"Shake it Off:" The Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Homily for the Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
(Final Draft)

I was in the bleachers at a Little League game.
Next to me sat a mother
whose husband was the coach
of the team up to bat.
The kid standing at the plate was their son
and he had just struck out.

“Shake it off, Tom!”
the mother called to the boy.
“Just shake it off.”

The boy’s father, the coach, didn’t shake his head.
He didn’t throw his cap to the ground.
He didn’t say a word.

His attention was already on the next batter.

But then something different happened.
The next batter also struck out.
I don’t know if that boy’s parents were in the stands.
If they were, I didn’t hear them.

All I remember is that, when the second kid struck out,
he was completely crushed.
He started pounding himself in the head.
He then threw off his helmet
and stomped back to the dugout
shaking his head:
“I’m so stupid! I’m so stupid!”

No one told him to Shake it off
or Get over it
or Better luck next time, kid.

His response to his failure
was to berate himself
and no one tried to stop him.

* * *

This scene I witnessed from the bleachers
at a Little League game came to mind
when I read today’s passage from
the Book of the Prophet Isaiah:

“Thus says the Lord:
Remember not the events of the past….
It is I, I who wipe out,
for my own sake, your offenses;
your sins I remember no more.”

Sounds to me a bit like the words
of that mother in the stands
at that Little League game:
“Shake it off, Tom. Shake it off.”

Put yourself on that ball diamond for a minute.
Which kid would you rather be?

I think I know the answer.

Nobody wants to be the kid who can’t get over
striking out.

No one wants to be that kid in the dugout
pounding a mean message into his soul
with every slap of his fist into his hand:
“I’m no good. I’m no good. I’m no good.”

A boy like that needs someone to convince him
that life is more than a batting average.

And that’s a fact we all need to be reminded of
now and then.

Everyone of us here in this church needs to know
that our life is more than the sum total of our mistakes.

Like the kid in the dugout,
we need to hear God tell us,
“Shake it off!”

Never forget this:
In God’s eyes,
we are more than the list of our moral failures,
we are more than that tally of our sins,
we are more than destructive things we do…to ourselves or to others.

(Gosh, where would anyone of us be
without the hard and fast reality
of God’s forgiveness?)

* * *

This is at the heart of the message Christ came to preach.
In fact, it’s right at the center of today’s gospel passage:

“Which is easier to say,
‘Your sins are forgiven’ or ‘Stand up and walk?’”
So you might know the Son of Man
has authority to forgive sins…
he said to the paralytic…
“Stand up and walk!”

Sounds easy, this forgiveness stuff.
Actually, it sounds so easy
that some Christians think it’s too soft.

The too-good Christians say things like,
“No one goes to Confession anymore.”
Or:
“People just take God’s forgiveness is just taken for granted.”
Or:
“Nobody takes sin seriously.”

They have a point and, sometimes, as a pastor,
I find myself in their camp.

It seems as though no one worries about committing sins anymore.
The word sin hardly ever crosses our lips these days.

Sometimes I am amazed at the “so what?” attitude
that people have toward breaking the Ten Commandments.

As a pastor this concerns me.
Yet, as a sinner myself,
I depend on the assurance of God’s forgiveness.

Without such assurance,
we sinners would have no choice but to take a seat on the bench
next to the second boy there in the dugout
and join him in kicking the wall, saying,
“I’m no good. I’m so stupid. I’ll never amount to nothing.”

* * *

The Good News in today’s reading is telling us:
“Shake it off.”

God wouldn’t be telling us that
if we didn’t need to hear it.

And, in all honesty, we do need to hear it.

You see, when it comes to sin,
---and I’m talking here about the hard-hitting,
kind of sin that goes by the name
“deadly sin” or “mortal sin”---
well, the memory of that kind of sin
can haunt us for a long time.

For instance,
there are days…I have them
and I’m sure you have them too…
when the memory of past sins
barge right in and stare us in the face.

It might be a perfectly sunny day,
and you wake up in a good mood.
But then, you take a look into the mirror and,
from out of nowhere,
it hits you.

For just a second
you look yourself in the eye
and realize how far you’ve fallen
short of God’s expectations.

* * *

People don’t talk much about this,
but sin…and the residue of sin…is a part of life.

Of course, American society,
the American media,
the American entertainment industry
tends to make light of sin.

But the truth of the matter is that
committing sins is serious business.
It takes its toll.
It corrodes the soul.
In short, it drains the spirit out your life.

(Sometimes, the hardest part of forgiveness
isn’t accepting God’s forgiveness…
it’s accepting your forgiveness of yourself.)

When this happens,
today’s message that God
transmits to us through the Prophet Isaisah
has to somehow get through:

Thus says the Lord:
“I do not remember your sins
(so why should you?)”

So, on those days when clouds from the past
cast a shadow over your present…
you need to turn from the mirror
and toward the Lord,

And He, in turn, will turn toward you.

And this is what He’ll say:

“Shake it off.”