s love
not realizing that we are in it.
It is easy to get lost.
There is a great quote from the famous philosopher, Blaise Pascal,
who once said that there is a hole in every human heart
that only God can fill.
We search for God in all the wrong places,
but we are in God’s love, we are surrounded by it
but we do not realize it.

 That is the real challenge of our life here in Silicon Valley,
in our own culture.
We swim in the waters of innovation and ambition
and the go, go, go mentality.
It is so hard to realize where is God
and yet it is the very air we breathe,
it is the very water we swim in.
We are sustained by God’s love and that is the reality.

 One of the greatest gifts that God gives us is freedom.
He does not coerce us.
He does not manipulate us,
He gives us freedom to accept His love or to reject it.
He does not try to manipulate us into it,
but He does offer it to us in freedom.

 This is what we hear in today’s first reading from Sirach.
I offer before you, I ask you to choose life or death,
choose light or darkness.
Whatever you choose, you will have.
And it is true, whatever we choose, we get,
for good or for bad.
But he says, choose the commandments,
choose to follow God because He will give you life.

 We hear in today’s second reading
from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians,
a reassertion of the wisdom of God;
it is not human wisdom.
Is it not just like what we are up against in our society today?
Everyone tells us what we need to have.
Everybody is telling us we need to have more, more, more.
More cars, more toys, more money, more jobs, more power,
and it is all more, more.
And the Lord says, no, it is not; that is none of that.
Paul assures us that Christ is the true wisdom.

 If we look to Christ and realize that we have Christ within us,
that is the wisdom of God.
And then along comes Jesus in this reading,
and it can sound harsh,
but He is not talking about the commandments
as an extra burden.
He says, this is what sets us free.

 He is not trying to double down
but it does sound like that.
He is actually trying to help us realize
that once you actually accept the law and live the law,
then you are set free,
and you go to a deeper level.
He goes through this list of commandments that we know.
He says, “You’ve heard it was said this.”
Then He goes one step farther.
He goes deeper, not harsher.
He says, that is the wisdom of God.
This deeper reality that God calls us to.

 It sounds so easy, and it is in one sense, straightforward,
it is simple, but hard.
Our society around us gives us so many conflicting choices
that do not bring us to new life.
For us, this freedom is a great gift, the freedom to choose,
but one gives us life and the other takes the life away.

 We think in American society,
and indeed almost all societies
that freedom is to exert our individual rights,
as in we are free from the law,
free to do whatever we want to do.
That is what freedom is, that is what I take up.
I can do anything,
you cannot tell me what to do, I am free,
I can do whatever I want.

 You see, according to the Scriptures,
that is not freedom at all, that is just choice.
He says, freedom is when you read the law
and you choose to follow God
because that gives us the greatest freedom
when we do God’s will in our life.

 We choose life over death, we choose goodness,
we choose light over darkness.
That is the language of the Scripture,
and that is what we are called to do each and every day.
The challenge for us is then to live that in our daily life,
to make these choices that are for goodness
versus for not goodness,
and that is where we need discernment.
We need to slow down and to ask,
what is the Lord calling me to do this day?

 You see, the gift is God;
we are already swimming in this ocean of God’s love.
In one sense, we do not have to do anything.
All we have to do is breathe it in,
swim in it and realize how blessed we are,
and that is the call to action.

 You know, we celebrate the sacraments as a reminder to us of this.
We come to the table each Sunday to receive the body of Christ,
to remember, to humble ourselves and say,
we are completely dependent on God,
and that I have to choose God one more time.
So, when we come forward and say, “Amen,”
we are saying and choosing to receive God
and to become Christ to others.
That is what we do.

 That is our confirmation of our choice,
but it is not enough just to receive it;
we have to become it in our daily life.
We have got to go out and become it,
a living reality of that choice
in each and every choice we make in the day,
to be kind to others
when every reason could tell us we do not need to be,
that we love instead of hate,
that we choose unity over division.
We choose the light of Christ over the darkness of the world.

 We say, this is who I am,
this is what I have just chosen here,
so I am going to live it in my world.
So others turn around and go like,
“Where is your source?
How did you make that choice?”
Because the source of our strength is Christ.
And that is what the Scriptures
are trying to constantly remind us of.

 We do not do it alone.
Christ is within us and
He is helping us make this choice,
but we have to choose.
Because once we choose, we are given it
because that is the freedom,
the radical freedom that God gives everyone.
So thus we have evil in the world
because people choose the wrong thing.
But let us not choose evil.

 I am talking about the daily life.
Let us choose kindness.
Let us not choose harsh words, but kind words.
Words that lift up, not tear down.
Let us find a way to be a healing balm in our world
that has so many words of division and hatred
and you can just feel it
because they are listening to the wrong source.

 See, we claim to listen to the right source
by coming to receive Christ
in the word spoken and in the bread and the wine
now made into the body and blood of Christ.
Now our job is to live it.
And when we do that, Christ says He moves closer to us,
that we will be His presence in the world.
We do not have to do it alone.

 In a couple of moments now,
we are going to invite those who are sick among us,
who may be in body or mind or spirit,
who are asking for healing.
What God says in those moments
is that He moves close to us.
He does not move further away.
He moves closer to us when we are in need
and the sacrament of anointing is a demonstration of that.

So we move closer to our brothers and sisters
who are going to come up here to line up together.
Why? Because that is what Christ would have us do.
That we move close to them, not further away.
And so we should;
that is the model we are meant to be in the world.

 When somebody is broken and wounded,
we do not move away, we move closer to them.
When somebody is disenfranchised on the periphery,
whether they are migrants
or whether they are married, divorced and remarried
or whether they are LGBT, it does not matter.
Whatever their periphery is,
we are called to move close to them,
to bring healing to them,
kindness, gentleness, the love of God.

 That is the commandments, and my friends,
that will set us free.
So the Lord puts before us that commandment,
keep the commandments.
He says, choose life over death,
choose light over darkness,
and whatever you choose, it will be given to you.

 You think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets,
not to abolish but to fulfill the law.