Blizzard

Many of you who read this blog experienced a major winter storm this week. It kept us home for two days, but at least we were safe and warm and had enough to eat. We are now dug out, thanks to a couple of neighbors with snow blowers who took pity on a middle-aged priest shoveling two-foot drifts in his driveway. R and I consider ourselves fortunate. We still are amazed at the hundreds of people stranded for hours on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.

Tuesday morning before the storm hit, we went to our favorite coffee spot in town, knowing that soon we would be holed up at home. R remarked on the ironic title of the book I was carrying: In the Eye of the Storm by Kenneth Leech. It isn’t actually a weather book at all, but rather a passionate argument that spirituality and care for the poor are closely linked, that we don’t have an “inner life” separate from what we do in our “outer life.” The irony is not that the title fit the weather, but that the content fits the readings for this coming Sunday.

Take Isaiah, for instance. “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers,” he tells the Israelites. “Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist.” Instead, Isaiah presents a very different kind of fast, one the Lord chooses: “to loose the bonds of injustice….to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them.” True inward worship will reveal itself in outer acts of justice.

Jesus knows that. “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” Paul speaks of the inner light as spirit. Only the human spirit knows what is truly human, he says. In a like manner, “no one truly comprehends what is God’s except the Spirit of God” – a Spirit given to us so that “we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.” Those gifts emerge as fruits of the Spirit – but only in people who are spiritual. Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit.

Being “spiritual” sounds very modern. It is exactly where Leech believes we have gone wrong, especially when it is mixed up with American individualism. Paul did not understand Spirit apart from God, nor the fruits of the Spirit apart from community. Jesus saw good works as a response to the light within, and thus a way to glorify God. Isaiah clearly believed that the right treatment of others revealed the presence of God’s Spirit within. There is no dichotomy here between an inner “spiritual” life and outer “worldly” life. The life of the Spirit cannot be confined to an hour on Sunday mornings. More importantly, we are not true followers of Jesus Christ if we do not strive to embody Christ’s Spirit in all that we do. As one commentator puts it, “the challenge is to live out in the public arena what one is intrinsically.”

Our neighbors with their snow blowers embodied the Spirit of Christ. They were only two of the many people who helped others in this latest storm. Disasters do tend to bring out the best in us. It is daily life, life when no one is watching, that truly reveals what is going on within us. May we strive for that life of the Spirit that shows forth in good works, so that we can give glory to our Father in heaven.

[Epiphany 5: Isaiah 58:1-12; 1 Corinthians 2:1-16; Matthew 5:13-20. The quote is from John Nolland, The Gospel of Matthew: A Commentary on the Greek Text, p.214.]