3rd Sunday (Scrutiny) Looking for Love

<<note, the gospel and readings are from Year A, used for the Scrutinies>>

In the 1980, a groundbreaking film was released.  A dramatic story of a man searching in life, via an electric bull.  A song from that movie by Johnny Lee made the charts… “Looking for love in all the wrong places”

Where do we look for love?

A story of our lives.  Our movies, our tv, our literature filled with people looking to be loved.

We look for love via social media, in our brew pubs, coffee houses, in many places.

And we can find love, sometime. Or a form of love anyway.

Teens just starting out on that journey, sorry, but it can be quite painful.

There will be a crush on someone, hard, and then when it does not work out...ouch!  This applies for males as well as females.

Broken hearts are part of the journey.

Yet we know this process can continue into the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s….

What is love?

The English language fails when it comes to this word.  One word attempts to fit all.

Love, at its core, is to believe in the goodness of the other.

Love means to see a person, and see a person in front of us.

Love means we choose to believe that person is good and capable of such goodness.

The emotion, the feelings we call love, all derives from that.

The core love is a choice.

The feeling of love is a reaction.

Chaos happens when we confuse the two.

Thus we look for love in all the wrong places.

All of us have a deep need for love, the true love.

We have a deep need, as humans to want to be seen as good persons.

We want to be seen as ourselves.  

God is love.

We are created in God’s own image, so it makes perfect sense that we have this deep need.  It is part of our authentic self to want to love and be loved.

It is a thirst that needs satisfied.

Last year, Fr. Michael Fish gave the priests of the diocese an outstanding retreat.  One story he shared was this gospel.

He made a comment that, as many of us know, the normal time for the women of the community to come to the well to draw water was the morning, when it was cool.  It was time for them to form community too.

Noon time, he said, was when the more seedy elements of society would come for water.

So this woman coming to the well; she may have come not just for water, but she was looking for love in all the wrong places.  As apparently she has her adult life.

Jesus sees her.

Across the void of her being a woman and he being a man and all the societal protocols;

Across the void of her being Samaritan and he being a Jew and all the cultural and religious protocols;...

...Jesus sees her.

He sees the potential within her.  The searching, the hurt, the woundedness...he sees beyond all that, to her core.  He sees her.

And in a remarkable process, she begins to see too; to believe in herself.

She drinks from the well of God’s love; and will not thirst again.

It can be hard to love; to believe in love.

The great lie in this world is that our goodness, our self, depends on things, power and status.  It is the Original sin.

How many likes and followers we have on social media.

How many compliments we receive; these can be come the wrong place to drink of love.

We try to prove ourselves by over working, doing too many projects, involved in too many things.

We bust ourselves and our families by focussing on having having and having.

We surrender ourselves to the wrong people, the wrong causes;

We force this on others:  “Prove your value to me, by being my version of a man, woman, Catholic, American…..” or “ I will love you if you are this way…”

Look at the destruction, the depression, the chaos, the death.

We put so much effort and energy into something that does not satisfy us.

Look at the sin of racism, domestic violence, the gun violence, abortion and euthanasia, the amount of poverty in this world.

Jesus Christ exposes that lie, that sin.  He dies from it.

Jesus on the Cross died because of people chose to believe in that lie and he exposes the lie for what it is.

March 24th too we recognize St. Oscar Romero, killed by the rulers of El Salvador because he dared to expose their lies.  They craved their power.  They wanted to decide who is worthy and who was not. They treated the people like garbage.  Archbishop Romero stood up for them.  He Spoke the Good News, the Truth.  The people loved him.  The government murdered him during the Eucharist.

The Father loves us.

The Father sees us as good.  The Father wills, the Father desires, that this goodness be realized.

Jesus frees us from that lie, so that we can truly be loved!  And to Love.

And that is the starting point..Believing in the God’s love of us.

This is the great well that Jesus speaks of.

The only way I can say we know it, is that we simply are.

God’s love sustain us.

We would not exist without it.

I am not talking alive or dead, because God clearly loves us beyond death.

I am talking of existence.  If God did not love us, we simply would not exist.

But we do.

So therefore we are loved.

Hold onto that.

It will get us through those broken hearts.

It will get us through the messes of our lives.

It will strengthen us when people try to destroy us because they themselves do not feel love.

It will empower us to look at life differently.

Empowers us to look for love in a different way.

It empowers us as church to look at the world with love.

To welcome those who come to us, searching for love too.

Searching for love in the right place.