Fifth Sunday of Easter (April 29th, 2018)

The Church’s first scripture today is an excerpt from the New Testament Book entitled “Acts of the Apostles”.  The book of Acts is a continuation of the Gospel of Luke and whereas the Gospel of Luke presented the story of the Lord Jesus acting in the world and in the lives of his friends and followers in the body of his Incarnation, the book of Acts presents the Lord Jesus acting in the world and in the lives of his friends and followers in a new kind of body- the body of Christ which is the Church.

You see, the Church is not just a faith-based non-profit corporation or community center or institution.  The Church is both mystically and really the Body of Jesus living and acting in the world.  When we get that understanding of the Church right the profundity of our lives as Christians and the urgency of our mission as disciples becomes really and truly evident and real.

Now, in our scripture from Acts of the Apostles we hear of Saul, a convert to the Faith of the Church, who we learn is not a very popular fellow.  In fact, he is kind of a pariah, viewed with fear as derision by his fellow Christians.  Why is this?  Remember, Saul was a persecutor of the Church.  In fact, his efforts led to acts of violence and murder against Christians and so even in light of his remarkable conversion, folks are understandably angry with him and suspicious of his motives.

A Christian by the name of Barnabas acts as an advocate and friend of Saul and helps him to establish trust and to find his mission in the Church.  Saul will eventually take the name Paul and we know him as St. Paul and his testimony, through his letters, are known to us as holy scripture, reverenced as genuine witness to the faith of the Apostles.

Just as Barnabas guided Paul, so now Paul guides us still, each time we hear his words proclaimed.  In fact, in the great genealogy of the Church’s faith, our own faith can be traced back to that friendship of Barnabas and Paul.

The lesson?  No one comes to the faith alone and no one’s faith can be sustained for very long in isolation.  All of us are Christians because someone at some point brought us to the Lord Jesus and helped us to find our place in the Church.  Who is your Barnabas?  What Barnabas did for Paul should not be understood by us as a task for religious professionals or Church bureaucrats, it is the common and shared mission of all the baptized, of all believers.

The Church grows and flourishes, not simply as a result of annual collections, but because Christians are willing to extend to others the invitation to know Jesus Christ in the Church and to share with them the Church’s unique way of life.

If Christians are unwilling or unable to do this, then no pastoral plan, mission statement or capital campaign can save the Church from decadence and decay.  Always remember, in the beginning there were none of the things that we have come to rely on to grow and support the Church- there were no parishes or dioceses, there was no infrastructure or bureaucracy.  No one understood the Church as an expression of their ethnicity or culture.  Nothing about the Church was taken for granted.  What did the Church have?  Relationships.  Primarily a relationship with Jesus Christ, which expressed itself in their relationships with one another.

Those relationships were not closed, making the Church an exclusive club, but were open to others (open even to a person like Saul, who had hurt them so terribly!).  The Church grew because Christians were willing and in fact saw it as their mission to share the relationship they had with Christ and the Church with others.  That’s what grows the Church.

The Church’s second scripture for today is an excerpt from the First letter of John and in this text we hear testimony to the relationship of love to the commandments of God- in other words, love is not primarily or simply an emotion or a feeling, but an act of your will to do what is good, to do what God wants you to do.

What God wants us to do is to keep his commandments, and in this way, the First Letter of John insists, we learn what it truly is to love.

The relationship between love and the commandments of God is contrary to much of what our culture presents as love- love is understood primarily as an emotion or an intuition to follow one’s heart, which means to do what is emotionally satisfying.  The commandments of God are many times presented as a foil to this quest, inhibiting, rather than facilitating love.

But the sense and sensibility of the Scriptures, insists that true love is found in the commandments of God and that love is not an emotion, but an act of our will in which we seek to do what God asks us to do.  What God asks us to do is not left shrouded in mystery, but it is expressed in his commandments and his commandments are not abstract, but concrete, not theoretical, but practical.  Not difficult to understand, but at times hard to do.

