Those of you who
know me know that it’s rare that I begin a homily with a humorous
anecdote or story. For one thing, I’m not all that good at telling a
story and, then, I’ve discovered that what’s humorous to one can be
quite ho-hum to another. In other words, there’s a risk involved.
Let me prove my point. Did you hear the one about the fellow who
fell headlong off a steep cliff? In mid-fall, miraculously, he
caught hold of the branch of a tree that was growing from a cleft in
the rock. There, suspended between heaven and earth, he cried out to
God for help. And God called back to him, “Do you trust me?” “Oh
yes, Lord, I trust you,” the fellow told God. “I trust you!”
“Okay,” said God, “then let go of the tree.” To which the fellow
replied, “…Is there anyone else up there?!”
I told you that
stories were not my thing…! But that one – not exactly a
knee-slapper - does shed some light on today’s readings. In one way
or another, they’re about letting go. That’s certainly true of the
story of Abraham and Sarah, our ancestors in faith. God asked them
to let go more than once.
God first asked it
of them when they were well up in years – at that mellow time of
life when looking back comes more naturally than looking ahead. In
their advanced years God broke into the quiet of Abraham and Sara’s
lives and told them to move - to leave everything behind: their
comfortable dwellings, their herds, their crops, their livelihood.
Let go, God said. Move far away from all that, and I will be with
you. I will make you the founders of a great and powerful new
people, numerous as the stars in the sky or the sands on the
seashore. But first you must let go!
And Abraham and
Sarah did let go. They went where God led them – to a distant and
strange land. And they let go even further one fateful day many
years later when God told Abraham to take his son, Isaac – the son
of his old age to whom his sterile wife Sarah had given birth – to
take Isaac and offer him up on an altar of sacrifice. Remember,
Isaac was the living embodiment of God’s preposterous promise that
Abraham and Sarah would be the founders of a great nation. Let
go of him, God said. Give him back to me. And Abraham once again
said yes.
But, as so often
happens with this mysterious, demanding, yet faithful God of ours,
God said yes, too. Yes to Abraham and Sarah, yes to the divine
promises. God caused young Isaac to live, and so a great nation was
born from the bodies of two people who were as good as dead, to
quote the Letter to the Hebrews.
My friends, this is
a story that gets repeated all throughout the scriptures. Today’s
first reading from the Book of Wisdom evokes the memory of that
greatest of all nights in the history of God’s dealings with the
Chosen People – the night of the Exodus when Moses led God’s people
through the waters of the Red Sea from slavery to freedom.
We tend to view that
story in a rather ho-hum manner. We know how it turns out, after
all. Yet it is another of the great ‘let go’ stories of the Bible.
In fact, the Exodus is the great ‘let go’ story of the Jewish
scriptures. Before those waters ever parted, there was that
leap into the dark we call faith, that “yes” to God that echoed the
“yes” of Abraham and Sarah. I once heard it put this way: “Not until
the Hebrews plunged into the waters did the winds push those waters
back.” First came the plunge; then, and only then, came the parting
of the waters.
It’s always that
way. Call it what you will - a plunge, a leap into the dark, a
letting go – it’s all the same. It’s an act of faith in a God who
asks a great deal but who always gives a great deal more.
The message from
Jesus in today’s gospel is the same. “Fear not, little flock,
for it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
What a wonderful thought that is. The kingdom! And God is going to
give it to us! But there is a catch, because Jesus goes on to say,
“Sell your belongings and give alms. Get money bags for yourselves
that do not wear out, a never-failing treasure in heaven which no
thief can reach nor any moth destroy. For where your treasure
lies, there will your heart be also.”
It’s the old “let
go” story again, isn’t it? We who want to follow Jesus will, like
Abraham, Sarah, Moses and the chosen people, be put to the test in
one way or another. “Trust me,” God will say to us. “Take the
plunge. Let go. I will be with you…!” And our challenge is to
believe that the unknowable future God offers us is worth more than
the present we’re so used to.
My friends in
Christ, I have no way of knowing what price you have paid – or are
paying – for saying your “yes” to God. All I do know is that
it has cost you, is costing you, and will cost you. That much is
certain. And I also know that if it isn’t costing, maybe it’s
because your yes has been less than wholehearted. The same goes for
mine….
And I know this,
too: that no matter how dark the days or how bleak the prospects may
seem at times, the God who was faithful to Abraham, Sarah, and Moses
– turning nature itself inside-out and upside-down for them, and the
God who did the absolutely unimaginable for Jesus, raising him from
the dead after he “let go’ on Calvary, will just as surely be there
for us if we will but place our trust in God, and let go…!
Father Michael G. Ryan
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