Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our reading from I Samuel this morning, God asks the priest Eli, “Why then look with greedy eye at my sacrifices and my offerings that I commanded, and honor your sons more than me by fattening yourselves on the choicest parts of every offering of my people Israel?”

Now we’ve learned the context of God’s pronouncement here from our office readings over the last few days: Eli’s sons, Hophni and Phineas, have abused the priesthood, not only taking for themselves the best parts of the sacrifices offered by God’s people, but abusing the people around them in all sorts of ways. It’s classic abuse of power which results in abusiveness all around.

And at the root of this abuse of power is envy, the greedy eye—not only the desire for more, but the desire for more that’s pursued at the expense of those (or the One) to whom the more is due. When it comes to mishandling the sacrifices, the sons of Eli have appropriated to themselves things that were meant to be offered to another.

Beloved, from the moment that God created humanity, we were meant to be priests of the whole of creation, offering back to God as freely-given gift the free gifts of the splendor and beauty of creation (including ourselves). It was our purpose to give voice to voiceless nature in offering praise and thanks to God, to interpret back to God the beauty of sun and moon, of star and ocean, flower and bird, animal and grass, to sing creation back to God as glory, to gather all creation up and return it to God in love. Our own fall was like Hophni’s and Phineas’: we desired to appropriate to ourselves what rightly belonged as offering to another…and this has been our pattern when it comes to our relationship with creation and with each other ever since.

The good news is that Jesus has fulfilled the priestly service we could not. As the new Adam, Jesus has recapitulated all of humanity, all of creation; in his life and death, he’s offered all back to God, and in his resurrection, all has been transformed in and through him into the glory of a new and redeemed creation. In Jesus, the royal priesthood we lost is restored to us.

So the question that might be useful for us to ponder today, my dear Friend, is this: in what ways are we still living our lives according to abusive patterns of envy and appropriation? Or further: in what ways do we continue to take for ourselves what we’re meant to offer another, what we’re meant to give back to God? In what ways do we keep ourselves from fulfilling the duties of the royal priesthood entrusted to us: to sing the beauty of creation and to sing, too, wounded nature back to God to receive the redemptive grace of healing for ourselves, our communities, our world?

You may be wondering: it sounds like singing this song might be worth doing, but how do I do it? Beloved Friend! We sing our lives back to God in thought, word, and deed; in and through whatever art or skill we’ve been given; in gentleness, kindness, patience; in love, by grace, through faith. We sing our song of praise and thanksgiving so that our lives may become a living prayer, a living sacrifice to God.

Beloved, in all of this, we’ve been given a high calling: but we’re not bereft of the grace needed to fulfill it. Indeed, it is the Spirit of God that fulfills it in us! So I urge you today: don’t hold back! Sing the song of God’s incomparable glory by every means you’ve been given to sing it!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+