If you want a thick description of what this looks like concretely, look into what are called the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, for in these you can discern the kind of love that emerges when we seek a way of life ordered and directed by the commandments of God.

And there is the lesson: true love, real love, happens only in relation to the commandments of God.

Finally, in his Gospel, the Lord Jesus testifies that his relationship with us is like that of a vine to branches.  In other words, he is the source of the nourishment that enables us to flourish and grow.  The fruit of our vines are works of holiness, virtue and love, from which our testimony to Christ becomes credible and from this testimony, the Church thrives and expands.

Our lives as Christians are not self-sustained or self-directed.  Being a Christian is not an act of self-expression.  Instead, to be a Christian is to live in relationship with Jesus Christ and this relationship is integral and necessary to who we are and to our unique way of life.

Our relationship with Jesus Christ is not merely a matter or ideas or emotions, but of being connected in concrete, tangible ways with Christ.  This is what the Sacraments are for us.  This is what the Mass is all about.  This is what service to the needs of our neighbors and to the poor is all about.  Sacraments are not just cultural expressions, but expressions of Christ’s relationship to us.  The Mass is not just an expression of the community’s values, but an expression of Christ’s relationship with us.  The opportunity to love and serve our neighbors or the poor is not just good citizenship or volunteerism, but a way of loving and serving Christ.

When the Sacraments become only expressions of culture, the Mass merely community self-expression and service merely volunteerism, then we have become like branches detached from the vine, and the faith, indeed the Church, will wither away and die.

Being a Christian is being in relationship with Jesus Christ and being in relationship with Jesus Christ is being in relationship with his Church.

This, friends, expresses the “golden thread” that is tying our scriptures for today together.  Indeed, it is the “golden thread” that connects all Christians together.

We are not as Christians in relationship to an ideal or a culture or an obligation, but to a living divine person, who for the sake of his love for us, accepted a human nature like our own, and lived a real, human life.  This living divine person has given himself the name Jesus and makes his presence known to us through his Church.

All this means that we are not exiles in this world, nor are we alone.  God is not an indifferent cosmic force, but a living person who seeks to meet us face to face and in Jesus Christ calls us his friends.  He is with us in this world, even now, and our relationship with him gives our lives meaning and purpose.  In the Sacraments of the Church we encounter him, and that encounter changes us, makes us different.  Death does not sever our relationship with him, but has in fact, been transformed by Christ as the means to take us to him.

A relationship with Jesus Christ is what being a Christian is about and if we don’t think it is, if we don’t live like it is, then we are missing the point.

Fourth Sunday of Easter (April 22nd, 2018)

The Church’s Gospel for today presents the Lord Jesus’ testimony to his identity and mission- who he is and what has he come to accomplish.

Christ the Lord tells us that he is the good shepherd.

What does this mean?

For many, the image of Christ the Shepherd evokes the image of green rolling pastures and a quiet bucolic countryside, free of care and worries. Christ is the Lord of a Christianized version of the Elysium fields, the master of a retreat and respite from the troubles of life, the gentle presider over a safe space of comfort and security. Such musings are coupled with an understanding of the Lord Jesus that is entirely meek and mild, very much like the lambs over which he watches.

However attractive this image of Christ the Shepherd is to us, it fails to capture the biblical imagery, which the Lord Jesus is calling forth in today’s scripture from the Gospel of John.

The image of a shepherd is, biblically speaking, coded language, it’s a metaphor, not simply for the gentle presider of a care free respite from the troubles of life, but for the leadership of the Israelites- the priests, prophets and especially the kings, who had a divine mandate to lead the Israelites along the paths of fidelity to God and righteousness in their daily lives. The ideal of the Good Shepherd was often contrasted with the reality of bad shepherds- the priests, prophets and kings of the Israelites repeatedly missed the mark, endangering the flock and leading the people into dark and dangerous situations.

Thus, then, we hear in the testimony of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah (Chapter 3) that Lord will act to give Israel good shepherds, but more than this, that he will become the Good Shepherd- no longer will the Israelites languish under thrall of wicked or incompetent kings, false prophets, and double-dealing priests, but God will come himself and lead his people as priest, prophet and king. The Lord will be their shepherd and they the people “shall not want”.

