3EpiphanyB, Sullivan Park Care
Center, January 25, 2015 by Sr Annette Fricke, OP
The end of a poem titled, “I’ll be
happy in the future” goes like this: What if I could be happy, right here,
right now, even though my life isn’t perfect and never will be? What if I could
be happy with my aches and irritations and concerns and duties? I am happy just
to breathe. I am alive. I am happy just to have food, water, shelter, clothing
and love. I am grateful. I am happy just to hug and play with my beautiful
little girl. I am happy just to be her mama. I am happy just to trust and
respect my partner. I am loved and loving. I am happy like the songbirds, even
when it’s raining. I am happy like the lilies in bloom, even knowing I will
wither and pass away sooner or later. I am happiest when I am like water, when
I let go and go with the flow. When will you be happy?
What’s stopping you from being happy, just where you are,
right now, today?[1]
The lives of the disciples of Jesus
have at least one thing in common with us: They were not perfect. Despite our wanting to call some people
saints, designating their superiority to us, even the most ardent and faithful
among us have their ups and downs. There
are times when we also fail miserably.
The pattern is unmistakable: we are all excited and gung-ho, then we
realize just how difficult it is to remain that way. It doesn’t mean that we have in any way
fallen out of favor with God, it just means that without God, we are truly
weak. We can clearly walk away from God,
yet God is always there to reel us in, like catching a big fish that swallowed
us whole and getting it to spew us back out.
We think we should go one way, only to discover it was a bad decision. We
are children of God. We don’t belong
imprisoned in a fish, thinking that we have somehow escaped and don’t need to
deal with God. But that’s not where we
belong. We belong to God who made the heavens and the earth and gave us a
commission to go out into the world and be the love of God to all people and
our environment. Some have explained it
like this, when we are young, we are very accepting and trusting of others but
when we get older, we start becoming distrustful and judgmental. We become
alienated from each other. We sense that
others are not following the same rules as we are and we begin to second guess
what we should be doing. We become
seekers of our own self-interest and become selfish. We become trapped in our own pity system,
unable to get out without outside help.
Our self-sufficiency is our downfall. It is our place of unhappiness
because we are never truly happy until we rest in God’s gracious love. In Psalm
62, from our psalm for the day, also a passage that inspired St Augustine, “For
God alone, my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him.” St Augustine
said it more like this, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” If we look closely to the words of Psalm 62,
over and over, the psalmist affirms that trusting in God is our only hope.
That is clearly one of the major
points of the story of Jonah. God alone
is our rock and our salvation, our fortress; we shall not be shaken. But, we
can decide to walk away from God and God’s call to us, to be tossed about by
the seas of chance and our own decisions.
We can choose to merely float along or be subject to the wind that
pushes us further and further away from God and God’s desire for us. To be close to God’s bosom is not restrictive
or weakness as we might imagine at times, but is actually our security and
strength. It doesn’t mean that nothing
bad will ever happen to us, but it does mean that God will give us the strength
to endure. We may become depressed,
angry and bitter, but God will always be there to help us. On God rests our deliverance and our honor;
our mighty rock, our refuge is in God.
In the words of the popular hymn, “A mighty fortress is our God, a
bulwark never failing.” Though we may
fail God many times over, God never fails us.
Because God never fails us, we should
trust in him at all times. We should
pour out our hearts before him. God
seeks an intimate relationship with us through prayer. God alone is worth our trust. That does not mean that we cannot trust other
people, just that God is to be most trusted and is to be trusted above
everything and everyone else, even our best friends. Even our best friends are capable of becoming
disloyal and deceptive. When our experiences of the world are ever spinning in
different directions, God is the one who always stands waiting for us. God wants to give us peace and can give us
peace like no one on earth. God’s peace
has more power and hope than all of our lifetime troubles and distresses
combined. God’s persistence in bringing us that hope will never end, no matter
how much or how often we chase after vain desires. It doesn’t matter if we are wealthy or poor;
we are always a child of God. It is God’s
nature to seek us out and to seek our welfare.
It is God’s nature to show mercy.
It is God’s nature to love all of us, even those of us we find to be
difficult or unreasonable. We may be
just as unreasonable or difficult in their eyes.
Our greatest sin can be summarized in
this: we choose to follow our own thoughts and feelings rather than putting our
trust in God. That is it in a nutshell
and we find so many different ways throughout our lives to go away from God and
God’s way. From a lecture on the book of
Isaiah, “The uterus and womb of God is the divine Word, by which we are
fashioned and borne, as Paul says to the Galatians, ‘My little children, with whom
I am again in childbirth until Christ be formed in you!’…It is an outstanding
and very firm comfort for the godly that God cares for us. Therefore we must strive with a single heart
that we abide in the Word. The Lord will
reject no one, however weak, if only we cling to the Word, the womb of
God. Thus then, who will care for us
with supreme devotion and will never reject us… [?] These are supreme consolations. They should be written in golden
letters. Let us just cling to the Word
alone, and we shall have God as a mother who feeds us and carries us and frees
us from all evils.[2]
And may we, like the people of Ninevah, repent. From John Wesley, “Forgive them all, O Lord: our sins of omission and our sins of commission; the
sins of our youth and the sins of our riper years; the sins of our souls and
the sins of our bodies; our secret and our more open sins; our sins of
ignorance and surprise, and our more deliberate and presumptuous sins; the sins
we have done to please ourselves and the sins we have done to please others;
the sins we know and remember, and the sins we have forgotten; the sins we have
striven to hide from others and the sins by which we have made others offend;
forgive them, O Lord, forgive them all for his sake, who died for our sins and
rose for our justification, and now stands at thy right hand to make
intercession for us, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
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