Pentecost

The Spirit of Truth

 

The famous line at Jesus’ trial from Pilate: “What is truth?” reveals the skepticism of the Romans, and the West in general, at being able to arrive at one unified Truth.  Jesus, however, did not proclaim to know the truth; he declared that he was the truth.

In today’s gospel , Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of truth, which proceeds from the Father.  In our Creed, we retain the original form that declares that the Spirit proceeds from the Father without the later addition of “and the Son”, called the filioque in Latin.  One of the issues that divided the Church in the 11th century was over the Roman church unilaterally changing the Creed to include the phrase “and the Son” ; the East refused to accept this change without a council, and this refusal has been a source of division between eastern and western Christianity since then.  We get our name “Old Catholic” because we retain the original expression of the creed out of a desire to reunite ourselves with the original, undivided  Church.  Using the Western rites and rituals, we see our mission as one of declaring the unity that was lost and inviting both the Eastern churches and the Western churches to  find more common ground and recover the original meaning of the term “catholic”, universal.  Some have suggested the compromise (which I think is the most accurate rendition) of changing “and the Son” to “through the Son”.  We can only hope that one day such a healing compromise will help close the wounds of division.

Unity is not realized through uniformity, though, and runs against the essential truth of how we experience our world.  Our unity springs from the truth of Christ’s mission to bring everyone into God’s loving embrace through the common pursuit of the Spirit’s call.  We can heal the divisions in our communities by not insisting on everyone doing the same thing the same way, and by recognizing the “different workings, but the same God” as Paul puts it in today’s reading.

The freedom of the Truth springs from this awareness, and where this is not recognized, community builds upon the sands of uniformity and exclusivity.  Following Christ is becoming more and more like Christ each day.  It is conforming our lives to a vision we all share while celebrating the diversity of gifts we bring to help realize that vision.  The Spirit’s truth is lived, not simply contemplated; and it is in this living the Truth that  the Truth is revealed to the world.

Third Sunday of Easter

"Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones
as you can see I have."  Jesus,  Luke 24

Resurrection and Woundedness


It was important in the early Church that the account of Jesus' resurrection not become a "ghost story".  Some followers of Christ could not reconcile the divinity of Christ with his humanity, and came to the conclusion that Jesus, being divine, could not have truly suffered on the cross; a wounded God is much more difficult to worship.  Luke writes in the tradition of Christians who share the conviction, handed down by the Apostles, that Christ's humanity and suffering did not detract from his divinity.

When Jesus invites his Apostles to touch his wounds, and then to give him some cooked fish to eat, his intent was clear: "It is I myself".  During Good Friday, we venerated the Cross and meditated on the wounds of Christ as those wounds were the sins of humanity being put upon Christ.  Today we see Jesus, the resurrected Christ, but we also see his wounds.  Jesus was resurrected with his wounds.

Being resurrected doesn't mean we jettison our wounds, or, as Hamlet put it "shuffle off our mortal coil"; the resurrection has transformed our wounds, not removed them.  We carry our wounds through our baptism into our new life in Christ, and we often take on new wounds.  What is markedly different, though, is as Christians we live with our wounds visible, proof our our resurrection.  We can share the painful wounds we've received because we live in a new body, the body of Christ.  Love has conquered death, our wounds are no longer harbingers of death, but proof we have not died, but that we live.

There is that wonderful anecdote of a man trapped in a deep well and the encounter with people who pass the well that cannot help him.  Eventually, a man jumps into the well as his gesture of rescue only to be met with the contempt of the man trapped in the well. "Why did you jump down here to save me?  Now we are both trapped!"  His rescuer smiled: "I've been down here before.  I can show you the way out."

In a sense, our wounds when not hidden, become the agent of connection with a wounded world.  The bumper sticker "Not Perfect, Just Forgiven" comes to mind.  Our wounds makes us human, the freedom from having our woundedness lead us into despair, hate, anger, greed, etc.. is our release from death--our resurrection with the risen Christ.  Chuck Coleson's prison ministry, which has led so many to not let their wounds define them, had its genesis in the wounds of his ambition and lust for power.

What being resurrected means for us is living with the confidence that love overcomes death.  That our wounds present in our new life in Christ become a source of great hope for whom woundedness has led to death.  Like Christ, we can live a life that removes the defensive imperative to cover our wounds and move to dominate, to control and accumulate wealth.  Our life in Christ shows the world another way, the way of Jesus displaying his wounds to his followers as the beginning of their spiritual journey as people of the resurrection. 

The Resurrection of The Lord

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; its 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 an empirical backing to what they claim to already believe.  Harold Camping comes to mind, as do the like-minded who, based on this man's "mathematical" calculations, predicted the end of the world and the parousia on a specific date.  The time came and went.  Nothing.  Another date was set; it seems 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 is no longer going to make any further predictions.  Humiliated, alone, 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 in accordance with the scriptures."