Christ testifies in his Gospel that this vision of the prophet Jeremiah is fulfilled in his very person- he is God the Good Shepherd. Remember who the Lord Jesus is- he is God, who accepts a human nature and lives a real human life and who reveals himself as fulfillment of the hopes of the prophets- one of those greatest hopes being that the Lord would be for his people their leader, their protector, their guide- their king.

Jeremiah, and other Old Testament references to the Lord becoming a shepherd to his people are not directly cited in today’s Gospel, but they are the texts behind today’s text. Today’s Gospel is unintelligible without Old Testament reference points. Indeed, trying to understand today’s Gospel without reference points in the Old Testament is why the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is often overtaken by flights of fancy about an otherworldly safety zone, rather than being a densely textured revelation about how God promises to act in this world, in the midst of the trials and tribulations of real world events and circumstances.

The Israelites were in their beginnings as a people shepherds, their longing for a homeland was not primarily for lands to cultivate as farmers, but as pastures for their flocks. The importance of having good shepherds and the consequences of bad shepherds was not lost on them. Good shepherds meant prosperity and peace. Bad shepherds meant sure and certain destruction. The founding fathers of the Israelites were shepherds, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were shepherds. Moses is purified for his mission by leaving the safe space of a palace and being forced out in to the wilderness to labor as a shepherd. And the greatest of the Israelite kings, King David, is introduced to us as a shepherd.

Christ’s testimony to being a good shepherd is not simply poetic musing, but a practical statement- God’s response to real world concerns.

And as I said, the promise of the Lord revealing himself as God the shepherd of his people had revolutionary resonance at a time when the Israelites were ruled by the corrupt Herodian kings, who themselves were controlled by a foreign power- the Roman emperor, with all this corruption propped up by priests and prophets who were in their thrall.

The words of the Lord Jesus, testifying that he is the Good Shepherd, would have been heard as an answer to the desperate cries of the Israelites for God to act as he had acted in the past to free them from the Egyptian pharaoh at the time of the Exodus or from their Babylonian overlords at the time of the great exile. The people longed for God to deal with the Herods and the Romans and everyone colluding with them as God had dealt with Pharaoh and the Babylonians.

So you see, Christ is not inviting the Israelites (or us for that matter) to lose ourselves in thoughts of a carefree existence beyond the trials and terrors of this world. But he is telling us that he has come into this world, the real world, to deal with the caprice and cruelty of men and women like Herod or Caesar and those who collude with them, like worldly priests and false prophets.

But most importantly, the powers that undergird tyrants and human corruption are not merely human agents, but the darker powers of sin and death and the devil. And the Good Shepherd, who is God in Christ, will face these dark powers down directly, he will not run from them. That’s what the cross is!

That’s the mission of the Good Shepherd, to stand athwart the dark powers that deprive us of the abundance of life that God intends for his people to enjoy- to stand athwart these powers and to fight.

The image of the Good Shepherd is not one of a retreat or withdrawal from the world but of confrontation of the dark powers who defy God and assert that this world belongs to them and it belongs to them to do with as they will. It’s not the mission of the Good Shepherd to withdraw his people, his flock from the world, but to assert that this world belongs to God and to take it back from those who would make the pastures for his flock into a wasteland. This is who the Lord Jesus is and this is what his mission is all about.

One more insight about Christ the Good Shepherd:

The shepherds of the Israelites were the heroes of the Israelites, but they were heroes who were so often unknown and unappreciated, and even maligned. The economy, and therefore the livelihood of people, depended upon their work, and bad shepherds could bring about catastrophe, starvation and death.

But, they were considered by polite society to be uncouth and unsophisticated. They lived apart from society, on the margins of settled towns, cities and villages.

Shepherding was for the most part the vocation of solitary males, who were dispossessed in some way, often times younger sons without inheritance or worldly prospects. Shepherds who were without property were also for the most part without wives or children and their way of life was nomadic and unsettled and isolated.

