Category: Sunday Homilies

For this week’s homily, imagine your local pastor using his sermon time to lead the following “readers’ theater.”

Readings for Pentecost: Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104: 24-34, 35b; Romans 8:22-27; John 5:26-27; 16:4b-15

Pastor:  Here we are almost half way through 2012. The Mayans told us that this would be a year of profound change in planetary consciousness. The astrologers tell us the Age of Aquarius is actually dawning now – Jupiter aligning with Mars and all that. Yet if you read the daily newspapers we seem to be in anti-2012 mode, don’t we? Anger and harsh words, war and conflict dominate from Afghanistan and Iraq to Chicago and Camp David. Can this really be the dawning of a new age of “Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust?”

Fittingly in our rather darkened context Pentecost calls us to open ourselves to a radically new and hopeful consciousness. And the calendar has poised us to do just that in an unprecedented way. I say that because precisely this year, 2012, marks the 50^th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council. I want to suggest this morning that by observing that anniversary properly, we in our very own parish could  invite Jesus’ Holy Spirit to visit us here – to make Pentecost among us as never before. Observing the anniversary of Vatican II in the spirit of Pentecost could truly transform us all.  

Hold that thought.   

Before returning to it, let’s try to get the flavor of the first Christian Pentecost.  To help us with that, I’ve asked six people from our community to perform a little “readers’ theater” with me. Readers, please come forward. (A group of six emerges from the congregation, and stands scripts in hand in a semi-circle before the community. The group includes men and women of all age groups.)

Pastor: Recall the picture Luke paints this morning in the first reading. . . . Jesus’ disciples have been gathered in their Upper Room safe-house since they realized on what we call “Ascension Thursday” that Jesus was gone for good. They’re a group of Jewish men and women with a strong sense of being God’s Chosen People. They’re not Christians at all. They’re Jews who think they’ve found the messiah in Jesus. For them, the Jews are God’s chosen; no one else is. And yet as they share remembrances of Jesus in that Upper Room, they find their narrow religious consciousness challenged by recollections of the Master. Imagine their conversation:

Reader One: I’m feeling really abandoned. I mean, what are we going to do now that the Master has left us for good?

Reader Two: What do you suppose he wanted us to do when he told us to return here and wait for the Spirit?

Reader Three: I don’t know. But let’s see what happens. Jesus has never let us down. He’s never been wrong.

Reader Four: We still have our memories of him, don’t we? I think those could guide us.

Reader Five: No trouble there. Jesus seems to be all we’re talking about these days. (Laughing) Remember when he talked with that Samaritan woman?  We were all so shocked. Speaking alone with a woman – and a Samaritan on top of that!

Reader Six:  Yes, he didn’t seem to have much trouble crossing boundaries or scandalizing us, did he? Women, men, Pharisees, tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, the poor who loved him so much – even Roman soldiers and members of the Sanhedrin; he engaged them all.

Reader One: And he cured Samaritan lepers too.

Reader Two: Somehow, he seemed partial to Samaritans, didn’t he?”

Reader Three: Yes, and, you know, he fed those 4000 non-Jews across the Lake just as he did the 5000 on our side. That confused me. How could he do that? It was like he was saying that they mattered as much as we do. To me it seemed like a slap in the face.

Reader Four:  And that gentile woman from Syro-Phonecia? She bested Jesus in debate. I still laugh about it. Here he was virtually calling her a dog, and she disarms him completely by saying, “Yes, but even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.”

Reader Five: That was the only time I ever saw him outwitted. And he loved it! He couldn’t stop laughing either. And she wasn’t even a Jew, was she? Do you think she taught Jesus something about God’s love for gentiles?

Reader Six: And what about that Roman soldier, remember him? Didn’t Jesus say the centurion showed more faith than any of us?

Reader One: What was he talking about? That centurion was our oppressor. How could a man like that have faith?

Reader Two: It was like he was showing us that there shouldn’t be any barriers between people – like all peoples, not just the Jewish community, are God’s people.

Pastor: Story after story like those must have been shared. And then someone said:

Reader Three: You know, I’ve been thinking . . . Jesus wasn’t the first of our prophets to show openness to everyone – not just to Jews. Didn’t the Prophet Joel say something about a future when God’s spirit would be poured out on everyone without exception?

