Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Anyone who gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ, amen, I say to you, will not lose his reward."---Jesus  The Gospel of Mark

Thirst Slakers,  Children, and Prophets

The gospel reading in Mark unites two completely different events and renders a fascinating connection.  The first excerpt, or pericope, is Jesus reproving John for preventing a man who is not Jesus' disciple from casting out demons by declaring "...whoever is not against us is for us."  The second pericope is taken from the context of warning his disciples not to scandalize children (the pais), or "little ones."  By linking these two passages together, Mark gives the moral force of punishment for those who lead astray the least and last (those in need of healing) with the "outsider" exorcist.  Remember last week when I told you that the word for child and servant was the same?  Today, we get an explicit linking between the two.

The Old Testament scripture is also about cautioning against limiting God's work to only "approved" sources.  Moses remonstrates Joshua of Nun for complaining that there were two outside of God's chosen seventy elders who were prophesying (Eldad and Medad).  Moses asks, "Are you jealous for my sake?  Would that all the people of the Lord were prophets.  Would that the Lord might bestow his spirit on them all!"

These readings suggest quite clearly that the true authority does not reside in human institutions as such, but in what is done in God's name.  Gospel authority is doing the will of God.  Period.

How does one, then, discern who is working in God's name?

Paul helps us with recognizing the "fruits of the Spirit" in " "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control."(Gal.5:22-23).  In a sense, when you recognize goodness, there God's Spirit is at work.  The other element besides the work is time.  Are these works true and good over time.  The ruse never lasts; the wolf must eventually shed its sheep's clothing to breathe.

At the conclusion of all the Eucharistic prayers, the priest declares "...from whom all good things come." God is not only the source of all that is good, but God is also perfect goodness in essence.  Much of what is good is apparent, but finding the Resurrection looking at the Cross can be a bit more difficult.  Again, time reveals all.  Given enough time, the Cross becomes the Resurrection.  How long do we wait?  How deep is your faith?

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 address 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, servant/children, who, as Tugwell has written, are not valued by Jesus for their innocence, but for their vulnerability.  They receive everything as gift.

Imagine the transformation from a church of control and power to 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.

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

"Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,
take up his cross, and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake
and that of the gospel will save it."

The "Tao" of Christianity

A former Jesuit friend of mine recently drew my attention to the idea that when Jesus spoke about taking up one's cross, he probably wasn't referring to the cross of crucifixion, but about the more common cruciform image of the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, tao. He combined this with another observation: Jesus' reference to Peter being evil was better understood in the Hebrew understanding of "obstacle" rather than "source of malicious intent".  The result was a fascinating homily.

The significance of the the letter tao for the Jews of Jesus' time was its symbolic suggestion of the end, the completeness of something. Taking up one's cross, then, could broadly suggest following Jesus completely, from alef (the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet) to tao.

Jesus' rebuke of Peter as being an obstacle, rather than evil incarnate, gives us a clearer picture of what Jesus was trying to teach.  After Peter drew Jesus aside, Jesus looked back to see the disciples to notice Peter standing in front of him, an out of place position for a disciple, a "follower".  Jesus then rebukes Peter by saying, in essence, "Get out of my way and follow me.  To be a true disciple is the commitment to follow me completely and not presume to lead me."

Most Christians will not die for their faith, but in some parts of the world, such martyrdom is very real and not a remote possibility.  For us, blessed with the safety of our nation to worship God as we see fit, we "lose" our life in the daily sacrifices to love.  The journey to the cross is always love, sacrificial love.  The tao cross reminds us that the nature of our love is being a disciple completely, following where the Spirit takes us.  Ours, then, is a sacrifice of our time, our ego, our comfort, for another.  Shouldering the Cross, is taking our commitment to its logical extreme of offering ourselves for others.

