Predigt zum 16. Sonntag im Lesejahr A 2020 (Römerbrief)

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19. Juli 2020 - KHG Bonn, St. Remigius

1. Parables of the kingdom of heaven

• Christians somehow always stand in between. On the one hand we want to grow in faith. We want to live more and more in firm trust in God. Hope means: firm trust without being able to pin down.
  On the other hand, like everyone else, we live with the questions, joys, hopes and doubts of life, with social tensions and exciting topics, in families and circles of friends, alone and in relationship with other people. In between this ‘normal’ and ‘trust in God’ stands whoever wants to believe as a Christian.
• Jesus compares it to a field in which wheat and tares grow side by side. You can't just make a clean slate. As long as we live in this body, life remains ambiguous. Also and especially believers only look out for clarity. This will be the business of the angels at the end of times. Only to the one who does not have a God in whom he trusts, everything can now already appear unambiguous, without doubt and always clearly.
• For believers, however, faith is more like just a seed, a small shoot perhaps, a small tree. One can only guess and hope what will become of it. The birds of the sky will nest in it. But that is only the end. It's not now. Now is "in between".

2. Parables from everyday life

• We human beings - we Christians too - live in different worlds. Not completely different, but always somewhat different. Each of us has a different background, different imprints and different experiences. We also have a lot in common, which offers points of contact.
  This results in exciting conversations (for which, once upon a time before Corona, people had come together without any distance). In the pub, at the breakfast table, maybe even in the KHG after the mass. There are common experiences and points of contact. And there are new things to tell.
  But sometimes there is also the situation that some people are talking intensively and there is one who keeps trying to get into the conversation but realizes that these are not his topics. We all know this situation because we have observed others or because we have experienced it ourselves. The group gets excited about a topic and perhaps doesn't even notice that one is left out because it is not his life world at all. It could also be that a different thought, which the group does not understand at all, is much more important to this person, so that it does not occur in the conversation.
• Or: When a group is together, in which everyone has seen a film or a series and can therefore have a say, but one of them doesn't understand what it's all about. Or the other way round: Although there is a lot of talk about some religious topic, only one person is present who has had a deep religious experience himself by being given a spiritual experience of the presence of God. But yet he does not have the words and does not find in the conversation the situation to talk about it. The intensity of his experience of faith does not match the verbosity of the others.
• Or: A family sits together, in which everyone has something to say to each other. But one of them has just found out that someone else is his father, not the one he always thought of. That means: The others are only his half brothers and sisters. For him, all thoughts will revolve now around the real father. He is one of whom he still knows so little, does not know how to address him, about whom he thinks, but does not know how talking to him. And in his thoughts he's suddenly not among the others anymore, just in between.

3. The Spirit intercedes for us

• What Paul writes in the two verses of today's reading to the Christians in Rome is written to people who live "in between". They are not taken out of the world. They are not spiritualized and bodiless. But at the same time they are Christians who want to orient themselves completely to what is coming and who want to trust God completely. But because God is not simply "to have", the right words are missing to describe this situation to other people. But also the words to pray are missing. Paul speaks of "unspeakable sighs" (and probably does not mean the sighing of the Holy Spirit, but of the person who wants to believe).
• The decisive hint Paul gives us is: "The Spirit [of God] takes care of our weakness. For we do not know what we should pray for in the right way, but the Spirit [of God] himself intercedes for us. God's Spirit unites herself with our spirit. Where we find it difficult to pray, God's Spirit prays in us. "He who searches the hearts knows what the purpose of [our] Spirit is. For [the Spirit of God] intercedes for the saints as God wills. “
• Paul is confident. We do not have to leave this life to be Believers. We can stay with it, even if the issues are not always ours. We can remain relaxed. But this also applies to prayer. Paul encourages us to pray, even if we have the feeling that we do not know how to "pray properly". That does not matter. God knows our hearts. An allegedly 'wrong' prayer, stuttering but from the heart, is closer to God than a prayer, no matter how 'right', which is not our words. God's spirit itself enters into us. God's Spirit is on our side. We may firmly trust in it. Amen.