Six years ago, I woke up one morning unable to put any weight on my left foot. I was on a work trip, six hundred miles from home. Getting home and getting appropriate medical care was an adventure, but it is not the purpose of my telling you the story now. Eventually, I was fitted with a special orthopedic insert which will only fit inside chunky shoes. This insert-within-a-special-shoe re-creates what ligaments in my foot would normally do to hold foot, ankle, knee, hip, and back bones in alignment. I still have restrictions, and the shoes I must wear are still uncomfortable and ugly—but I have learned how to live in a new “normal” way that permits me to live a satisfactory, ordinary life.
A New Ordinary?
Last Friday was First Friday, and our parish returned to its practice of having Adoration all day on First Friday. There were differences: greeters at the front door to check each person’s temperature, to make sure they were wearing masks, to have people sanitize their hands, and to explain how to sanitize their space as they left . People came. People prayed. In spite of the extra measures, the day felt like a “return to normal.” It felt “ordinary.” There was a comfort and solidity to it.
Our Scripture readings now take us back to “ordinary” time. True, we are not living in ordinary times. But our readings move from the “high Mysteries” of Lent and Easter to the ordered, “ordinary” mysteries of living the Christian life. “Ordinary” in church parlance means “put in order, numbered,” rather than our more common sense of the word—“nothing special going on.”
There is always something special going on in Scripture. Today we begin a three-week prayerful study of the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel. About half that time the first readings will tell us stories of the prophet Elijah.
Elijah
As we enter Jewish history with Elijah’s story today, it is about 900 years before Jesus’ life and about 60 years after King Solomon’s death. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah have split. Neither kingdom is living by the law of the Lord. Ahab (with his wife Jezebel) is king of Israel. Just before our story starts today is this description of Ahab: “He erected an altar for Ba’al in the house of Baal, which he built in Samaria. And Ahab made an Asherah. Ahab did more to provoke the Lord, the God of Israel, to anger than all the kings of Israel who were before him.” (I Kings 16: 32-33) An Asherah was a pole used in ceremonies to worship a mother goddess, a religious practice of other Semitic peoples.
Into this historical context God calls Elijah to be a prophet. Elijah begins by calling for a drought. The drought would endanger Elijah’s life, as well as the life of the king and all the people. Today, God tells Elijah how to keep himself safe during the drought. Elijah does what God tells him to do, and God takes care of him: he provides shelter, food, and water.
Sermon on the Mount: The Beatitudes
The Sermon on the Mount covers three chapters of Matthew: chapters 5-7. Biblical scholars tend to see the Sermon on the Mount, not as one very long homily that Jesus preached, but as a summary example of what Jesus preached to the crowds as he began his ministry. It has always been interesting to me to note that Matthew’s conversion (Matthew 9: 9-13) came after the Sermon on the Mount. This is what Matthew heard that led him to leave his tax collecting and follow Jesus.
The Sermon on the Mount begins with the Beatitudes, which are our Scripture for today. It then preaches “the Kingdom of God.” It preaches the Kingdom of God as a “new normal” that includes all that the 10 Commandments require, but goes beyond “thou shall” or “thou shall not” to “but I say unto you.”
It seems to me that the “but I say unto you” standards Jesus teaches all through the Sermon on the Mount are summarized in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit…those who mourn….the meek…those who seek righteousness…the merciful…the pure in heart…the peacemakers…and those who are persecuted for righteousness sake.”
For Me, Lord?
St. Benedict (6th century) and John Climacus (7th century) used the Beatitudes as foundations for their religious “Rules.” Perhaps because they were founders of monasticism and “religious life,” their Rules have been seen through the centuries as “for the chosen few.” The 10 Commandments are for us ordinary people. We must keep them. But…being poor in spirit, mourning sin and decadence in culture, being longsuffering with fidelity (meek), being merciful enough we turn the other cheek, seeking righteousness enough we are willing to be persecuted for it…being holy enough our hearts are pure of evil thoughts…being peacemakers in a world of prejudice, pride, and survival of the fittest…. Those standards are not for us ordinary people. They are for “the blessed.”
Pope Francis questions that. More and more, I question that. Jesus taught the crowds what he said at the Sermon on the Mount. If he taught it to the crowds, did he not mean for the crowds to follow it?
Our help is in the name of the Lord…
The Psalm today says:
The LORD will guard you from all evil;
he will guard your life.
The LORD will guard your coming and your going,
both now and forever.
R. Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
At first reading, Elijah the Tishbite, Jesus teaching the Beatitudes, and our call to create new ordinary lives in extraordinary times have little in common. But further prayer ties it all together in this Psalm: Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. God leads and guides us.
It took me some time to both learn how to live in the new normal of my chunky shoes and to admit that my need for them was my own doing. Habits of less protein, less exercise, and more weight in the first years of widowhood caused the ligaments in my foot to break down. God, in his goodness, sent corrective measures and a new ordinary life in the discipline of my shoes. I live safely now in that new ordinary.
The social distancing and sanitizing measures we use at church create a foundation of a new normal as I worship. It was interesting last Friday: by the time I wore a mask all day, it had ceased to distract me. It was a new normal—like my shoes. It (and other measures) gives me a new way to be safe in a new ordinary.
If we admit it, there are many “evils in the sight of the Lord” that are highlighted, restricted, or intensified by living in our new normal of pandemic culture: Selfishness, racism, complacency, entitlement, judgment, anger, greed, envy, violence, family alienation.
As we learn to accept the disciplines of a new normal, what is God leading us to? What is he turning us from? What does God’s plan for a new ordinary look like?
Prayer
Lord, our help is in Your name, Your goodness. Lead me and guide me to learn from the disciplines of the new normal, the new “ordinary” that You are showing us all. Are the disciplines of the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount meant for me? How do You keep me safe by their standards? How do you keep me safe in the drought of pandemic? How do You guide me to being blessed by You? Lead me, guide me, Lord.
