Seventh Sunday after Trinity
“Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things; Graft in
our hearts the love of thy Name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness,
and of thy great mercy keep us in the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Recently I heard a story about the saintly Bishop Edward McBurney, retired bishop of
Quincy. While visiting India, he was in Calcutta and desired very much to see Mother
Teresa. So he came to her modest convent and knocked at the door for admittance.
There greeted him a tiny, seemingly-frail little woman, mop in hand, whom he
immediately recognized as one of the greatest saints of our time. He introduced himself
as an Anglican bishop from the United States, and requested an audience with her. She
responded to him, “Oh, I’m so glad you came—I need help mopping up the kitchen.” So
she handed him the mop in her hand and proceeded to grant him his interview as together
they mopped up the kitchen floor. That reveals the inherent homey-ness, the organic and
unaffected naturalness of the Christian life. We tend to think of Mother Teresa and the
great saints as leading these remarkable and extraordinary lives which none of us could
ever attain to, but in reality what they do is to let God inject his grace into the very
ordinary, and by living a very ordinary life infused and enlightened by the Gospel, that is
what makes it extraordinary. We are called to give God our tiny little bit, our few little
loaves and fishes, and to allow him to make something great out of them. But notice,
they are still loaves and fishes, they are still the ordinary sustenance of a regular, human
life. The Lord of all power and might, who is the author and giver of all good things,
grafts into our hearts the love of his human Name, his Incarnation as the simple Galilean
2
carpenter Jesus bar-Jospeh, he increases in us true religion, which St. James teaches us is
visiting the fatherless and widows and keeping ourselves unspotted from the world,
nothing all that spectacular; he nourishes us with all goodness just as our mothers
nourish us with their own milk, and of his great mercy he keeps us in the same, all the
regular, ordinary days of our life.
We want and try to compartmentalize our lives, and let a couple of hours on Sunday
morning suffice us for the practice of our religion. If we get our ticket punched on
Sunday morning, we don’t have to think about God for the rest of our week; we can get
him out of our way and get along with what’s really important. Here’s our little God
compartment, here’s our work compartment, here’s our family compartment, here’s our
recreation compartment, and so on. But God, who became Incarnate and lived and
ordinary human life, wants to integrate our whole life through his grace so that we
become one complete person in him rather that a whole bunch of detached little bits and
pieces. He wants to make each one of you, as it were, a sacrament, an outward and
visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. In other words, he wants to make what he is
doing with you on the inside to be manifested through what’s going on with you on the
outside, not just one day a week but seven, and 365 ¼ days per year. One of the greatest
mysteries of the Christian Gospel—you could spend your whole life meditating upon it
and never exhaust its richness—is also one of the most hidden: that God himself for
thirty years lived right next door, and no one realized that it was God right there. No one
except his Mother and foster-father knew that it was God himself, our great High Priest,
who had made you that wonderfully steady table, the workmanship so much more perfect
3
and exacting than any piece of furniture you had ever owned. No one recognized in that
flawlessly fitting door he had made for your entryway the One who is himself the Door,
through whom we enter into everlasting life. Nobody realized that those seamlessly
straightened and perfectly aligned beams he cut to support your dwelling would one day
bear him in agony as he died in order to bring us to dwell with him in the eternal
mansions. (He may have even mopped a few floors along the way.) All of Christ’s life
as the Carpenter of Nazareth is integrated into the cross, for he takes that simple, human,
everyday life he lived and offers it to his Father, not just at one moment, but through
every day of his life on this earth.
Today is the feast day of St. Anne, the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary—or, as she is
commonly known, “Holy Annie, God’s Granny.” And by her, we are reminded that God
came and lived ordinary, human life, just like all the rest of us. I think grandmothers are
one of God’s greatest creations, and he himself partook of having a grandmother. Anne
and her husband Joachim were childless, and this was the greatest shame for an ancient
Jewish couple to suffer, so much so that their sacrifice was even refused when they
brought it to the Temple. But, Holy Tradition tells us, God revealed to them that he
would accomplish something great through them, that Anne would bear the one who
would in turn bear the Messiah, the Redeemer. And so Anne, whose name means
“grace”, became the mother of Mary, whose name means “Lady”. God’s grace enters
into human history, into the physical lineage of an obscure Middle Eastern family, so that
all nations of the earth may be made one in him. But it is not only that Anne gives birth
to Mary, that grace brings forth our Lady, but even more that she raises her, that she
4
trains her and teaches her, in her simple and everyday life, to seek the will of the Lord, to
let his grace infuse her every act and thought. Anne teaches her to be the Handmaid of
the Lord, so that one day she might declare “Be it unto me according to thy word”. But
even more, she trains her daughter in the simple things of the Faith so her daughter may
in turn train her Son, so that following that family tradition, he may, when faced with that
most awesome choice of living out to the end that faith, may himself pray, “Not my will,
but thine, be done.” By following the will of his Heavenly Father (which includes
submitting himself to the authority of his Mother and of his foster-father on earth) every
day for thirty something years in all the down-to-earth and mundane responsibilities and
acts, his human will naturally and perfectly follows this Father’s divine will when he
faces that moment of choice upon which heaven and earth hang. And so in our own
lives, we are called to follow those examples of all the saints, of our Lady and her mother
St. Anne, of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta and holy Bishop Edward of Quincy, who in turn
follow our Lord, and in every thing we do, from the simplest to the greatest, pray along
with him in the words he gave us, “Thy will be done.”