Cycle – 14^th Sunday in Ordinary Time 26

Rom. 8:9, 11-13

In the early 1970’s there was a widely popular management theory and practice based on a theory that each of us will eventually rise to our level of incompetence. Companies began to focus on identifying the characteristics which indicated that level was approaching.  It was a horrible trend because it ignored the responsibility of management to train, teach and mentor people so they would succeed. That theory would be true for manual skills but not as it was being applied. It also ignored the desire and motivation of the person. 

There were other tools being used by management to define the strengths and weaknesses of individuals who they were grooming for the future.  One of those tools was the Myers Brigs personality tests. Myers Brigs defined four characteristics which defined you as a person. Those characteristics were fixed and unchangeable, however they may weaken or grow over time they would never disappear.  If you were a thinker your decisions would never be based on sound reasoning, never allowing emotion to influence your decision.  It does not allow for change ever, unlike Christianity which declares you will be a new creation.  Those who believed in those tools were adamant about their effectiveness and based their decisions about a person’s future based on identifying strength and weaknesses.     

This may seem like a strange beginning for a homily on today’s scriptures. But how we are viewed by others does impact us.  Also, how we view ourselves impacts our relationship with others and our relationship with God.  We judge our worthiness to be in God’s grace by how well we adherer to laws and rituals.  That restricts us just as much as Myers Briggs restricts us.  It is natural to fall into complacency and remain in a place where we feel good about ourselves and our relationship with God.  Peter’s desire to stay on the mount of transfiguration shows us how easy that is.

But Jesu’s response to Peter that shows us God desires us to walk in faith. Not a comfortable practice of our faith but instead a faith that is willing to go deeper and trust the Holy Spirit to guide us. We need to become water walkers willing to do the impossible because God told us we could do the impossible because He has given us the Spirit.  The Spirit would change us from one degree of glory to another.  It is a never-ending growth that reveals how pleased God is with us. Growing spiritually depends on us trusting in His plan for our holiness. To do that we need to give up control following the promptings of the Spirit. The prodigal son teaches us that lesson because all the prodigal wanted is to be a slave not a son.

God did not intend the law to condemn us, but it was given to us to discipline us until the law of the Spirit guided us. The law like Mers Briggs restricts us and focuses on weaknesses.  Every day we are bombarded by concept of holiness based on the lies of the world.  A faith guided by the law is constantly under siege.  The embrace of God is possible, but we like the prodigal we misunderstand how God reacts to sin.  He took away the penalty of our sin and is waiting for us to realize how the Spirit can move us beyond sin and into the kingdom of God on earth    Satan will use our image of ourselves to believe we are unworthy.  Hope is loss and the barrier of sin between us and God remains. One of the professed great sinners knows how easily we can be deceived about Christ’s death removing the penalty of our sin. That sinner was Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee, a scholar of the scriptures. His denial of Jesus shows us how easy is its for us to have an image of Christ’s mission ignores our restoration is based on allowing God’s mercy to guide us.

Saul shows how much we need the clarity of God’s plan for our holiness to be revealed.  It involved more than Jesus dying for our sins. It relies on us to understand a spiritual truth that God promised to send us the Holy Spirit to guide us, shape us and transform us.  Paul in his letter to the Roman’s tells us, “. the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in us.”  I do not know about you, but for the first thirty five years of my life I never thought about the Spirit.  But Paul’s encounter with Christ and the Holy Spirit reveals to us a spiritual truth., the power of the Holy Spirit, dwells in you and in me. The POWER of the Spirit is within us, and Paul is exhorting us to awaken to that reality and to begin to tap into that power.   

But unless we act on this spiritual truth, we will remain in the flesh.  We will measure ourselves by the law and adhering to a faith lived within concepts of holiness set by the world.  God desires us to believe He has provided for our holiness by the gifts of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Do you believe God longs for you to invite the Holy Spirit to come alive in your heart.  God inspired Paul to write his letter to the Corinthians telling them and us how easy it is for us to be transformed.  Paul wrote: “we” should see our holiness as we look in a mirror.   “We all, with unveiled faces, are looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord and are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory; this is from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2Cor.3:18).

Jesus said He came to show us the Father.  The more we place ourselves before Jesus the more we will be transformed. In addition to your regular routine of mass, adoration, pod casts add daily reading the New Testament.  Prior to your reading pray for the Holy Spirit to fill you with wisdom, insight, and the forgiving mercy of God.  Then pay attention as you read and when a word, a phrase, some insight, a prompting strikes you stop.  Reflect on that feeling and acknowledge it has resonated within you. Then as you acknowledge it, respond to it and pray for the Spirit to reveal to you how you should respond. 

We need to heed the advice of James the apostle who wrote “stir into flames that Spirit that filled you when hands were laid upon you.”