That Don’t Impress Me Much

Many years ago, I met a woman named Cassandra who was a regular and outspoken “regular” at St. Joseph’s House of Hospitality. She came there most days for the food but also for the conversation – and she often added much spice and humor to the dialogue! One day during one of the conversations, she was talking about contributions that people had made to a particular project. I said, “Hey, what about me…I’m not just a pretty face…” She immediately said, “You ain’t even that!”

#Humbled.

Today’s scriptures are about being humbled in our righteousness and getting more aligned with the ways of God.

Hosea 6 offers some simple guidelines. It urges the people to return to God and get to know God more intimately. And it concludes with God saying (through the prophet), “it is steadfast love/mercy I desire, not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

Throughout the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, God has to keep saying over and over again, “The outward displays and religious observances are not what I want! I want heart-level change.” I often think of God singing the Shania Twain refrain to us as God says, “That don’t impress me much!”

The translator uses the word “love/mercy” above because the word used by Hosea is the Hebrew word hesed. This word does not easily translate into English and is a word which means steadfast love, kindness, mercy, and grace – all in one word!

What is more, this kind of love is not just about doing obligations or going through motions. It is an above and beyond kind of love and mercy. It’s an over the top kind of grace. It’s compassion and forgiveness even when they’re not required.

Which is why God gets so frustrated with the people who can’t reciprocate and embody that kind of love/mercy/compassion. They do the bare minimum. They go through the motions and try to make it look good, but their hearts are not really in it (or they are in it for all the wrong reasons).

In Luke 18 Jesus continues this theme by telling the story of two people who approach the altar of God – a tax collector and a Pharisee. The first person, a Pharisee, proclaims how wonderful he is and says he’s grateful that “I am not like the rest of humanity —  greedy, dishonest, adulterous — or like this tax collector…” The Pharisee goes on to brag out loud about all the religious practices that he does and how great he is.

We’re awfully familiar with this kind of person these days.

The tax collector doesn’t even get close to the altar of God and does “not even raise his eyes to heaven.” Instead he prays, “‘O God, be merciful to me a sinner.’” 

Jesus goes on to say that the tax collector is the one who “went home justified” and then says the famous line, “for everyone who exalts [themselves] will be humbled, and the one who humbles [themself] will be exalted.”

Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM unpacks this gospel (and this whole theme) by saying that Jesus offers us what he calls a “spirituality of imperfection” versus a “spirituality of perfection.” Rohr said that so many of us grew up with an idea that God developed a spiritual “meritocracy” – like an award and reward system which is “all achievement, accomplishment, performance, and perfection. The good people win and the bad people lose. Of course, once we cast anything as a win-lose scenario, the irony is that everybody loses.”  He concludes by saying, “I’m convinced that Jesus’ good news is that God’s choice is always for the excluded one. Jesus learned this from his Jewish tradition: God always chooses the rejected son, the barren woman, the people enslaved in Egypt or exiled in Babylon. It’s not a winner’s script in the Bible—it’s a loser’s script. It’s a loser’s script where, ironically, everybody wins.”

In short, we don’t get closer to God by getting it all right, saying all the right prayers, being in all the right places and knowing all the right people. We get closer to God because of God’s enduring grace and our own humble offering to God of all that we are (with all of our strengths and limitations).

Taken together, our first reading challenges our Lenten disciplines and basically says that if they are not accompanied by or leading to internal change, they’re not what God wants. And secondly, if our Lenten (and yearly) faith journey does not somehow center the excluded, the lowly and the outcast* (and only affirms how wonderful we are), it is not the kind of journey God was hoping we’d take.

* I also want to be sure to say that when I mention the “excluded, lowly and outcast”, I am referring not only to those people in the collective but those parts inside of ourselves. We all have parts in us that have been excluded or outcast for some reason. God wants to heal those parts of our lives as well. Which is why Lent is also a time for tending to our own woundedness, our own brokenness and the many ways that we may have been harmed.