Ordinary Spirituality Sunday!
Isaiah 62:1-5, 1 Corinthians 12:4-11, John 2:1-11
Welcome to Ordinary Time, when nothing spectacular is celebrated but daily routines. But how easy is it to be ordinary, when we all crave for the extra-ordinary? We resist being like others, we insist on our differences! We quarrel about superior skin color, superior position, superior intelligence, superior citizenship and countries, etc. Yet, Jesus says to us: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). This statement immediately reminds us of our express ticket to Hell, because no one is perfect! However, the best remedy to the fear of Hell because of our imperfection is being ordinary! This Sunday is “Ordinary Spirituality” Sunday!
Ordinary Spirituality starts with seeing and serving God in the ordinariness of everyday: cooking, singing, dancing, marriage, child bearing and upbringing, as well as our respective paid jobs. God must be so close and present in all we do that perfection accrues to us from his presence. God is found in the ordinary and invites us to meet him there! The language of marriage, in our first and gospel readings, shows how salvation is won in our ordinary lives! And, our second reading makes “communion” or human unity the aim of “Ordinary Spirituality”.
Just take the last paragraph of our first reading as an exemple. God got into a marriage (spiritual) covenant with each one of us: “As a young man marries a virgin, your BUILDER shall marry you”. Why is God a builder and what is he building? Our second reading provides an answer: God is building human communion, by the power of the Holy Spirit!
For sure, every “building project” takes time, needs the collaboration of others and due diligence: so is marriage to God or the work of perfection. Imagine the love that gets people into marriage; above all, contemplate the sacrifices that keep couples married! Sandwiched between these two is marriage itself: the ordinariness of shopping, cooking, laundry, visits to salons, gyms, wearing makeup, quarreling and reconciliation! In marriage, practice makes perfect, because the virtues required must be practiced to make marriage a success!
Now, we understand the implications of the baptism we celebrated last Sunday – the daily reality of living like a child of God in the very messiness and craziness of daily living. Those who accept Ordinary Spirituality have a new name, Christians, and function – royal-leadership. The first part of our first reading puts it this way: “you shall be called by a new name pronounced by the mouth of the Lord. You shall be a glorious crown in the hand of the Lord, a royal diadem held by your God”. These are not just titled, we must earned them; that is why Matthew’s gospel puts it better: “By their fruit you shall know them” (7:16). A Christian or a child of God is known through actions, just as marriage is not imaginary but by living out the sacrifices it entails!
The “crown” we received with our anointing at baptism gives us the audacity to lead and rule our lives like princesses and princes, the new name or title we received from God. From birth, princesses and princes begin training in leadership. So does a Christian begin the practice of Christian action at birth, baptismal birth. The name “CHRISTIAN” and the function “ROYAL-LEADERSHIP” begins with oneself and not others. If we so ordered our lives on Christian principles, living and working with others will flow seamlessly!
Ordinary Spirituality asks, how does God our Builder build us into oneness? Our second reading explains. The Holy Spirit of God in us is what makes it possible for us to be built up by God into the Temple of God. Individually, we cannot stand because salvation and the Holy Spirit are God’s free gifts to the whole of humanity – we are a family, a community and partners with God and one another. There is just one royal family, with each member given specific gifts for specific purposes as a part of the Temple of God. The neglect of anyone and the refusal to accept the contributions of any interfere with God’s perfection that comes from our collective synergies! Ordinary Spirituality is to see every action of ours as geared towards building human communion, and not just focus on spectacular human actions!
In today’s gospel, the intercession of Mary and the intervention of Jesus at the wedding in Cana in Galilee show that everyone’s affair is God’s affair and preoccupation. The anticipated disgrace, probably due to poverty, when the wine ran out, was fixed by Mary’s intercession and Jesus’ intervention. In fact, the so-called important guests of the day were those who drank the bad wine, because they had no place for the “new wine” of Jesus when it arrived. In other words, God obliterates the “high-table” or table-of-honor by providing wine for everybody. The communion of God is equality and communion among human beings and with God. Our desire to create “high-tables”, not to say differences, does not mean that equality and communion are impossible! In fact, the miracle (sign) at the wedding in Cana demonstrates that the word “impossible” is absent in God’s vocabulary and must be thrown out of human vocabulary as well, should we all become intercessors like Mary and interventionists like Jesus to succor the needy.
Poverty has a place in the world because we refuse to become intercessors and gratuitous sharers of our gifts. Each time we sell and buy all it requires to keep soul and body together, we put a cog in the wheels of our communion and community building as God’s children. Thankless services bind hearts together and build both communion and community. The Holy Spirit of God and the free gifts he inspires decries the monetization of our strict necessities of life. When money decides who lives and who dies, the building blocks of God’s Temple – all of us – are trafficked!
Neither Jesus nor Mary demanded pecuniary remuneration for the “new wine” supplied at the wedding feast of Cana! This means that only sufficient free lunches can build God’s Temple, of which each of us is a brick! Hoarding our gifts – money, intelligence, minerals resourves – impoverish everyone else; by selling all that others need to survive passes a death sentence on humanity as a whole, because a broken human family is a collapsing edifice!
If you want to be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect, never separate any action of yours – no matter how ordinary – from God, it is there that God is found, in the ordinariness of life and human actions! Marriage to God and our inter human marriages remind us of the communion and equality that must characterize our communion as children of God. Be ordinary, and you will enjoy Ordinary Time!
Assignment for the Week:
Find a way to offer your services/expertise for free this week.