Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

 "Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me."

The Spirituality of Imperfection

                We continue this week with the second of three passages where Jesus describes his fate of persecution and suffering that awaits him.  Last week we took a look at the cross from a different angle, the "Tao" of the cross emphasizing sticking it out until the end with Jesus as being the cross of discipleship.  This week we look at the cross of servanthood and humility.

                Mark's gospel resonates with the Suffering Servant of Second Isiah where biblical scholar Reginald Fuller notes that in verse 13 (not included in the reading), God's suffering servant is called pais, a term used to denote both servant and child; both were at the very bottom of power in society.  So then Jesus uses children as an example of the types of people whom the disciples must embrace (Jesus embraces the child).  For us, who exalt children, this may not seem unusual, but in Jesus' time, such an act of concern for the least and last was profound. 

                After being told to get in line last week, Jesus addresses the rest of the herd as they vie to be " the first disciple".  Jesus tells them to become servants (pais).  In a sense, they should compete to become last and least.

                In Matthew, this discourse about humility and greatness occurs in chapter 18 and more fully develops the concept of "receiving these pais".  Jesus declares that beyond "receiving", the disciples, one must become as pais to enter the Kingdom.  Clearly, Jesus' words speak as much against the triumphalism rampant in the church today as it did for Jesus' disciples in the First Century C.E.
                Simon Tugwell writes eloquently about the need to not count the success of the church with the world's standards of power and domination.  In his book Ways of Imperfection, Tugwell writes 

"There is a kind of unsatisfactoriness written into her [the church’s] very constitution, because she is only a transitional organization, keeping people and preparing them for a new creation . . . .Christianity has to be disappointing, precisely because it is not a mechanism for accomplishing all our human ambitions and aspirations, it is a mechanism for subjecting all things to the will of God"(1)

                Inevitably, our human ambitions always creep into our communities, and into the church as a whole, but today's gospel reminds us how Jesus regarded such attitudes of a triumphalist church.  We need to become like pais, servants/children, who, as Tugwell has written, are not valued by Jesus for their innocence, but by their vulnerability.  They receive everything as a gift.
                Imagine the transformation from a church of control and power to a church as vulnerable as the wounded Christ; the vulnerability that grows gratitude becomes the mechanism for being Good News.  When people turn away from the church because they can't abide such a powerless institution unable to be an extension of their need for power and control, we shouldn't change to accommodate that sinful need.  The church's real gift is its witness of the Suffering Servant of Christ---vulnerable and committed to distributing God's grace to the least and last, and inviting transformation into that life of vulnerability, compassion, and gratitude.

Fifthteenth Sunday after Pentecost

    In today's gospel, Jesus opens the ears and restores the speech of one who is deaf. It is common for those who are not able to hear to also have a speech impediment. This relationship between speaking and hearing is no coincidence; speech is perfected not through the tongue, but through the ear.  Speaking is all about self-expression.  We use it both for healing and wounding,   praising and condemning.  It is a powerful tool in the hands of one who is adept in the art of speaking. Listening is associated with receptivity,  vulnerability, and openness.  It can manifest as profound hospitality and docility to a teacher, but it can also be a profound failure to act in the face of injustice.  In the right combination of motive and skill, it is God's gift of deep abiding wisdom and healing.  Speaking and listening is our agent of true communion.

We shouldn't confuse listening with hearing, though.  Hearing is simply the physical act of perception, but not of response; listening is much deeper.  Listening presupposes attention.  When we listen, we are in communion with the speaker, opening ourselves to her or his word, allowing ourselves to have our consciousness shaped by the word spoken.  When we attend to the proclamation of Scripture, we are open both to the word (text) and Word (God's voice heard in Jesus and the Spirit).  It isn't the book that saves; it’s the words and Word attended to that becomes healing and life.

Today, the Letter of James tells us to listen to this:
"Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters.
Did not God choose those who are poor in the world
to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom
that he promised to those who love him?"

We hear the poor, but do we really listen?  What would it mean to “be opened” to poverty?  Does it mean we must become poor ourselves? (That's the scary part!).  What if we did become poor?  We could then not help the poor because we would be poor, as the reasoning goes.  But what constitutes "helping the poor"?  The poverty of the poor is much more than the absence of financial means; it is a loss of participation in making choices.  To hear the poor is to participate in their poverty at this level.  To give the poor hearing and a voice, one must first enter into communion and listen.  Too often those who seek to "help" begin by imposing a solution rather than by entering into communion through listening.  The "poor" is not a single entity, but something in us all.  Can we hear our poverty?  Can we experience the beggar in ourselves, and are we ready to enter into communion with the literal beggar and listen before we speak?

