The Third Sunday after Pentecost

 

“Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give”

As Christians living in the twenty-first century, we have little to fear. In this country, about sixty-three percent of Americans identify as Christian, a clear majority, and few fear persecution or death for their beliefs, unlike Jesus’ disciples or other Christians living in societies hostile to their faith. Jesus was sending his disciples “as sheep in the midst of wolves.” There was plenty to fear.

Matthew was writing his gospel during tough times. The tension between followers of Jesus and the established Jewish synagogue and the overall tension between the Jewish people and the Romans were increasing. Matthew’s gospel was addressed to the community at Jerusalem around 70 A.D., the year the Romans destroyed the Temple and caused widespread chaos both for the neophyte community of Jesus’ followers and the mainstream Jewish population. The need to affirm Jesus’ authority as Messiah permeates Matthew’s gospel, and today’s reading with Jesus sending out his disciples to evangelize the Jewish people would have been particularly timely for Matthew’s community. Jesus depicting the disciples being sent as feeling “troubled and abandoned” is an understatement.

The second descriptor of these disciples as needing a shepherd seems particularly apt when you consider how Jesus contemplated being killed at the hands of the Roman and Temple authorities, a feeling shared by the leadership of Matthew’s small Christian community in Jerusalem. What happens to sheep without a shepherd? They are devoured by wolves. It is difficult for us to imagine how desperate Jesus and Matthew were to get the message of God’s kingdom out to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel”. What could Jesus’ disciples, or for that matter, Matthew’s community offer coming from such a troubled community? They offered hope; their mission was to heal. But how can the wounded heal? Jesus summed it up by declaring the healing they received came free to them and “without cost you are to give”.  Who better to heal than those who are being healed?

We, too, are being sent. We begin our missionary journey, though, in our hearts. Before we can share God’s healing, we must realize God’s work in us that has begun. We don’t need to be cured to heal, but we need to know what the wounds look like. Before we can be Christ to the world, we need to see Christ in the world, present in the least and the last, the wounded and weak. As Christ’s glorified body still bore the wounds of his crucifixion, so we go forth using our wounds as proof of God’s healing and how real for us the coming of God’s kingdom is, because it has arrived.

The Body and Blood of Our Lord

 

Become What You Receive

St. Augustine’s famous admonition on the Eucharist, “Behold what you are; become what you receive,” reveals the dynamic between the taking and becoming the blessing of the Eucharist. 

In the Eucharistic celebration, the priest’s actions are taking, blessing, breaking, and giving; the part that is often left out of the discussion is the taking and becoming of all who receive. But we who receive are also taking, and rather than blessing the bread, the bread becomes a source of blessing for ourselves so that we might be a blessing to the world—the world yet to be transformed by Christ. Also, rather than breaking the bread, we become broken in our blessing. In Augustine’s saying, “Behold what you are” comes before “Become what you receive.” Approaching the Body and Blood of Christ sacrificed for us, we behold our great need for God’s grace because we experience blessing. The image of brokenness works on two levels: to be shared, the substance must be divided and broken. In the sharing of ourselves, we freely distribute the blessing we have been given and have become. Broken also suggests the suffering of Christ’s sacrifice, the “way of the cross.” We must become true flesh, accept we are not gods, break our egoism to bless and celebrate our humanity.

We then, in our common priesthood, in our lives, do what the priest does at the altar: We take, bless, break, and give, stripped of our false humanity, and reveal a great blessing that God has sanctified, what He has created and found very good.

The Most Holy Trinity

 "Batter my heart three-person God"

--John Donne, "Meditation 14"

Preaching on theological-theme-Sundays is particularly challenging because it invites abstraction and can quickly turn into a lecture; even in a seminary, seminarians want to hear a homily rather than a lecture at Mass.

The Holy Trinity is difficult because the official declaration of God's identity as "three persons, one God" seems to run contrary to our understanding of what it means to be a person. For many, such language brings up popular images of "multiple personalities" in a single person suffering from a mental disorder. There is a quotation from the spiritual masterpiece The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis that gives us a great place to start:

What good does it do to speak learnedly about the Trinity if, lacking humility, you displease the Trinity? ( Book 1, Chapter 1)

The first thing we should recognize is that any theological understanding finds its ultimate meaning in the goal of all Christian life: to allow God to transform us daily into becoming more like Christ. With that in mind (and heart), let's consider today's readings, how the Blessed Trinity is revealed in them, and the implications for our life in Christ.

One of the essential characteristics of the Trinity is God's nature revealed through relationships not only among the persons of the Trinity but also with us. God's revelation is an invitation to join this relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God has become known to us through revelations (the Prophets), redemptive action (Jesus as Christ), and acting within us (The Holy Spirit) in such a way as to recognize in oneself and one's neighbor, the Divine. This three-part structure: God-self, God-revelation, and God-within, is the basis of how we know God.

Deuteronomy speaks of God's existence in both heaven and earth, acting in both revelation and redemption.

...fix in your heart, that the LORD is God in the heavens above and on the earth below, and that there is no other . . . . that you and your children after you may prosper, and that you may have long life on the land . . . ."

In Paul's letter to the Romans, he explicitly writes of God in terms of Father and Spirit and of being "heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ" The text takes an interesting turn, then, and suggests that this relationship is only fully recognized (The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit) "if only we suffer with him." Paul is suggesting that we will be led by the Spirit into the sufferings of Christ to enter into the glory of the Father. How often do we regard God as aloof and incapable of suffering because of the attribution of "perfect". Something perfect does not suffer, but God as Christ did suffer (contrary to the rather insipid claim of the Gnostics) and does suffer. The reason God suffers, for Paul, is clear: we are all God's children. God suffers because of His great love for his creation and his perfect love expressed in our free will to walk away from our inheritance. God must experience us quite often like a petulant child who walks away from Disneyland to play in the backyard on a dry, brown lawn with broken toys in the summer heat to spite his parents. God sees what we could be because he has blessed us with his grace to share in His glory.

In Matthew's gospel, the Trinity is explicit in the triadic baptismal formula with the promise that the role of the disciple is to teach the world "all that I have commanded you." If you remember, three weeks ago, Jesus commands his disciples: "Love one another." The mission, then, of both the Church and the individual, is one of "going out" into the world, as Christ and the Father "went out" of themselves---God in creation, revelation, and redemption, Christ in perfect obedience to the Father. This centrifugal force of the Spirit, though, is only possible as a fruit of loving one another--the centripetal force of the inwardness of God's presence within us and Christ's presence in the community of the faithful. What draws us together leads us to the mission. 

The mission will "batter" us, to quote the epigraph from Donne, but we live because we are embraced by God's Spirit in following the battered Christ resurrected. Donne's pleading seems masochistic until one realizes that to join in this family of God's children, the way of life and glory is also the way of suffering and death for love of the other, embodying the practice of the Trinity. Who could ever understand such love?