I’m sure that many of you, who have a profession, are expected to keep abreast of the latest developments in your field of activity. As a matter of fact, some of you probably have to be recertified every so many years to prove that you’re staying on top of the latest information.

Well, priests are expected to keep studying all during their lives. And so, I try to buy and read a couple of books about various areas in theology every year. I bought one recently, and I just threw it away, because I got to the part in the book where the person was going to prove how Jesus was not divine, but that the church made him divine later on. And I wasn’t surprised to find that, because it’s an ancient heresy that comes up every now and then in different guises.

Before I tossed the book, I have to tell you, his opening chapter was really great. Because it talked about his growing up in a little Midwestern town, where everybody in the town was either Catholic or Lutheran. So, no matter which church you went to, you had the same presuppositions about God, about Jesus, and about the Christian life. And, basically, he said the supposition by which all the adults and children ran their lives was that you try to be good here in order to go someplace else later on. And you can see that in our old Baltimore Catechism. Those of you who are at least in your mid 60s will remember the second question in the catechism. “Why did God make me?” “God made me to know, love, and serve Him in this world, in order to be happy with Him in the next.”

And the author’s premise, of course, is that childhood suppositions - the milieu in which we grow up - determines our attitude toward God. He said the attitude toward God that he grew up with was ‘the God up there.’ And, because by his late teen, he could no longer buy into that concept, he became an atheist. But, during college, he met someone who brought him to a Christian group that had a very different focus on God. They talked about ‘the God here and now.’ And that brought him back, first to the practice of his faith, and then to the study of his faith.

And that brings us to the two radical ideas that we find in today’s readings. Most of the time, we think about the Old Testament as the Testament of ‘the God up there,’ and the New Testament, because Jesus is with us, as the Testament of ‘the God here with us.’ But, if you noticed in the first reading, which is all about the Torah, the law, the very thing over which Jesus was in confrontation with the Pharisees, it says, “If you keep the Covenant, then all the nations around you will say, ‘What other great nation has gods as close to it as our God is to us.’ So, right there, a good fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, a good seven or eight hundred years before the written Old Testament scriptures began, we have, implanted in the community understanding of God, that God is not up there someplace. God is close to us. God journeys with us. And that is the bedrock of Old Testament faith. It’s what made it possible for Jesus to come among us.

There was a psychologist at the turn of the twentieth century from the nineteenth, who challenged the orthodoxy of the usual way of looking at the human personality, as super ego, ego and id. And said instead, you have to look at humanity as a relationship of I and thou. I and thou. He said the ‘thou’ is the other person, but sometimes that other person is distinguished from me, separate from me, and sometimes that other person is in communion with me.

Well, along came, in the decades just before and during WWII, a German theologian named Paul Tillich. And Paul used Martin Buber’s idea of the I and the thou to talk about relationship with God. He just capitalized the T in Thou. He said it’s the same thing with ourselves and God. Sometimes God is the totally other. Sometimes God is the one who walks with us. And so that radical idea planted, now almost two thousand years ago or more in the Old Testament, becomes for us the way in which we are invited to live our Catholic Christianity. The whole point of Jesus’ coming is to show us what God is like in human form, what God is like in human form. The first radical idea.

The second radical idea is in the second reading, right near the end of the passage we read. St. James says that true religion is care for the widows and the orphans. True religion is care for the widows and the orphans. But we don’t really understand what he means by ‘widows and orphans,’ because our understanding of widows and orphans is very different. Who are the three most famous orphans in modern literature? Little Orphan Annie, Oliver Twist - and now I’m going to test your memory, the funny papers in the 1950s and the 1960s – Dondi, the orphan in Italy as the troops come through Italy during the second World War. Each of those three orphans is portrayed as a spunky and optimistic child, who almost always lands feet first, no matter what happens. That’s our idea of an orphan, because our society takes care of, and is emotionally invested in, children without parents.

What about widows? You know, widows for us are people who have lost a spouse but, after a suitable time of grief, have picked up and moved on, perhaps have come into unexpected income because of the death of their spouse, and perhaps have found a new lease on life, a new career, new hobbies, new friends, something else like that. And, because of the way in which our social society deals with – we don’t even like to say widows and orphans anymore, pretty soon we’ll be calling them the parentally challenged and the spousally challenged.

But, in the time that St. James is writing – the time of Jesus and a long time after that – widows and orphans were the pariahs of society. They had no status at all. To be a woman, in the first century A.D., and have status, you had to be your father’s daughter, your husband’s wife, your brother’s sister, or your son’s mother. And if you were none of those things, if all the men in your life were gone, you were at the mercy of society because you had no legal standing.

The same thing was true of orphans. All children had no legal status in society, but they were important as long as they were the heirs of some man. But if they no longer were the heirs of some man, they too were set adrift by the society. So, when St. James talks about true religion being care for the orphans and widows, he’s talking about our investing ourselves in the dregs of society. And the other interesting thing is that he said this is true religion. We usually think of religion as one of two things. It’s either what we do here on Sunday morning, or it’s the stuff we’re supposed to learn or follow in our lives.

But the word religion is made up of two Latin words, the little tiny syllable re, which means again or back, and ligio, from which we get English words like ligature and all of those things that have to do with string or rope. Religion means binding again. So, if we have to be bound again, how did we get unbound?

When we disconnect ourselves from the gaping, horrific needs of society – we do that all the time, don’t we? We watch the news on TV, see something in the paper, see something on our phones, we shake our heads in sorrow and move on, or we write out a check. It’s easy to write out a check. And Americans are very generous with their money, especially Catholics. Very generous with their money. But not so generous beyond the simple act of donating. And so, we have to be rebound to something that we have forgotten.

There was another German theologian, his name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And he was actually executed by the Nazis, because he stood up to them, using the principles of Lutheran Christian morality, to confront the evil of Nazism. And obviously that was not going to fly. But he talked about something called “radical Christianity.”

That’s the other radical notion in today’s second reading. Radical Christianity. That we invest ourselves in the present day, using our belief in Jesus to confront the evils of the day in a meaningful way. That rebinds us to ‘the God here and now.’ Rebinds us to ‘the God here and now.’

I have no answers. I only know that we’re talking about the big questions.