Big Sugar Buddha: A Homily – The Second Sunday of Lent (Year C)

Sunday, March 16, 2025

A Homily – The Second Sunday of Lent (Year C)

First Reading – Genesis 15:5-12,17-18 ©

Responsorial Psalm – Psalm 26(27):1,7-9,13-14 ©

Second Reading – Philippians 3:17-4:1 ©

Gospel Acclamation – Matthew 17:5

The Gospel According to Luke 9:28-36 ©

(NJB)

Listen!

Exercise great caution when you read the sacred text. There is a temptation to read them in a way that enables the reader to justify their most corrupt desires, and that is the opposite of the way.

The reading for today from the Book of Genesis, contains many errant and problematic tropes, even though its central message, the promise that God makes to Abraham, is sound.

Remember.

God does not intervene in human affairs. God never has, never does, and never will. God made the universe and every creature in it free, and as such God does not appoint kings and princes, or rulers of any order.

God did not call Abraham, but rather, Abraham found his way to God, and as always the path Abraham took was to live a just life.

Like Abraham we find God by doing good; through acts of compassion and mercy.

Know this:

God does not favor the cult of animal sacrifice. This is a human contrivance interposed on human culture for human ends.

God did not give land to Abraham in a covenant; God is not a relator, there is no land covenant and there never was.

The idea that there is a covenant of some kind between God, the creator of the universe, and the descendants of Abraham, merely served as a justification for seizing the so-called promised land by force.

In the time of Abraham they were lands which belonged to other people. The covenant narrative became woven through the history of the children of Israel after they slipped the bonds of the Egyptians, and only after they successfully prosecuted their wars throughout Canaan, against all of the other Semitic peoples.

Be mindful: in the reading we have been given for today, what is useful is this:

“Your descendants will number as the stars in sky.”

This is the central promise in the reading, not the phony covenant with Abraham.

God’s promise is a word of hope; Abraham’s children will increase without measure, and based on this hope we may set aside the notion that the world will come to a sudden and arbitrary end. We can set aside the notion that we are on a race to the finish line, that the clock is ticking, that the sands are falling, or that the end of days is near.

Know this!

There are billions of stars in the galaxy, and there are countless galaxies lighting up the night sky; in fact, there are stars and galaxies aborning at this very moment; their number is without end.

God is good. Open your eyes and you will see God’s goodness, look for it in the faces of your enemies, the goodness of God is shining.

God is good. Open your ears and you will hear God’s goodness, even in the words of your enemies, the goodness of God will ring out.

God is good. God loves you, and with you God loves all people. Your eternal home is waiting for you…come, and invite your enemies to the table with you.

This is the way of Jesus.

Take heed!

Reflect on the daily concerns of the apostle, how he seeks to manage his community of believers, knowing that people are notoriously difficult to manage. They do not always do as we would wish them to do, they pit themselves against each other…they are divisive

Paul was not alone in experiencing this, Jesus experienced it with the disciples. Paul deals with it everyday, in every community he helped to form he encounters the schizophrenia of the group mind, a recalcitrant church, ungrateful, vain and unwise.

If you are responsible for the care of people and you are seeking to follow the way of Jesus, remember this; God is always with them. God dwells inside of each and every one of them, in each and everyone of us…if you are true, they will be true with you.

We may try to influence the circumstances we find ourselves in, to free ourselves from folly and the impediments of sin, which is the burden of our nature, but we are not responsible for it’s resolution. The resolution of sin is in God’s hands, and because we will not live to see it, this is something we are called on to hold by faith.

Do not give up on God as the apostle did, free yourself from the doubts the disciples shared. Do not denigrate God’s creation, or imagine that the body is evil, do not malign the state of our mortality simply because we experience hunger, disease and pain; these are belong to the mystery of life, they are of God’s creation, and God’s creation is good.

Remember.

As Christians we are bound to read the Gospel in the context of its truthfulness. We must let the Spirit of Truth guide us, even if it means rejecting a passage such as what is behind the acclamation from Matthew today.

There may have been an event or a time when Jesus, together with James and John went up the mountain by themselves, and it may have been that at such a moment Jesus connected his ministry with that of Moses, the liberator and law giver; and to Elijah who was the truth-teller.

