Invitation, Acceptance, Power, and Humility

(a homily)

Invitation is a powerful notion. To invite another person or group into your life or your home or your group is an act involving power. It is not a power that lords over the other, but one that empowers the other; to invite is to lower yourself in order to clarify that you see the other as worthy of your company, significant in your sight.

Conversely, the acceptance of an invitation is also an act of lowering and empowering. Acceptance is a gracious disposition, a humbled manner of facing the other and the world. It is living with thankfulness of heart and a true sense of dependence. Within this framework we see the deep significance of the invitation of the woman from Thyatira, Lydia, and Paul and the other's welcoming acceptance. The giving and receiving of invitation and acceptance give us a vision of the spiritual life, the life lived worthy of the Gospel, the testimony of Jesus in the Spirit.

Worship and the Eucharist teach us how to invite and accept. We worship God in response to God's invitation. The conversation of worship leads us to invite others into our personal lives, even into our communal life together. Even when others do not know how to accept our invitation, we continue to lovingly offer ourselves to them, empowered as we are by the Advocate who proceeds from the Father. Our life in the Spirit draws us into fellowship with the Triune God.

Worship humbles us so we might invite God into our hearts. The seventh or ninth century Palestinian monk, Theodorus the Ascetic, profoundly writes concerning the life with God:

The Lord makes his abode
in the souls of the humble,
for the hearts of the proud
are full of shameful obsessions.
Nothing strengthens the obsessions
so much as arrogant thoughts;
nothing uproots the weeds of the soul
so quickly as blessed humility.
[Quoted in The Book of Mystical Chapters: Meditations on the Soul's Ascent from the Desert Fathers and Other Early Christian Contemplatives, Trans. and Intro. John Anthony McGuckin (Boston: Shambhala, 2003) 58.]

May our worship and the high praises of God in our throats lead us to blessed humility. In this humility we are delivered from the kind power that finds its source in arrogance and instead we are empowered by the love of Christ which guides us in a way of invitation and acceptance of the other.

(Acts 16:11-15; Psalm 149:1b-2, 3-4, 5-6a and 9b; John 15:26—16:4a)