17th Sunday Year B

17th Sunday Year B – Be All That You Can Be

How free do you feel? How capable or enabled do you feel when you look at your life and the living of it? What restrictions do you have? What limitations have you or others set on your life?

I think that we have to consider what the chains are that bind us so that we can appreciate them when they are gone. And these chains are not really around the Covid restrictions, they are more to do with how we think and how we feel – about life, about living, about God and about ourselves.

Paul exhorts us to, “…lead a life worthy of your vocation. Bear with one another charitably, in complete selflessness, gentleness and patience. Do all you can to preserve the unity of the Spirit by the peace that binds you together.”

Our vocation is that we are called to live lives that are Christian. As Christians we promise to live lives that are full of love: love for God; love for our neighbour and love for ourselves. And we show that love in every aspect, by our acts and our deeds of charity and care; of looking outward for the wants and needs of others before those of our own; of being kind, careful, caring, thoughtful and patient.

How much of this was reduced or restricted by Covid over the lockdowns we endured and suffered? I think that answer for a lot of us would be that we did feel restricted in our interactions with others. We did feel divorced from our meetings and in our natural instincts of contacts and conversations. We did feel reserved and maybe even suspicious about others, our neighbours, and maybe even stand-offish. We did feel cut off and excluded from others.

I think that a lot of us were filled with differing degrees of fear, suspicion and doubt and these negative feelings then held us back. They pulled us down. They made us feel less, much less about ourselves, and about others and certainly not full of love.

And now that we have come through all of this, we need to ask ourselves, have we changed? Have we recovered from those restrictions? Have we become the better people that we were or even better than before? Have we learned anything from that time of restricted contact?

In our gospel account of the feeding of the five thousand, we have Jesus giving us the example of how-to live-in practice the exhortation that Paul has pronounced in his letter to the Ephesians, “. . lead a life worthy of your vocation. Bear with one another charitably, in complete selflessness, gentleness and patience. Do all you can to preserve the unity of the spirit by the peace that binds you together.”

He takes action to look after the needs of all of those gathered in front of him. He gets them to sit down comfortably. He takes bread and fish and breaks it and portions it out amongst them so that they are all fed. He encourages them to sit and eat and talk amongst themselves: people who ordinarily might well cross the road to the other side rather than risk walking into or alongside these others: foreigners, other colours and faiths!

Jesus encouraged them to act as a mini-community, caring for each other by how they spoke, how they behaved, how they listened and how they responded to each other. Jesus gave them the freedom to act as human beings toward each other. Jesus fed them with both actual food and with spiritual food and gave them strength in Spirit to act with love toward each other and show and feel this love in action. Jesus gave them their own moment or day of freedom, and they loved it. They relished it. They rejoiced in it. They saw it as a moment of revelation.

And so to us and the lessons we learned from our time in Covid and the restrictions it placed on us - our current relaxations; our current easings and our current increase in freedoms: what do these mean to and for us. Well, I would say that unless we do something positive and productive with them, then they mean nothing!

Unless we get up and get out and do more, much more than we were doing before, then these newfound freedoms are meaningless.

Unless we make a deliberate point of contacting our neighbours and speaking with them – nothing!

Unless we go out of our way to see to the needs of others, with care, patience and understanding of their wants and needs – nothing!

Unless we try and see where we can offer help and assistance in whatever shape or form – nothing!

Unless we do all that we can to become all that we can and even the best that we can be – nothing!

Unless – unless – unless. Freedom is there, is here, to allow and enable us to be all that we can be in the eyes of God. That is, a person full of the love of, for and from God, that we demonstrate through our deeds and actions with every person that we meet through every contact or word.

Our Day of Freedom came when were baptised. Our life of freedom is that of a Christian who knows and believes that they are saved for all eternity.

Our life of freedom is that which we live in the love of God, shown through our love for others. Our words and actions that show God’s love alive in me and in my love for them.

“Lead a life worthy of your vocation. Bear with one another charitably, in complete selflessness, gentleness and patience. Do all you can to preserve the unity of the Spirit by the peace that binds you together.” Amen