If there was such a moment, or perhaps there were many such moments sewn together by narrative into one; this may be the case, but the supernatural events that were described in the text, these did not happen.

God does not engage in supernatural activities, because God is the author of nature and its laws, and God does not violate them for any reason…especially caprice.

The lesson here is that the disciples were meant to understand that the ministry of Jesus was in keeping with the expectations of Enoch, the Son of Man, a proto-type of the Hebrew Messiah, whose return was hoped for.

In the text Jesus warned the disciples that his ministry will lead to his death, but like Enoch, death would not stop him, and that like Enoch he would return, and this is what they hoped for.

Be mindful.

Strip the fantastical elements from the scripture as you find the, they may fuction metaphorically, or allegorically, but stories of the supernatural cannot be taken literally, they are not elucidating and to read them this way is contrary to the way.

In theology the words we use to speak about God. These words are only good and useful, if they are grounded rationality.

In mythology; we use words to contextualize our experience and link it to a world beyond ourselves, this is the place for metaphor and allegory.

These two modes of narrative are not necessarily at odds with each other, but they can be.

Myth can be grounded and rational, but only when the motif of the metaphor and the assumptions in the allegory are fully understood and properly balanced so that they are aligned with the way. They can be good and useful when they facilitate our engagement with the narrative with our eyes wide open.

By the same token theology can be irrational; if the assumptions we make about the nature of reality, human nature and the divine economy are not rooted in truth, or worse, if they are rooted in fear, hate and greed.

The mythology behind the transfiguration motif is easily and often misinterpreted, and this is because the root of the narrative has its origins in a fundamental misunderstanding of who Jesus was.

As I have already suggested; it may be the case that those who first articulated the narrative of the transfiguration, and those who first penned it, only intended to transmit the message that Jesus stood in the same tradition as Moses the lawgiver, and Elijah the prophet.

The motif of the cloud descending on Jesus may have only been meant to suggest that Jesus’ authority, his understanding of the divine will, came from a place of mystery as well as “on high”..

The voice from the cloud naming Jesus “son,” may have only been meant to convey the message that Jesus is the “heir” to the Abrahamic tradition, and not merely a “teacher” within that tradition.

This is a grounded and rational interpretation of this myth.

However, the interpreters of this myth commonly dwell on the more sensational images in the narrative; the bright lights and the shining garments, the presence of Moses, and Elijah (as if they were actually there), their journey together into the cloud with Jesus (as if they went there bodily), the voice from that cloud naming Jesus as God’s son, as an actual declaration of paternity from the divine source of all being…this is irrational, and this fantasy-based interpretation has led to great confusion through the centuries. Incredible conflict and bloody warfare between opposing factions of Christians have ensued based on these falsities, including conflicts with non-Christians as well.

These conflicts came about because the people involved in them felt the need to take sides on the question of who Jesus was, and defend their claims with violence; this is a tragedy, and it is antithetical to the way.

Know this!

Jesus was a human being, like any other. Like all creatures he carried a seed of the divine within him, and where the divine is, the divine is fully present.

The fullness of God dwelt within Jesus, just as the fullness of God dwells within each of us. We are connected to and in relationship with God, and Jesus, just as we are connected and in relationship to every creature who ever was, is, or yet will be.

What differentiated Jesus from his followers was his understanding of these truths and his ability to apply that understanding in a manner that points the way for us to a moral and just society.

First Reading – Genesis 15:5-12,17-18 ©

God Enters into a Covenant with Abraham, the Man of Faith

Taking Abram outside, the Lord said, ‘Look up to heaven and count the stars if you can.’ ‘Such will be your descendants,’ he told him. Abram put his faith in the Lord, who counted this as making him justified.

‘I am the Lord’ he said to him ‘who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldaeans to make you heir to this land.’ ‘My Lord,’ Abram replied ‘how am I to know that I shall inherit it?’ He said to him, ‘Get me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove and a young pigeon.’ He brought him all these, cut them in half and put half on one side and half facing it on the other; but the birds he did not cut in half. Birds of prey came down on the carcases but Abram drove them off.

When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, there appeared a smoking furnace and a firebrand that went between the halves. That day the Lord made a Covenant with Abram in these terms:

‘To your descendants I give this land,

from the wadi of Egypt to the Great River.’

Responsorial Psalm – Psalm 26(27):1,7-9,13-14 ©