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

 

A Matter of the Heart

                Purity is a word that few would consider pejorative; it sits alongside other words we associate with virtue such as honesty, courage, etc.  It is even more effective as a marketing tool to entice the consumer that you are getting 100% of what you are expecting.  The other word associated with this one is perfection. In a sense, purity is a type of perfection, and when you begin an endeavor, it is common to hope for perfection.

                It is this struggle to be perfect before God that the Jews turned to the Torah (the first five books of the Bible).  These books contain a little over six hundred laws that were composed between 600 and 400 BCE.  These laws were extended to interpretive texts that were designed to help people apply these laws to everyday life to keep better the original six-hundred or so laws in the Torah.  By Jesus' time, some of these laws became impediments to the spirit that informed them.  Like so many good ideas, when people who have lost sight of why the law exists simply follow the law "because it is the law", the spirit suffers the ignorance of the law-abiding.

                In today's gospel, those whose job it was to interpret and admonish adherence to the Law (Pharisees and scribes) were incensed that Jesus seemed oblivious to the demands of the Law.  He did not seem to chastise those among his disciples that did not wash before meals in violation, not of the law, per se (Leviticus 15:11), but explicitly from the Talmud, a group of interpretive statements to apply the Law.  When questioned as to why Jesus seemed such a scoff-law we get a two-part answer:  You are like the hypocrites of whom Isaiah speaks "They honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me", and the spiritual insight that "Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person, but the things that come out from within are what defile."

                Jesus' statement in the fifth chapter of Matthew intends not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and now he seems clear as to how the Law is fulfilled: intention.

                The other day, I had a rather distressing conversation with a man who insisted that undocumented immigrants should not be allowed to receive any public services such as education and a driver's license. He said this about the poor entering our southern border.  He felt quite confident that his view wasn't obstructed by racism, but that "it was the law".  He insisted that acting unlawfully was the fundamental transgression that could only be remedied by these people returning to their native country and following the procedure for properly entering the United States. He was so focused on the violation of the law that the broader question of justice seemed to him as a distraction from the core issue of these folks breaking the law.

                The law serves justice, but so many today have it reversed thinking that if it is a law it presupposes being just.  Needless to say, in recent memory laws that kept blacks segregated from society, women from voting, and prohibiting consenting adults who are gay from marrying are examples of laws most would find difficult to reconcile with concepts of justice.

                Jesus understood this insidious tendency to focus on law rather than justice. This focus provides a false sense of comfort to those who don't want to deal with the messiness of justice and opt for the simplistic purity of law. For many Christians, the Bible has become the modern equivalent to the religious law--studied to discover transgression rather than compassion in the false promise that by doing so one may become perfect.  But perfection does not lie in the observance of the law, but in its fulfillment as Christ fulfilled it: love of God and love of neighbor--the two most important commandments according to Jesus. 

                The standard of civil justice for us as Americans is the Constitution, and the standard for Christian justice is love.  The Good News must be received and dispensed from the heart.  Reading the scripture to discover "what to do" is ignorant. We read scripture to become more like Christ.  It isn't so much searching the Scriptures to see "what would Jesus do" as much as it is searching scripture to see "what Jesus did".  Holy Scripture doesn't interpret itself but only comes to life in the circumcised heart of someone who loves aided by the Spirit.

Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

 The Practice of Discernment

    In both the Old Testament and gospel readings, people were asked to make a decision. In Joshua, the people were asked to choose between worshiping a foreign god or worshiping God. In the gospel, Jesus’ revelation about himself as “the one who has come down from heaven” turns away some, but it also generates Peter’s confession: “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”

Making choices is at the core of a moral and ethical life. Now that we have “come to believe and are convinced” that Jesus is the Christ, we must continue to make choices that are consistent with our commitment to follow Christ.

    An excellent way to make these choices, or to “discern” what is consistent with our spiritual welfare, is the time-honored approach of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits.  Taken from the site developed by the Valparaiso Project from the University of the same name, it is an adjunct to the book Practicing our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People. As the website, PracticingOurFaith.org describes: “Both book and website explore twelve time-honored practice shaped by the Christian community over the centuries and still richly relevant to contemporary experience.  These Christian practices are shared activities that address fundamental human needs and that, when woven together, form a way of life that is faithful and has integrity.”

Here is an excerpt from that site meant to guide a Christian in discernment:

    Discerning the Spirit as an individual 
Ignatius of Loyola, founder of Jesuits, offered a model that includes these requisites: a passionate commitment to follow God, an attitude of indifference toward all other drives and desires, and a deep sensitivity to the ways and being of God. 