Crucifixion forces our hand, breaks 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 know factually if Jesus was bodily raised from the dead, but one thing is eminently possible: 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 borne 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 what my faith finds its foundation upon are the resurrections I've experienced in others and in myself that have their origin in The Resurrection. This yolking of death with birth is an incredibly rich source of imaginative literature and art. Easter is the "difficult birth" of a faith borne on the cross of a two-thousand year old man who claimed to be a king and Messiah; but the millions of new lives hewn from the roughness of the Cross is witness to a deeper and more profound truth than an historical event, and the Resurrection has lived long after Jesus walked the earth.

Good Friday of the Lord's Passion

Faith: FAIL. God Punished.

Good Friday is when we recall that even Jesus' closest disciples fled into the night and sought refuge away from the Roman and Temple authorities for fear that they, too would be arrested; faith: FAIL. Today is a day we move deeply into meditating on our need to tell God, as Jesus, hanging on the cross to pull off another miracle, save yourself and save us! No? We’re out of here! I’m not going to end up like that!!

Peter’s famous denial three times echoing Jesus’ earlier query, also three times: “Do you love me, Peter?” Peter responded then: “You know that I love you!” Now, fearful of his life, he replies “I know nothing of this man you refer to!” This is the disciple the Church was founded on. Peter, the so-called “Rock” by Jesus, crumbles into sand at the crucifixion.

The cross is a spectacle of human folly, failure and faithlessness. Yet, despite this, as T.S. Eliot wrote “We call this Friday good.”

Its goodness lies in God’s total submission of his love for humanity in the person of Jesus. It is the goodness inherent when we willing suffer for another person, perhaps a stranger, or even an enemy. Today, we contemplate how we respond to being asked to suffer for another, or whether or not suffering (of ourselves or another) sends us scurrying into the night, renouncing God because we suffer.

“How could God allow such suffering ?” many ask and imply this is the cardinal weakness of Christianity. Perhaps the better question is “Why would God be willing to enter into our world of suffering?” The mightiness of God isn’t a lifeboat dropping out of the sky for survivors floating in a tempest; it is God dropping into the water next to us to show us the way to dry land.

God with us, “Emmanuel”, means God suffering for and with us. God does not want to “save” us as much as he wants to be with us. We want to be “saved”, just as Jesus wanted to escape suffering; its only natural. No one suggests that to follow Jesus we should seek out suffering, but rather following Jesus we will enter the suffering of a suffering world with a resounding affirmation: “Yes” to being with the poor and hopeless, the excluded, imprisoned, tortured, and sick. “Yes” to the suffering of the world, and all its messiness and dysfunction. The cross’ affirmation is entering into the heart of the suffering world and walking with those who suffer to find God calling us into his arms stretched out onto the cross, now embracing us in all of our horror and pain, failure and humiliation. Today we come to the cross to be embraced by Jesus’ crucifixion in order to be resurrected with the Christ.

Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord

Gospel Procession: Mark 11:1-10
First Reading: Isaiah 50:4-7
Responsorial: Psalms 22:8-9, 17-18, 19-20, 23-24
Second Reading: Philippians 2:6-11
Gospel: Mark 14:1-15:4-71

April's Fool

Passion.  The word evokes reckless adventure, impulsive romance, gestures too big to fulfill, and  the brief but intense relationship of Romeo and Juliet.  This word places Jesus in the tradition of the foolish romantics—an itinerant preacher from the margins schooled by his radical cousin (John the Baptist) and led to make one final, dramatic gesture to get his message out: die as a martyr.  But Jesus’ death was unlike the death of many of the martyred faithful to come.  His death wasn’t for a cause, but a relationship.  You see, God fell hopelessly in love with humanity and inserted Himself to be with his own creation to deliver this message of healing, love and forgiveness.  God’s power isn’t the power of Zeus with lightening-bolts from the heavens, but God’s message is now simply “Return; I love you”. 

Throughout Holy Scripture, God has struggled and failed many times, just as His people have.  It has been an on-and-off-again cosmic love story between the Creator and His creation since humanity was first created and was given a choice not to love God.  This dance between Creator and created culminated in His great and final act of love: self-sacrifice on the cross.

Today’s gospel reading recounts this journey to the cross with Jesus as God leading the way, experiencing the pain and abandonment of His creation, the physical pain of a gruesome, ignominious death, giving into the abyss of his own uncreated end---all for love.  But in this remarkable journey, he found a few responding with courage: Simon of Cyrene shared some in your suffering, the women who gathered at the food of the cross and stayed there long after the men had scattered for fear of being arrested, the felon who believed because he, of all people, responded to the suffering of an innocent man, and finally the Roman centurion who saw in this suffering man God’s love.  This is pretty intense stuff and many would feel much better with “April Fools!”.  Rather than struggling to believe, many struggle to disbelieve because God’s affirmation of his creation, of saying “yes” to the cross, is the ultimate folly for a world seeking safety over communion.  God as Jesus, crucified, dead and buried.  Stay tuned.    

