Thirty-First Sunday of Ordinary Time
October 30, 2005


Do you ever give away the power over your life to anyone?

I have a friend who is a mostly practicing catholic, though if you’d ask them they would say they are a good catholic. What is interesting is when they half jokingly, half seriously ask for the occasional ‘dispensation’ for going to Sunday mass from me. The excuses vary – football game, chauffeuring the kids around the universe that day, being up late the night before hosting a holiday gathering, the unexpected showing up of help on a Sunday morning for a project – and you get the picture. I do my best not to give it. It is truly not my call to make that decision for them. But they dearly want to give me that power, to be absolved from that personal choice about which they will have stand before God on the judgment day. I cannot make that conscience call for them, as much as they would want me to do it. But as often as I hear those half serious, half joking requests, I am put into the heart of today’s gospel.

"Call no man rabbi. Call no man father. Call no one master.” That does not mean that I couldn't call my dad "father" when he was alive, nor are you prohibited from calling your eighth grade educator ‘teacher’, nor does it mean that you shouldn't call the ordained spiritual leaders of the parish ‘father’ such as Fr. Vic or myself. In its scriptural context, Jesus is telling the people not to hand responsibility for their lives over to a particular individual, nor to a power structure. We are only to hand our lives over to God. It is not up to me to give or deny my friend permission to miss one of the precepts of the church, and one of the ways we fulfill the 4th commandment. Call no man rabbi or father or teacher. Because you and you alone are responsible for the decisions of your spiritual life.

Yet in a hundred ways is it easy for me to find myself doing just that.
· Call no one rabbi. The Rabbis put themselves into a position to mediate the people’s experience of God. They were the in-between person. You went to God through them and God came to you through them. Jesus says in effect – “No one can pray in place of you, and no one can dismiss your need to have an authentic relationship with God.” It is what you and you alone are responsible for. And as often as I have neglected my prayer, and been lax in my spending time with Jesus, I have called someone Rabbi.
· Call no one Master (or Teacher in our idiom). Where have I turned for wisdom? Through the generosity of a donor in the archdiocese, I am using a ‘coach’ to help me learn some skills they never taught me in the seminary. Skills about managing my desk and the paperwork. Skills about managing people and situations. I find his teaching wonderfully helpful. However, it is easy to make decisions because it is the efficient way to do it, the corporate way to do it and not the gospel way to do it. When I buy into that line of doing things and not the gospel, then I have called another teacher that I shouldn’t have…
· Call no one Father. The reading from Malachi is addressed to priests in an instruction about their common worship. “Have we not all the one Father? Has not the one God created us? Why have you broken faith with each other...? Malachi teaches that authority and power are given to us not so that we can claim ‘Mine’ - but that we might claim ‘ours’. That we might come together because we can’t make this journey on our own.... That we might live together honoring each other’s lives before we ever set foot in this space - call no one Father unless you are in right relationship with both God and our neighbor. It is what this communion - this common union of ours is about. We are taught here at this table how to let go of what is mine - so we can embrace what is ours... And as often as I have denied those bonds, I have let called someone else father.

My friend would love it if I routinely gave them the permissions they ask for. Heck, I would love it if the Archbishop took the rap for all of my decisions. But that is not the case. I am accountable for my choices. As is my friend accountable for his. And each one here is accountable for their own. And if that is not enough a reason to pray for each other, I don’t know what is…