1.     Become aware of as many aspects of the decision as possible.

2.    Consider the negatives, the decision you feel least inclined to choose.

3.    Repeat the process of consideration with the side you feel most inclined to choose.

4.    Take action to see if your decision is resulting in the desired outcome; if it is not, re-evaluate your decision.

One essential addition I’d like to make: All decisions involving your spiritual welfare should be made in dialogue with a spiritually mature friend or mentor. In the Christian life, discernment has a communal element as well.  Needless to say, prayer is part of all the steps of the process.

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

 "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him"

This line taken from John's gospel is the core of what Catholics believe about unity. However, this unity of which John speaks is sometimes confused with uniformity by the institutional Church. Case in point: last year’s doctrinal investigation by Rome of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious assessing how well the organization is aligned with Church teaching on matters of "feminist issues"(op. cit. NCR). Specifically, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is concerned that the LCWR is silent in matters of birth control/abortion and marriage norms set by the institutional Church, and that it gives dissenting voices from Church teaching, some of them quite radical (i.e. espousing a post-church spirituality, post-Jesus, spirituality [op. cit. Bishop Leonard P. Blair]). The name of this investigation is formally called a "doctrinal assessment". The goal is to have the LCWR align what they say (or what they allow their members to say publicly) with official Church teaching; for Rome, having holy people saying different things about what it means to be an ecclesiastical community undermines the Faith for all believers. However, it is this mistaken notion of uniformity for unity that I believe is a threat to the Faith. Pope Benedict wrote

"We cannot keep to ourselves the words of eternal life given to us in our encounter with Jesus Christ: they are meant for everyone, for every man and woman. ... It is our responsibility to pass on what, by God's grace, we ourselves have received."
- Pope Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, 2010

This is precisely what the sisters of the LCWR are attempting. In their mission statement, they declare that bringing the Good News, " to further the mission of the Gospel" to the "world today" is the animating nexus of their community. The Good News is often messy, because everyone who has been transformed by this "encounter" with Christ has, as part of her or his story, the uniqueness of the encounter. Different that these encounters may be, we seek community to share our stories and listen to the stories of others from the founding of the Church in the first century down to the present. It should not be surprising, then, that the meanings attached to these personal experiences diverge in many places--good for spiritual health, bad for institutional uniformity.

Jesus said I am the "living bread" because he established a relationship with his disciples that continues as "living bread", a nourishing relationship through the Holy Spirit. The unity, of which the Church speaks so much about, is borne from this living and dynamic relationship, and yields poorly to the box-building structures of institutional rule-making; unity is full of dissent, divergent understandings, and practices, and embraces everyone who claims a relationship with Christ within and without the institutional Church. The keeper of uniformity is doctrine; the keeper of unity is dialog. It takes greater faith to live to work with unity than simply abandoning the responsibility of communion by blind obedience to institutional decrees; one's conscience must be given the ability to speak truth to authority.

Dialogue is communion because it presupposes sharing rather than declaring. That isn't to say that there can be no doctrine or statements of definition, provided they are a product of this dialog, something the Church increasingly is seeing as a threat to its centralized authority. To be a living church is to allow the messiness of relationships and espouse the humility to seek a new direction when the old one no longer speaks Good News to the world. If we seek the eternal in human institutions, we worship a false god.

Jesus' admonition in today's gospel to "stop murmuring among yourselves" because "no one can come to me unless the Father, who sent me-draw[sic] him." He then goes on to cite Isaiah 54 "They shall all be taught by God." Our first and primary teacher in our spiritual journey is not the decrees of church, per se, but God, or more specifically, our living and dynamic relationship with God through Christ and the Holy Spirit that is tested not against a rigid authority, but against a sensus fidelium--honoring the experiences of the faith-filled as a foundation of expressing what we believe and understand to be true. When Church doctrine no longer speaks to the faithful, it becomes bread with bleached flour, void of sustaining nutrition, not the Bread of Life from which one may eat and never go hungry.

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

 

More than Enough

For the next five Sundays, including today, in our reading from the Gospel of John, we will explore what Jesus means by declaring that he is the “Bread of Life”.

We begin with Jesus feeding the five thousand in John 6:1-15 and end with John 6:60-69 and some of Jesus’ followers leaving because they could not accept his teachings about who he was. Today, and in the four succeeding Sundays, we are asked to reflect on our hunger for righteousness and how it is unlike any other longing we have; in fact, it is the only longing we cannot satisfy ourselves.

We begin this series with hungry people, a lot of hungry people—-five thousand according to the gospel, but, of course, that is only counting the men! 

Our reading from 2 Kings also involves feeding a hungry crowd though only two percent of the crowd Jesus faced. Two very important elements connect the two stories: signs and abundance.  In both stories, the events were considered “signs”, or markers that pointed towards a new existence. For Elisha, the sign wasn’t entirely clear: amidst famine, God provides—-God as a refuge in times of trouble. Samira, the place of Elisha’s “sign” was currently experiencing a famine, and the barley loaves set before the prophet Elisha became the blessing not only to be sufficient but to be a sign of God’s abundance in the face of famine.

