Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 23, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Heading for heaven with just one license plate
Your might is the source of justice; your mastery over all things makes you lenient to all.
Our front license plate was stolen sometime this week. It’s not something you notice right away, but when Margaret was looking for our car she couldn’t find it, because where our brand new white Texas license plate used to be was a dirty rectangle with two clean holes in the bumper at the top.
I spent a little while feeling angry, resentful, self-righteous. I liked our license number (TDX-6093)! I was leaving the next day on a trip to Illinois. It was a real hassle getting the back plate installed, and now both plates would have to be replaced.
The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.
Eventually I got tired of my mind spinning, and I remembered to pray. Just a simple prayer. As Henri Nouwen wrote, “All Christians are called to bring their thoughts into an ongoing conversation with their Lord.” Right. I just have to remember. The Holy Spirit is happy to take over after that.
And the one who searches hearts knows what is the intention of the Spirit, because he intercedes for the holy ones according to God’s will.
So I drove north and hoped no one notices the empty space on our front bumper. When I get back I’ll return to my local DMV and get replacement plates. And I won’t any longer be upset at the person who stole the plate, or be insulted that he chose our car of all the cars in the lot. It is not necessary that I understand in order to forgive. Besides, God is in charge.
Let the weeds and the wheat grow together until harvest; then at harvest time I will say to the harvesters, “First, collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning; but gather the wheat in my barn.” Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.
Sometimes I feel very ready for heaven, sometimes not so much. Quieting my ego, giving and not taking, the end of secrets … God keeps dropping these ideas for me to become his child more and more. And if I turn toward him just a bit, he is there to pick me up and love every bit of me. Tara Ludwig, part of Rick Ganz’ Faber Institute, wrote about camping … and about heaven:
I feel sure that Heaven, the Kingdom of God—He who is the great I AM, the Ultimate Reality—must be the realest domain there is. It is our own too-small world that is thin and flimsy and unreal by comparison.To live in Heaven we must become deeper, weightier, and more substantive, not further from our humanity, but closer to it. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain, “To enter Heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth”. When we die, we don’t cease to be real, we become more real. This is one of the great paradoxes of the Christian faith, the ultimate triumph of God, that when Christ conquered death on the cross, death became the mechanism through which we all can become more alive. Heaven is not full of dead people, it is full of living people: “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. [I am] not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32). – Tara Ludwig
(Wisdom 12, Psalm 86, Matthew 11, 13)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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