Jesus begins the gospel with the question: "Who do people say that I am ?" and quickly asks "Who do you say that I am ?"  The second question is our question.  We answer, as James suggests today, more in what we do than what we say.  Our faith is not an intellectual proposition, but a living faith, a faith of sacrificial love. 

To “believe” in Christ is not a propositional statement but an existential one. We, like Jesus’ disciples, must choose a way of life that follows Christ in imitation of how he engaged the world he found. We, like Jesus, must challenge hatred cloaked in pious orthodoxy, offer refuge for those the world has given up on, and treat our human brothers and sisters as a sacrament of God’s presence. We cannot, in good conscience, genuflect in front of the host as the body of Christ and continue to disrespect our brother and sister made in His image

At our confirmation, we publicly proclaimed our  faith.  Today, Jesus calls us to see this through to its completion in our answer to his question by living the answer to his question: "Who do you say to the world that I am ?"

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

"Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person;
but the things that come out from within are what defile."

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 common to hope for perfection.

It is this struggle to be perfect before God that the Jews turned to 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 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 being 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 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.

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 dialogue.  It takes greater faith to live working 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 dialogue, something the Church increasingly is seeing as a threat to its centralized authority.  To be a living church, is to allow the messiness of relationship 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 Pentacost

Bread of Life & Leftovers

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 Elisha 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.

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

The Good Shepherd

As the metaphor goes, we are the sheep, Christ is our shepherd.  Since the resurrection and ascension, those following in the tradition of the Apostles are the appointed shepherds and are supposed to be "good".  What we find, however, is corruption of every kind, with islands of hope; in short, we are not so much focused today on "separating the sheep from the goats" as the good shepherds from the malevolent ones.  We should also be challenged to move beyond our hierarchical concept of the shepherd as found in the Church and look for shepherds among the sheep.  Sheep make excellent shepherds.

Jesus calling to be a shepherd was in response to his "pity", but the translation loses the deeper sense of empathy Jesus feels for the crowd's need. The crowds of Jesus' time, like ours, represent people hungry for hope.  They hope for healing, hope for inclusion into God's kingdom, for the Shepherd who is there Lord who will provide for their needs, "from nothing I shall want".  In short, the expectation is that Jesus is the possibility of a better life.

The Gospel of Prosperity is a perversion of Jesus' good news, but people fill congregations to hope for a better life.  In our culture, a better life usually implies a life filled with more things and greater power.  Jesus' good news wasn't that you would get rich following him, or that one would become more powerful in society, but that there was a pathway to God's kingdom that he was walking and invited others to experience in his response to "come and see".

In Mark's gospel, this section serves as a transition between the return of the 12 from having been sent forth (last week's gospel reading) and the next section of Jesus feeding the 5,000.  It is plausible that some in the crowd had followed the disciples who had returned from their mission, people who wanted to meet Jesus and see, first hand, who this person was.  But the crowds were vast, the disciples tired from the mission, so Jesus invited them to "rest a while".  But people followed the progress of the boat and crowded the shore ahead of them.

Unlike the popular "Gospel of Prosperity", Jesus' call wasn't material empowerment, but his good news was that the Kingdom of God/Heaven was possible now, among those who seek it.  This was the core of Jesus' message.  Making Jesus relevant to the crowds who come to Christianity out of desperation (is there really any other way?) isn't a matter of telling them how wealthy and great everything is going to be, how powerful they all will become, how their stock investments will be fruitful after prayer; Jesus' relevancy is hidden in finding community and telling our stories, in sharing graces and, as Paul says, "Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn."  Salvation is here among us.  It isn't a beam of light from the cosmos; it is a journey of vulnerability and celebration.

Jesus' shepherding led people to shepherd; the sheep became shepherds.  Following the Good Shepherd gives us value not because we are excellent sheep, but because we are loved by our shepherd who is good.  From this love, we are called to shepherd one another, to respond to the need in our brother and sister, and to open the Kingdom to everyone.  The Good News is that you are loved; you count.