Likewise in today’s gospel, Jesus is faced with the doubt of his claim that what was brought before him would be sufficient to feed the hungry crowd (this time, five thousand—at least). Again, what was considered insufficient was not only sufficient but an abundance as evidenced by leftovers. In fact, there were more leftovers than the original number of loaves and fishes: “twelve wicker baskets of fragments”. The leftovers symbolized the Twelve as Jesus’ core disciple retinue, but also the link to the twelve “remnant” tribes of Israel, ten of whom have been lost.

The people of Israel themselves are signs of God’s abundance, and though small in the scale of the people of the world, more than sufficient for “feeding” the world and announcing God in their midst.

But, like so many times in Jesus’ ministry, he is mistaken as the Messiah/king who will drive out the Romans and usher in a new kingdom of righteousness with Israel’s greatness once again established and God’s blessing upon them. Today’s gospel ends with Jesus retreating into solitude. He needed time to regroup and realized that a great deal of further instruction was necessary because his “sign” was woefully misinterpreted.

The expectation of God’s abundance often translates into earthly wealth and power. Entire “prosperity gospel” themes are broadcast to hundreds of thousands of hungry people. But the sad truth of these distortions of Jesus’ message is that the food of material wealth and power has no spiritual nutrition; it's all empty calories. If you are hungry for power and money, then Christianity offers you nothing. If you hunger and thirst for righteousness, then pull up a seat at the table.

God’s bread feeds the truly hungry with food that will satisfy humanity’s deepest longing. As we will see as we progress through the sixth chapter of John, Jesus returns and opens us this mystery of being the Bread of Life.

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

 Ordained Ministry: Sufficient Grace

"Because our value is a gift, we don't have to prove ourselves, only to express ourselves, and what a world of difference there is between proving ourselves and expressing ourselves"--William Sloane Coffin, Credo

Jesus utters that famous line in Mark today: "A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house".  It is a bitter pronouncement, tinged with frustration.  It is remarkable that the author of Mark observes "So he was not able to perform any mighty deed there, apart from curing a few sick people . . . ."  Who wouldn't consider any healing a "mighty deed"?  A closer inspection of the gospel doesn't reveal Jesus' inability to heal, but his inability to bring people to faith in spite of the healing.  The incredulous response Jesus received was because he was a local boy.  Somehow, imagining someone we know well being spiritually advanced is difficult.  We don't do well seeing the extraordinary spring from the ordinary, but Jesus' birth and the arc of his life were spent revealing to the less-than-ordinary, the extraordinary.  Jesus' amazement at his hometown community's lack of faith leads him to appoint twelve disciples to go in pairs to extend his ministry.  It is a crucial transition in Jesus' ministry from being the sole font of healing and wisdom to establishing a community of healers and preachers. 

Paul's confession of being "content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints" could have come from the mouth of Christ just as easily.  One of the huge traps of the spiritual life for preachers, teachers, and priests is the "messiah complex"--the belief that we are God's greatest conduit for spiritual transmission.  This gospel reminds me well of even Jesus had to confront failure and lack of faith.  His response, however, is telling.  Instead of simply throwing up his hands and leaving, he moves away from himself to entrusting the mission to those closest to him.

People come to faith experiences with remarkable variety, but they almost always involve other, non-ordained people.  Relying on church leaders, ministers or priests to impart faith is a losing proposition.  At best, we plant seeds and touch people with God's grace-filled love at vulnerable times in their lives, but this is not the exclusive territory of church ministers.  Everyone is called to this ministry.  People may come to me for confession, but frequently they seek the religious brother or other non-ordained people to seek God's presence in a less formal way.  Being ordained keeps one occupied with church finances, organizing liturgies, and administrative tasks, such that it is easy to forget that our first responsibility is to nurture our relationship with God.  Henry Nouwen, a wonderful source of wisdom for ordained clergy, wrote that "in order to be of service to others, we have to die to them; that is, we have to give up measuring our meaning and value with the yardstick of others"(The Way of the Heart).

The drive to be a success in the religious life is more pernicious than "secular" life.  Nouwen's "yardstick" is the size of one's congregation, the number of books, speaking engagements, and theological degrees.  The measure of holiness can easily become the measure of what common society values; but social value is earned, fought for, and then displayed.  Spiritual value, or worth, springs from faith, the awareness of our value to God.  William Sloane Coffin, the wonderfully gifted preacher, wrote that "God's love doesn't seek value, it creates value.  It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value.  Our value is our gift, not an achievement" (Credo).