Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time (February 9th, 2020)

Our first scripture is an excerpt from the Old Testament book of the Prophet Isaiah, one of the greatest of the prophets of Israel.

Isaiah’s words pull back the veil of time that separates us from him and testifies that what God wants from his faithful people are works of mercy, works of mercy that attend to the sufferings of needy and care for those who cannot care for themselves.

It is through these works of mercy that Israel comes to the realization of its mission, it’s purpose and understands the meaning of both its worship and its law.

It is the mission of Israel to be the means by which God draws humanity into communion, that is, a relationship with himself. This relationship, this communion is meant to change us and to change others.

In this scripture from the Prophet Isaiah we see the great sign of this change- a willingness to care for others and to do so, not just by wishing them well or hoping for the best, or projecting good thoughts, but through works of mercy by which we attend to real, human needs.

The new Israel is the Church and as such the mission of works of mercy is our mission. It cannot be delegated to a professional caste of specialists or reduced to a transfer of our surplus wealth to this or that state sponsored initiative or NGO. These may be good things and worthy of our support, but in terms of the works of mercy we must ourselves be willing to do them- to risk encounters with those who are unlike ourselves, to give to others who have nothing to offer to us, to see even in the ungrateful and loathsome the image of the suffering Christ.

It is in these concrete acts of kindness, works of mercy, and law and worship of the Church are fulfilled. For it is in charity, it is in mercy that the worship and law of the Church find their proper fulfillment and show forth their meaning and purpose.

In today’s second scripture, an excerpt from the magnificent first Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul testifies to his purpose as an evangelist and minister of the Gospel.

(St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is a masterpiece of insight about our mission and identity as disciples of the Lord and also the mission and purpose of the Church. We should listen to, read and study first Corinthians, not as a historical text, but as testimony to, for and about ourselves. If Christians attended to St. Paul’s insights in his letter to the Corinthians, doing what he asks and avoiding what he identifies as harmful to the Church, more of our parishes would be flourishing).

With his characteristic eloquence, which flashes forth with the brilliance of lightning, St. Paul testifies that his message to the Church, to Christians, is singular- he preaches the mysterious revelation of Christ crucified, a mysterious revelation that can only be truly appreciated and understood from a disposition of humility.

Humility demanded much of St. Paul, the story of his life reveals a prideful man who was convinced of his own righteousness, so convinced that he justified cruelty in the name of God. An encounter with Christ compelled him to abandon his pride and self-righteousness, and he placed himself, indeed his whole life in the service of the very people he had so gravely harmed.

It is this change in St. Paul that helps us to understand that he did not believe his message to the Church was based on what he terms “persusive words of wisdom but Spirit and power”.

Take this to mean that St. Paul did not believe that the primary purpose of the Gospel was to prove that he was right and everyone else was wrong. The truth is its own advocate. St. Paul believed he was most convincing when he was most Christ-like in his encounters with others, and this required of him great humility.

We don’t convince others of the truth of the Gospel by convincing others how wrong they are and how right we are. However well intentioned, or even effective, this is ultimately a form of pride. Our testimony is most convincing when our words on behalf of the Gospel are supported by a way of life that shows forth what we believe to be true in concrete actions. People should come to know the truth of the Gospel through what we say, through our testimony (for it is true that faith comes from hearing) but once people have heard our testimony, they will have to see that truth practiced concretely.

The practice of the Christian life always involves humility because essential to its very nature is repentance, the humble admission of what we have done and what we have failed to do. Further, our way of life as Christians is meant as an imitation of Christ- seeking to go where he went, to meet the kinds of people he met, to serve others in the manner that he served. All this requires humility.

We do not become Christ-like by convincing ourselves that we are right all the time and that people would be better off learning from us how wrong that they are, but through an every-day death to our own self-righteousness, an abandonment of self-interest in favor of placing ourselves at the Lord’s service and learning to be willing to do what he asks us to do. In this way we not only proclaim, like St. Paul, Christ crucified, but we become ourselves living icons of Christ crucified in the world.