They lived on the peripheries and would have been rough, tough and physically strong. Fierce and capable in a fight and powerful enough to fend off attacks from wild animals, bandits and marauders.

If they smelled like their sheep it was not the smell of cleanliness or perfume but of hard work and danger. Shepherds would go into situations and places that most people would dare not go.

Shepherds were the first line of defense in times of trouble and the crook or staff they carried was not a scepter or a decorative accessory, but a practical tool and if need be, a weapon.

The lambs they protected might have been meek and mild, but the shepherds were most assuredly not.

When you think about Christ the Good Shepherd, think about all that…

I think at times we settle for an image of Christ that is limited to reassurance and comfort and that image can become not so much an icon of Christ, but an idol.

This idol hems in the risk and danger of the Gospel (of following Christ) and so whatever we gain in safety and security we lose in terms of reality and purpose.

The end result is a Church that retreats in the face of threats, pursues accommodation in the face of corruption, and assimilates itself into culture, rather than bearing witness to a unique way of life.

The opening prayer for today’s Mass invokes Christ as being “brave”. That should strike us, and perhaps cut us to the heart. Our reductions of Christ, our idols of Christ, are rarely if ever brave. But if Christ is not brave, what good is he? And if Christ is not our brave shepherd, than how will we ever muster the courage to do what he asks us to do.

 

 

Third Sunday of Easter (April 15th, 2018)

The Church’s three scriptures for today are magnificent, almost too much for a single homily to express.

So, one way of encapsulating the meaning of these sacred texts is to look for a “golden thread”- a single commonality that ties all three together and if you look carefully you find it.  What is it?  Sin.

Note in our first scripture the Apostle Peter insists that we “repent and be converted so that our sins may be forgiven.

And in our second scripture, from the First Letter of John, we hear that the purpose of this text is that it is written so that we “may not commit sin” but if anyone of us “does sin, we have an Advocate”- Jesus Christ.  And that he is “expiation for our sins”.

And then in our Gospel, Christ the Lord testifies that the purpose of his revelation, of his death and resurrection is “that repentance might be preached in his name for the forgiveness of sins”.

Now I know that preaching about sin is likely not “trending” right now.  It’s not considered positive and barely mentioning it evokes emotions of resistance.  Sin is not positive and isn’t the purpose of preaching to edify and lift us up, not weigh us down with guilt?

But if the scriptures, rather than our opinions or emotions are our guide for proclamation, we can’t ignore the “golden thread”.  The scriptures for today are identifying sin as a reality, a predicament and offering us the possibility of deliverance.  We can ignore this and rest in pious generalities rather than facing a reality of human existence or we can take our medicine, swallow the bitter pill and trust that the end result is hope and healing.

What is sin?

Simply put, sin is willfully and deliberately resisting the will and purposes of God, specifically God’s will and purposes expressed in his commandments.  Sin is a refusal.  God offers us a possibility for our lives and our answer is no.

Now with this refusal comes consequences, and sin initiates these consequences and we might think of the consequences of sin as a trap from which it is near to impossible for us on our own to extricate ourselves from and sin, our refusal of God, can be so insidious that we intentionally or inadvertently trap others in our predicament.  In other words, sin has a viral quality to it, and the misery of sin is rarely just our own, but it’s consequences are usually shared by others.

So, think of the commandments of God, not as a grim list of prohibitions, but God’s wisdom, a warning about the kinds of refusals that lead toward misery for ourselves and for others.  Through his commandments, God is not trying to seize our joy, but to maintain it.  He is not inhibiting our flourishing, but enhancing it.

God’s response to our sin is not, as many think, merely condemnation, but a rescue operation led by God himself- Jesus Christ.  Christ comes into the world as God’s response to our sin- our refusals of God.  This is clearly expressed at the very beginning of Gospel, in the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, which testifies that the purpose of Jesus, expressed in his name is “to save his people from their sins”.