Fifth Sunday in Lent

The Way of the Heart
Jeremiah is a prophet for God's people in exile.  They broke the covenant of the Law established in the exodus from Egypt.  In short, they had lost that intimacy of God taking them "by the hand to lead them forth from Egypt".  As famous as Jeremiah is for his prophetic message of doom, it is today's reading from the prophet which reveals God's desire for a new covenant, one that will no longer be subject to the difficulties of written text as the sole foundation of a relationship with His people.  Now God announces to Jeremiah "I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts . . . . No longer will they have a need to teach their friends and relatives how to know the Lord."  God's placement of this law "within" prefigures the presence of the Holy Spirit which is the dynamic, existential element of our faith that makes us a people first and foremost on a journey of the heart rather than the head.  As arduous and demanding as the exiles of Egypt and Babylon were, and the subsequent exodus back into the Promised Land, the Christ Event reveals through the journey to the cross as the greatest exodus of them all.


William Sloan Coffin, a pastor for years at the Riverside Church in New York, expressed this notion so well when he wrote "The longest, most arduous trip in the world is often the journey from the head to the heart.  Until that round trip is completed, we remain at war with ourselves.  And, of course, those at war with themselves are apt to make casualties of others, including friends and loved ones".


The authority of the priests, Temple, and God's precepts written in stone was not enough to sustain a relationship with God.  The revelation of Jeremiah's proclamation of a new overture of intimacy did not do away with priests, Temple, and the written Law; but what was added was a sense of God that transcended text, Temple, and priests.

Christ's presence as the non-Levitical high priest becomes that complement to the Law and Prophets.  For Christ proclaimed he did not come to abolish the Law and Prophets, but to fulfill them (Matt. 5:17).  The high priestly function of the Christ, in the letter to the Hebrews, is to suggest that Christ's sacrifice was himself in an act of pure love.  This sense of God's atonement, developed so well by Abelard in the 11th Century, expresses Christ's mission to win hearts by an example of reconciling love.  This pivotal shift from a primarily substitutionary atonement (God sacrificed Christ to atone for humanity's sins) to exemplary ("Come and follow me") moves us from simply another Temple sacrifice, albeit grand in scale, to a personal journey that involves sacrifice for all true followers of Jesus as the Christ.


The followers of Christ before the term "Christian" was coined, as people of "the way".  Early on, there was a sense that being a disciple was more than a function of intellectual assent, that being a follower of Christ involved a process, the give-and-take of a relationship with oneself, God, and a community of like-minded pilgrims.  Fulfillment of the Law now is fulfilled in its entirely in our relationship with God made possible by Christ's outpouring of God's love on the cross.  Stony hearts can read and follow directions, but hearts of flesh and blood seek communion.  Our Lenten journey is especially focused on the cross because it reveals so well the humanity of God in Christ, the spectacular overture of our God to win our hearts.

Fourth Sunday in Lent

Reading 1: 2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23
Responsorial: Psalms 137:1-2, 3, 4-5, 6
Reading 2: Ephesians 2:4-10
Gospel: John 3:14-21

Seeing is Believing

The holding up of the serpent in the desert referred to in today’s gospel is the story from Exodus when God’s people were grumbling and forgot God’s mercy in their deliverance, so God sent poisonous snakes to get their attention.  The people repented and God had Moses fashion a bronze serpent and put it on a poll, and everyone who gazed upon the serpent were healed.  Jesus uses this allusion to Exodus to suggest that he will be “raised up”, both in the sense of being elevated on the cross, and resurrected after the crucifixion.  This sense of salvation being linked to setting eyes on the cross is suggests the power of conversion is linked to witnessing the crucifixion and resurrection.

            It is interesting to note that King David, a few centuries later, had Moses’ bronze serpent destroyed because people turned it into an idol; they could not get around mistaking the object for what lay behind the object.  Indeed at the heart of our looking at the cross, it isn’t any particular cross of Christ crucified we look at but what it represents, the one, holy cross of Christ; a man and God who bore our sins; we can only see the salvation of the cross if we can see beyond the image of Christ and see the sins borne by God as Jesus on the cross.  These sins become visible only to the one who has repented, has turned so he or she can face the cross and live.  An unrepentant sinner only sees sheer foolishness; any sound-thinking god would have simply started over this ill-conceived experiment and leave out free will this time. 

            Last week in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians the apostle declares “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God”(1Cor.1:18).  Likewise, Jesus in today’s gospel says “...whoever does not believe has already been condemned”.  This condemnation does not come from God, but from the ineffectiveness of what they worship that ultimately fails to offer salvation. The cross of Christ can’t save one who can’t see their sins in the wounds of Christ, cannot see how their sins participate in wounding a wider world and, ultimately God. Sin is never private, it is always communal because we live in a tissue of social relationships and are interconnected in this kind of cause-and –effect dance more now than ever before in the world’s history.  You might not be able to grasp how your sins wound God, but you can, if you care to look, see how sin wounds the one whom you have offended, and that person is, for you, Christ. That is why the Cross is such a powerful devotion for the faithful; it calls us to contemplate the wider effects of our sin, sin that can pierce the very heart of God.  In our repentance, God heals those wounds and Christ’s Cross becomes the Crown of Easter.