Finally, in his Gospel, the Lord Jesus insists that we must become for him like salt and light.

The imagery the Lord Jesus employs is simple and direct. The purpose of salt is to enhance flavor and the purpose of light is illumination. When a meal is properly seasoned with salt, what is good in that meal is experienced as better. When light is cast into the darkness, our fear of what is unknown in the dark is dispelled and we see clearly what we must do.

Christians are to be like salt and light. Our presence in the world is meant to enhance all that is good and to dispel the fears the so afflict humanity, particularly the fears of suffering and death. If we are like this, like salt and light, the world will be convinced of the truth of the Gospel and also, come to know the presence and power of the living Christ.

If this is not how we Christians are, if we are bland or agents of darkness, then we become useless.

The world is a far more terrible place than it is without the Gospel. I think at times we Christians forget this or we adopt a false humility (really a form of pride) and self-defeatist attitude that thinks the world is just fine without us and that the Gospel contributes little or nothing that is unique or necessary.

This false humility and self-defeatist attitude is the cause of so much of the decline that we see in the Church (and in our parishes). Indeed, it is this attitude which is feeding so much of the corruption that afflicts us.

If we Christians become convinced that the Gospel is not all that necessary and that humanity can basically get along fine with or without it… If we Christians can no longer appreciate or even believe why precisely Jesus Christ is unique and that the world is better off knowing him… If we Christians have no sense of urgency in regards to our mission to invite people to know Christ are share a life with him in his Church… Well, then, we are hardly salt or light for the world.

It is relatively easy for us Christians to identify the problems and sins in the culture and in the world. The risk here is that the ease of doing this makes calling out the world for its sins a kind of leisure activity for Christians. We can all do this and become convinced that we have accomplished our mission. This does not, however, serve the Gospel, but instead serves our self-righteousness.

We Christians truly and really believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is God’s answer to the predicaments of the world and God in Christ has sent us as his representatives, his ambassadors into the world to let people know what the Gospel is and how it makes the world better than what we have come to expect.

This mission goes nowhere if we Christians won’t do it. This mission doesn’t happen unless we become for Jesus Christ salt and light.

Feast of the Presentation of the Lord (February 2nd, 2020)

One of the persistent and urgent themes of my preaching is the reality and dense particularity of the Incarnation.

Remember: The Incarnation is the startling revelation that the one, true God has done something utterly surprising and unique- God has, in Jesus Christ, accepted a human nature and lived a real, human life. This happened, not as a myth or legend, or as an idea or a sentiment, but in the hard and often hard facts of reality. The eternal God entered time and space and accepted for himself real flesh and real blood. God in Christ has a body and met his creation face to face.

And thus, does God in Christ come to us, not as a cosmic force, not as a disembodied voice, not as an idea, not as an emotion, but instead of all this he comes to us in flesh, in a body- a human body. Losing nothing of who he is as God, God in Christ accepts a life like our own, a human life- and he really and truly lives it. In fact, his living of a human life is so intense that he even accepts the experiences of suffering and death.

The mystery of God’s will to do this reveals God’s identity to us, and his will for us. We see who God really and truly is in Jesus Christ and are invited by God in Christ to a particular way of life. This way of life is called the Church.

This Incarnation is essential to what Christians believe. Christian faith is not simply in a code of conduct or a kind of ethnic identity, but it is about entering into a relationship, what we call sharing communion with, God, who in Jesus Christ, accepts a human nature and lives a real, human life. When this is the central concern of our lives, the concern that orients and positions all our other concerns, then we are Christians.

You are not a Christian because you find the teachings of Jesus to be personally edifying or because you find the Church to be personally useful or because of a vague association with Church through family or ethnicity. You are a Christian when the revelation of Jesus Christ, which is the revelation of Incarnation matters most to you, and you are living in such a way that you demonstrate you believe it is the greatest truth about God, about humanity, and about yourself.

