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 commanded 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?

Pentecost

 

The Language of the Holy Spirit

". . . they were confused because each one heard them speaking in his own language."

The first action at Pentecost involved the paradox of a single group of men from a particular region speaking so that others, who spoke many other languages, heard them in their own language.  Perhaps the message was one of universal salvation.  Scripture simply says the Spirit "... enabled them to proclaim...  the mighty acts of God." What could be mightier than the gathering of all nations to the loving call of God?

Too often, the call one hears in one's own language can lead one to assume God's call is exclusive to him or herself, that the others couldn't have got it right because God is speaking so personally to me! But the language of the Holy Spirit, which is heard in all languages, is the language of the Cross and the Empty Tomb.  The language of the Holy Spirit is loving sacrifice and triumphing over death.

The Spirit's long embrace of love is "as a flame of fire."  This simile suggests it is a passionate, dynamic, and living presence.  Candles, "eternal flames" of remembrance, and the sanctuary lamp all mirror the reality of a living, present God.  Each of us, born like an unlit candle, becomes light with God's touch at baptism and is the sustaining presence that burns brightly in dark places where light is sorely needed.  As Jesus proclaimed, "I am the light of the world"(John 8:12), so too we are called to live as "Children of the light"(Ephesians 5:8-19). This light, as St. Paul reminds us takes the form of the many and various gifts of the Holy Spirit; yet, 

As a body is one, though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ. For in one Spirit, we were all baptized into one body,
whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given to drink of one Spirit. (1Cor.12:12-13)

And in "this one body," we work out our salvation, light's gift of God.  Too often, diversity is viewed with suspicion by the institutional church and within Christian denominations.  Instead of looking at one another with a sense of mystery and awe at the diverse workings of the Holy Spirit, we assume error because of the difference.  Very often, this difference is mistaken as disunity; what, in fact, it is is a lack of uniformity.  What living system exhibits uniformity?  When, then, is the difference error?  The Spirit is also our teacher, and what is not of God will always manifest itself as a force pulling people away from the peace, love, and hope of Christ.  St. Paul writing to the Galatians (Gal.5:22) declares: "...the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, and self-control. Against such things, there is no law.”  

 In 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13, after discussing the “many gifts, one Spirit,” Paul writes elegantly of the primacy of love as evidence of the Spirit’s presence:

If I speak in the tongues^[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. ² If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge. If I have a faith that can move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. ³ If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,^[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing....Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.¹³ And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Love is the language of the Holy Spirit and the sure sign of God’s dwelling and the source of our comfort, instruction, and salvation.

The Sixth Sunday of Easter

 

 

Keeping Our Word

Jesus’ farewell address has the curious phrase, “Whoever loves me will keep my word” (Jn. 14:23).  We all understand how to keep our word, but how is it that Jesus asks us to keep it? In the Gospel of John, Jesus is the Word, in Greek, the Logos of God.  The Son in the Trinity is the Word of God; the Son proceeds from the Father as God’s Word, his expression of perfect love for all creation.  Just as words that come from us reveal ourselves to the world, so the Word (Jesus) proceeded from God the Father as a revelation of God’s true nature.

Keeping Jesus’ word is nurturing God’s promise of salvation that Jesus’ life embodied as a sign of grace, God’s great love for His creation in general, and humanity in particular. The world can know God most intimately through Jesus the Christ, though God reveals Himself in many other ways and to many other people; however, our faith tells us God’s preeminent and perfect revelation of Himself is through Jesus.

The second part of today’s gospel anticipates the gift of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.  Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as the Advocate or someone who acts on another’s behalf.  The Spirit, then, is how we can keep Jesus’ word to us and God’s Word to humanity.  Jesus’ reference to peace in declaring, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.”  The world offers us a sense of peace that can only be temporary; the peace of Christ is eternal peace, but it isn’t a peace that leaves us in a type of protective spiritual bubble that inoculates us from the difficulties of life.  The Reverend A.J. Muste, a famous American clergyman who preached peace, said, "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way."  

