Underdogs

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
    There’s something about underdogs.  People love to see them succeed.  I’ll find myself watching a sports game between two teams that I really don’t care about, and I’m often drawn to the team that is ranked lower, especially if it’s a close game.  People generally like to see the little guy succeed, even against all odds.  And I’d like to think that it has to do with something God put into our hearts.

    Now, to be fair, sometimes people want to see the underdog succeed because they really want to see someone else fall.  There were a lot of Spartan fans cheering on unranked Appalachian State in 2007 when they blocked the game-winning field goal attempt by #5 ranked U of M in one of the biggest upsets in college football history.  Or, basically any time anybody plays Ohio State, you know Wolverines will be rooting for the other guy, who, in recent history, have generally been the underdog.
    But there can be more virtuous motives behind seeing the little guy succeed, and it connects us to God.  Think about David and Goliath.  David should have lost, and yet, God chose David and rewarded his courage and confidence in God’s ability to give David victory over the giant who cursed God.  In our first reading, we hear about the underdogs and little guys even before David: aliens (foreigners; not extra-terrestrials or the Swedish hard rock band); widows; orphans; the poor.  God tells the Israelites in the Book of Exodus that He has a special love for those groups of people.  And note that God points out that He loves them because Israel once was in those groups, or was like those groups.  The Israelites were foreigners among the Egyptians and the Egyptians oppressed the Israelites and made them slaves.  The Israelites were often poor, relying on God for their basic needs, and hoping others wouldn’t take advantage of them.  Widows and orphans had no one to rely on, as in that time there was no social security or welfare, so if you had no family to earn money for you or to farm for you, all you could do was beg.
    The call to love our neighbor, part of the great law that Jesus highlights in the Gospel today, was a call to be like God: to care for those who could not care for themselves.  And it was the consequence of the first part of the great law, love of God, because when one loves God, one therefore also loves those whom God loves.  St. John in a New Testament epistle reminds us that we cannot love the God we don’t see if we don’t love the brother we do see.  The two are really inseparable.

    But how easy it is to forget that we once relied on others as others now rely on us!  It’s like the movie “Trading Places,” where the fortunes of the rich man, Louis Winthorpe III (played by Dan Aykroyd), and a street beggar, Billy Ray Valentine (played by Eddie Murphy) are switched through the conniving machinations and wagers of Randolph and Mortimer Duke.  When Billy Ray is poor, he condemns Winthorpe for the way he treats the poor.  But when Billy Ray suddenly becomes rich and encounters Winthorpe as a poor beggar, he suddenly forgets how he wanted the poor to be treated and treats Winthorpe the way Winthope treated him when they were in each other’s shoes.  
    And so the Church regularly puts before us reminders about God’s love for the underdog, which should also stir our hearts.  The Church reminds us that in order to love God, we also have to be mindful of the opportunities we have to love those whom God loves.  Since the readings talk about aliens, we can look at the immigration debate.  Catholics can sometimes find themselves split.  Some prefer to focus on the legitimate right of countries to regulate immigration, and the responsibility of immigrants to follow the laws of their new country and seek to integrate themselves to their new homelands.  Others prefer to focus on what we heard today: that we cannot “molest or oppress an alien.”  In fact, both are true, and both deserve our focus.  Open borders include a host of problems that afflict every-day people–drugs; human trafficking; terrorism–even while some legitimately are trying to make a better life for themselves.  So while we seek justice and public safety, which are very important goods, we also don’t want to forget that God has a special love for those who are fleeing oppression and hardship in their native lands.  In the midst of legitimately enforcing immigration laws, we still have a responsibility to treat illegal immigrants as human beings, not like animals or sub-humans.  I think most Catholics can actually agree on those principles if we really stop and dialogue, though how those principles are instantiated certainly become more difficult to flesh out.
    But God wants us to remember our poverty, not so much economic, as spiritual.  God calls on us to rely on Him, because everything good we have came from the hand of God.  In some way, we are all aliens, widows, orphans, and poor, because we started with nothing other than what God allows us to have.  God loves us, and so, if we want to love God, He calls us to love those whom He loves, as well.  May our love for God find its expression not only in coming to Church and worshipping Him, as is right and just, but also in our love for our neighbors, especially the underdogs.