I am saying all this for a reason, and the reason is connected to the great commemoration that the Church celebrates today- the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord.

The Feast of the Presentation of the Lord highlights an event that happened in at the beginning of Christ’s human life. The parents of the Christ-child, who were devout Israelites, brought the child Jesus to the spiritual center of Israelites life and worship- the great temple of Jerusalem. It was there that they offered the customary sacrifices, which according to the laws of their Israelite faith, “redeemed the child”. This meant that they offered sacrifices that indicated or represented the child Jesus himself. The spiritual logic of this was that every Israelites child was a divine gift, and parents, in gratitude for this divine gift, offered their child back to God.

It was in this gesture that Israelite parents recognized that their lives belonged first and foremost to God- not to themselves, not to the king the state, but to God. They were at God’s disposal and their lives were to be a mission on God’s behalf.

The deep mysticism of all this is telling, but for my purposes I will highlight this strange event in the life of Christ as an indication to us of the reality of his Incarnation.

The Incarnation is not an abstraction. God in Christ did not accept for himself a generalized expression of human experience. He didn’t become a symbol of everyman, he became a particular man. This means that God was, in Christ, born at a particular time and place, to a particular woman. God was, in Christ, born into a particular family and into a particular culture. God immersed himself into all this because all human beings are immersed in such things. God in Christ did not set himself apart from all the particularities of being human, he placed himself within these particularities and it is within these things that we come to know him and he comes to know us.

And one of the primary and most important of these particularities is that God in Christ becomes an Israelite.

This is why we Christians are so attentive to the Old Testament. We do not reverence and read the Old Testament because it is good to know history or literature, but because in knowing about the Israelites we come to better know God in Christ.

This is one of the great lessons of the Feast of the Presentation. You cannot truly know God in Christ without also knowing that God has, in Christ, become an Israelite.

Why is this important?

Because the Church is a new kind of Israel, always intimately connected to the Israelite identity of Christ. The mysterious identity and mission of Church does not yield its meaning to us if we only think about the Church as an institution. Instead we come to know the identity and mission of the Church through what the Scriptures reveal to us about the Israelites. We are the continuation of the story of Israel.

The great temptation that we Christians so often face is that we begin to think about the Church as a project that we are in charge of- that we our role is to make the Church into whatever we want it to be. In doing we disconnect the Church from Christ, because the Church is not ours, it is Christ’s- and it is his gift to us, indeed it the extension of the Incarnation into our own lives. The Church is the way that God in Christ uses to meet us. The Church is the Body of Jesus in the world.

And as such our proper relationship to the Church is expressed in how the family of the Lord Jesus accepted Christ as their very own, and then gave him back to God. Only then could they see and understand the true mission and identity of the Christ-child. Only then could they see and understand their own mission and identity in relation to him.

The Church is not just an institution or a building and grounds project or a faith- based corporation or an ethnic identity. The Church is a divine gift, Christ’s gift. And the greatest mystery of the Church is that it is the living presence of Christ himself. The saints see this and we can too if we learn how to see the Church rightly and accept the Church as a gift rather than trying to make it into something it is not and never will be.

There is perhaps no surer and more certain way of poisoning one’s relationship with one’s children when we see them merely as extensions of our own desires and using them as things we possess and control, rather than accepting them as divine gifts that we must learn how to love.

The same poison destroys our relationship with the Church.

The remedy or antidote to this is seen in the example of the family of the Lord Jesus- who having received Christ as their own, offered him back to God, indicating, that first and foremost, the Holy Child belonged to God, and so did they. Accepting this, they could properly receive the Holy Child. Accepting this, they gained greater clarity in regards to the Holy Child’s identity and mission, as well as their own.

Let that be today’s lesson about not only the revelation of Christ, but also his revelation of his Church.