What word would God use to describe you?

Homily

2nd Sunday of Lent BI

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

28 February 2021

AMDG +mj

What's the word God would use to describe you?

Like it or not, the right answer is BELOVED.  The Father speaks once, and only once in the Gospels.  He uses one adjective.  You guessed it.  It's beloved.  St. Paul takes it a step further.  God loves you so much He gave away His only beloved.  So what does that make you?  At a minimum, you're just as beloved as Jesus.  That's the right answer.  God describes you as BELOVED. 

Yet none of us believes it, not in our bones anyway.  I sure don't.  What do I know instead?  I know the worst about myself.  It's the thing I can trust and can control more than God's love.  It's what I deserve.

I deserve to be described as CLUTTERED!

My life is messy, not clean.  I hoard.  I hang on.  I obsess over what I don't have, and what I can add to m y life.  I hate pruning and love pleasure.  I add and add and add and add.  I add to my workload, my schedule, my things.  I'm hang on to memories, resentments, relationships, and things I don't need.  I'm afraid to throw away pretty much everything.  Ask Fr. Dan my roommate.  He can tell you the story of the cheese sauce that I hung onto for 4 months!

What word would God use to describe you?  I bet the first word you thought of was not BELOVED but something you hate about yourself.  

It's time to let it go, and not cling to what you deserve, but only to God's love.

That's it.  We are invited to cling to one thing in life, and one thing only.  It's God's love.  Take Abraham as the standard.  He received Isaac when his wife was 90 years old, as a miraculous sign promising fruitfulness through faithfulness.  Then God asked for Isaac back.  It makes no sense.

Yet when I cling to anything less than God alone, my life gets smaller.  It's only when in faith I realize I only have the things that I'm willing to let go of, that my life grows.  Think about your life.  Think about that thing you most wanted to hold on to, that relationship you least understood why you had to give it up.  I bet it led to your life mysteriously getting bigger, and to greater fruitfulness.

When I cling to anything less than God, I am not free to live the law of grace.  When I am not free, I cannot rise to the likeness of God, nor can I be transfigured or transformed by grace which is not cluttered, but clean and free.

This of course is the point of Lent.  It's an invitation to let go of anything, and I mean anything, that distracts me from the ultimate reality and truth that I am God's beloved.  For Lent I need to let go of the word I cling to, the one I think I deserve, to receive the greater word that God uses to describe me.

So what will it be?  What word does God use to describe you?