 We stand upon the foundation of peace that allows us to face the world in all its chaos and turmoil because keeping Christ’s peace means venturing into a violent and broken world with Good News when all around us is falling apart.  William Blake’s famous line from “The Second Coming,” “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” is the bad news of the peace the world gives.  The peace of Christ is the center that holds for eternity and extends out into the world, and draws everyone in like foundlings brought from a storm into a warm, protective, loving home. Alleluia, Christ is risen!

Fifth Sunday of Easter

 

Greater Works than Jesus' Miracles

In today's gospel from John (14:1-12), Jesus boldly proclaims: "Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones than these, because I am going to the Father." After turning water into wine, feeding thousands from five loaves and two fish, healing lepers, the deaf, the blind, the lame, and even after raising the dead, the Apostles must have been thinking this is another one of his exaggeration parables, But it wasn't.

These great miracles of Jesus were signs of the Kingdom, but they were not the Kingdom. The signs announced the arrival of the Kingdom, which wasn't a place but a person: Jesus. Jesus, in saying he was the Way was proclaiming that all those miracles, all those signs, were pointing to him because "heaven" isn't a place, it's an existence of persons, the Holy Trinity, of which Jesus is the Way.

How then are we, who are left behind, hugging ourselves in fear, able to do greater works than Jesus? Because what Jesus leaves with us is the peace of God's spirit, which is the essence of holiness, or completion. We no longer need to see God's face and live because, through the Holy Spirit, we live as the face of God through Christ to the world. Following Christ means becoming Christ through our baptism and sacramental life of the Church. The "greater works," then, are the works of the Spirit. Raising the dead may be impressive, and a sign of the divine, but through Christ, we offer eternal life, and resurrection rather than resuscitation; Lazarus eventually died for good.

St. Thomas Aquinas suggests wrote in his commentary on John

"...for the justification of the wicked is a greater work than the creation of heaven and earth. For the justification of the wicked, considered in itself, continues forever...But the heavens and the earth will pass away..."

We don't need to "go to heaven" to see God's face; we have a divine mission to become the face of God through Christ's Way as we walk together as church.

Easter Sunday of the Lord's Resurrection

 

From Death to Life

 

The older I get, the less concerned I am about the historical facts of my faith.  Don't get me wrong, if I could know some historical fact regarding the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, I'd jump at the opportunity; it's more a matter of accepting the inherent limitations of living a life of faith regarding the type of knowledge faith reveals.  I see so many folks trading their faith for a type of intellectual dishonesty that makes bizarre claims in an attempt to find empirical backing for what they claim to already believe.  Based on biblical passages, Harold Camping calculated the exact time for Christ’s return. For Harold, this wasn’t faith but empirical truth. He convinced others.  The time came and went.  Nothing.  Another date was set; his calculations were a bit off the first time.  The time came and went.  Nothing.  Finally, Camping admitted he got the whole thing wrong and will no longer make any further predictions.  Humiliated, alone, and pilloried in the press, Harold Camping takes his first step towards resurrection: crucifixion.  

There is no other way to resurrection than through crucifixion.  This is the substance of my faith when I proclaim each Sunday, "He was crucified, died, and buried.  On the third day, he rose again by the scriptures." 

Crucifixion forces our hand to break our plans for an orderly and carefully controlled life and puts us at the feet of the cross or on it.  We will likely never have empirical, historical evidence of Jesus’ bodily resurrection; this is faith. Still, one thing is eminently probable: Jesus was killed on the cross by Roman and religious authorities who were threatened by the instability of challenged metaphors: Jesus said he was a king, and Jesus said he was the Messiah.  The only possible way Jesus could walk to the cross was a faith born not in what would come after but in the sustaining relationship of love he had with the Father.  Jesus' fear and feeling of dejection in murmuring the 22nd Psalm, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me," ends with the 31st Psalm: "Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit."  

The Resurrection is what happened after.  The disciples witnessed it according to the accounts of Scripture.  But my faith finds its foundation in the resurrections I've experienced in others and in myself that have their origin in The Resurrection. 

Easter is the "difficult birth" of a faith borne on the cross of one who died two thousand years ago and claimed to be a king and Messiah. Still, the millions of new lives hewn from the roughness of the Cross are witness to a deeper and more profound truth than an historical event, and the Resurrection has lived long after Jesus walked the earth.