Now, the Gospels are clear that God’s rescue operation in Christ is not simply to reinforce existing commandments or offer us a self-help strategy that will guarantee us our best life now.  Instead of these, what God in Christ does is to enter into the human condition itself and confront the reality of our refusals with his will to love us.

He manifests this in his willingness to forgive us for our worst, our worst being manifested in the horror of the cross, and then through his death, enter himself into the deepest and darkest consequence of our refusal which is death.  He does this to reveal the extent to which God is willing to go to forgive us and to find us- our refusal can look like the cross and he maintains his power to forgive us for even that and we our refusal could go as far as far can go- even into death itself and even there we would come face to face with his will to rescue us.

In other words, God in Christ reveals that it might be our intention to live in alienation from God, but it’s not God’s intention simply to accept that situation as our status quo.  Our capacity for refusal is always met with God’s capacity for rescue.  That’s what God in Christ is all about.  That’s his mission.  That’s his purpose.  That’s the reason for his revelation.  God in Christ is the one who is strong enough to get us out of the trap.

God reveals in Christ that his response to our sin, to our refusals, is not merely to condemn us, but to rescue us from the trap and he does this by entering into the predicament that the consequences of our sin, our refusals creates.  This is what the cross and resurrection of the Lord reveal.

It’s also the reason for the joy of Easter. The joy of Easter is not our elation at the fact that winter has turned to spring or life proves itself to be resilient in the face of tragedy, or even that God is powerful enough to pull Jesus alive out of a grave, but that God in Christ has successfully enacted his rescue operation and in doing so demonstrated that sin, our refusals of God, need not be the last word or the final judgement.   God in Christ has in the revelation of his resurrection given us the most surprising and best of all possible second chances.

Now, in order for this to be true, it all has to have really happened.  And that brings us to a point the witness of the Gospel is making today that deserves our attention.

In today’s Gospel there is an account, an eyewitness account of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and this testimony goes out of its way to insist that the resurrection of the Lord Jesus happened not in metaphor or in simply or as a matter of mind or emotions, but in the real body of the Lord Jesus.  The resurrection was and is a physical event, not some kind of symbol.  Note, only is the body of the Lord Jesus real, but he demonstrates how real his body is by eating.

The resurrection is so outrageous, so outside the realm of what we conceive possible that there is a tendency to make of it something other than what the scriptures describe- but the actual testimony is stubbornly insistent that none of our qualifications or equivocations of the dense physicality of Christ’s resurrection will do.  We can dabble in symbolism all we want, but none of that will save us from our sins.

Sin is not an abstraction.  It does not just happen in our minds or imaginations.  Our refusals of God happen in the real world and have real world consequences. The very fact that we are so uncomfortable hearing about sin is testimony to its power over us. Rescuing us from sin is not a matter or revealing metaphors or symbols, but of entering into the real world and this is what God goes in Jesus Christ.  Sin is a real world problem that demands a real world solution.

The forgiveness of sins is real because God in Christ is real- as real as his being born into this world, living in this world- as real as his death on the cross and as real as his resurrection.  The reality of his body is demonstrating this to us.  So, in regards to the resurrection, paraphrasing the words of the American writer John Updike “let us not mock God with metaphor”.

If Christ has not been truly raised then our refusals of God are the final judgment and there is no way out of the trap.

Second Sunday of Easter (April 8th, 2018)

Our first scripture for today is from the New Testament book entitled Acts of the Apostles.  The book of Acts is a companion piece to the Gospel of Luke, continuing Luke’s story of the revelation of God in Christ.

Remember what this revelation is all about: God has in Jesus Christ accepted a human nature and lived a real, human life.  The revelation of Jesus Christ is not just about ideas or feelings or metaphors, but that a living, divine person, the one, true God has out of love for his creation, become a man.

The Gospel of Luke presents the experience of this revelation by those who knew God in Christ personally and the book of Acts continues this testimony by presenting how God in Christ, who revealed himself in a real, human body, now reveals himself in a different way- Christ reveals himself in the Church.

In other words, the revelation of Jesus Christ hasn’t just disappeared into the past, into history, but continues now in the Church.

The Church is not just an institution, a non profit corporation, an ethnic identity, but the Church is the extension of the revelation of Jesus Christ in the here and now, in the present and in the future.

This morning’s excerpt from Acts of the Apostles testifies to signs of Christ’s continued revelation in the Church and these signs are evident in the manner in which Christians live, in their unique way of life.

And there is the lesson: The mission of a Christian is to live in such a way that the revelation of Jesus Christ is evident and not obscured.  Seeing us, the world should come to know Christ.  Is this actually the case?  Do we know the Lord Jesus well enough to manifest his life and presence to the world?  Remember, being a Christian is not like being a member of a club or political party, but being a Christian is the way of life that emerges from being in a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Are we so caught up in the institutional expressions of the Church that we rarely, if ever, manifest the living Christ?  Do we reduce the Church’s way of life to a private matter, never allowing the public character of being a disciple of Jesus Christ to emerge?

Are we a bridge to Christ or a blockade?  Do we attract or do we repel?  Do we encourage or discourage?  Are we disciples or merely playing a game with religion?

If the world does not see in us what is described this morning in the Acts of the Apostles, then we have our answers to these questions.

The second scripture for today is from the First Letter of John.

The testimony of the First Letter of John insists that our identity as disciples of Jesus is not just a matter of mind or emotions, but of concrete practices- of keeping the commandments.  In this way we reveal the sincerity of our claim to be a Christian.

The commandments of God are not merely interesting suggestions, but expressions of the Christian way of life.  The commandments are best appropriated and understood, not simply by enshrining them in monuments or reverencing them as legal texts, but in practicing them, by doing them.

It is through living as a Christian, practicing the commandments, that world comes to know the meaning and purpose of Christ’s revelation.  Seeing our unique way of life, practiced in the commandments, reveals who the Lord Jesus is and why his revelation is so important.

And so, if as Christians, we pay only lip service to God’s commandments, testifying to their value but not accepting their demands and practicing them as a way of life, we look to the world to be liars and we obscure the revelation of Christ.

Our identity as Christians is imparted not merely by birth or by culture.  Nor is our identity as Christians expressed because our papers are in order or because we matriculated through faith-based institutions.  Our identity as Christians is manifested in our way of life, and that way is not self directed or self determined, but it is expressed in whether (or not) we practice the commandments of God.

Finally, the Gospel of John presents one of the most compelling accounts of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Remember, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not a metaphor or a symbol, it is a startling event that happened, not in minds or emotions, but in the real human body of the Lord.

God in Christ suffered, he died, and was buried and then he rose from the dead- all this happened in his real, human body.

God in Christ did not rise from the dead as a symbol or a metaphor.  He did not return to this disciples as an idea or a feeling.  What the disciples give testimony to is not about meeting a ghost or a zombie.

Christ rose in the flesh- in muscle and sinew, in skin and bone.  His disciples saw him.  They touched him.  He was changed, but he was Christ the Lord and he was real.

This kind of testimony highlights something important to us.

We Christians do not profess faith in a myth or a legend.  Our faith is in a living, divine person, Jesus Christ.  He is God, who has accepted a human nature and lived a real human life.  He revealed himself in real space, in real time, in real history.

He died in a real body and rose from the dead in a real body.

Believing this makes us Christians.  Faith is Christ’s resurrection is the measure of our faith.  If we do not believe in the resurrection, in all its strangeness and density as a real event, if we do not accept the Lord Jesus as being alive, if it’s only a metaphor, then as St. Paul aptly put it- then our faith is in vain.  Or to put it bluntly and appropriating the words of Flannery O’Connor- if it’s only a symbol, well then, to hell with it.

The story of Thomas and his doubts is about our own stark confrontation with the truth of the resurrection.  We cannot make of Christ’s resurrection something other than what it is.  And in our confrontation with the reality of Christ’s resurrection we cannot evade a decision- do we accept, do we believe?

Do we linger in our doubts or risk the great adventure of an act of faith?