Reader Four: Yes, he did.  I’ve committed those lines to memory. Joel said:

 I will pour out my Spirit⁷⁸on all kinds of people.⁷⁹

Your sons and daughters will prophesy.

Your elderly will have revelatory dreams;⁸⁰

Your young men will see prophetic visions.

 Even on male and female servants

I will pour out my Spirit in those days

And everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord

Will be saved.

Reader Five: What if Jesus was the fulfillment of Joel’s vision – no division between “kinds of people,” none between parents and children, young and old, men and women, servants and free? Maybe when we were with the Master we were living out Joel’s dream.

Reader Six: That’s a good point – a really good point. I don’t know about you, but I need some space to think about what’s just been said. (All agree.) Let’s all take some time for silent prayer.

Pastor: So the community in that Upper Room prayed – though they didn’t know exactly what for. They opened themselves to what they remembered about Jesus – to Jesus’ Spirit. After a long time in prayer someone said:

Reader One: Somehow, I’m feeling different now – like a huge burden has been lifted from my shoulders.

Reader Two: And I as well. My fear seems gone. It’s like a violent wind has blown through my mind, and everything has become clear.

Reader Three: My heart feels like it’s on fire.

Reader Four: And the rest of you are simply glowing – is that fire I see over your heads. (Everyone laughs)

Reader Five: You know, we may finally have learned what Jesus was trying to teach us. Everyone is God’s chosen, especially the poor and people like Jesus himself – the illegitimate, the immigrants, the outlaws, tortured and executed.

Reader Six: That’s incredible. It’s time for us to share this Good News the way the Master did. I think we’ve received Jesus’ Spirit.

Pastor: So all the disciples went out in the street.  Peter made a speech and told everyone what they had experienced. He used that text from the prophet Joel. Surprisingly, everyone understood as if language barriers didn’t exist. It all seemed so simple now and made so much sense to everyone. . . . (Pause)

Thank you, readers. (The readers return to their places. When everyone is settled, the pastor continues.)

Pastor: What a beautiful vision of church and reconciliation. So worth celebrating on a day like today, on Pentecost Sunday. 

But, you know, the vision was lost in the matter of a generation or two. It was. Soon the Pentecost story would be interpreted to mean “Yes anyone can receive the Spirit of Jesus, but to receive it you have to be baptized. To be saved you must call upon God’s name in Christian terms.” All other approaches to God were seen as invalid. Within three centuries, soon after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, those refusing baptism would be put to the sword. Subsequently, the return of the old narrow way of thinking – this time Christian — led to pogroms against Jews, Crusades against Muslims, to the Holy Inquisition, burning of witches, to the holocaust of Native Americans, and to cold and hot wars against “godless” communists.

The time is coming, Jesus warns in today’s Gospel, when killers will do their bloody work in God’s name – in Jesus’ name. That, in fact, happened historically. The Dark Ages were long and bleak. The partisan violence and wars surrounding the Reformation period seemed unending.

But then came the Second Vatican Council. As I said earlier, it began 50 years ago on October 11^th 1962, and ended in 1965. So this is its Silver Anniversary. As initiated by John XXIII and implemented by Pope Paul VI, Vatican II sought to recapture the spirit of the first Pentecost as described in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles this morning. Vatican II broadened Catholics’ narrow ideas about God. It recognized freedom of conscience as a human God-given right. The Council was “ecumenical” meaning that it no longer saw Protestants as enemies, but as sisters and brothers. Vatican II recognized that Jews and Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims are all “calling on the name of the Lord” and so can be saved even though we hardly know or can pronounce their names for God. The Second Vatican Council was monumental. Its significance was cosmic.  

However, once again sadly, the church of the 21^st century risks losing the Pentecost experience in a matter of just two generations. There’s a return of a narrow understanding of Christianity that contradicts Vatican II. And at times one can even get the feeling that the narrowness is coming from the church’s highest offices. Often church leaders give the impression that Vatican II, which remains the official teaching of the Catholic Church, is now somehow heretical. So we must backtrack on liturgical reforms. We must insist on the privileged position of Christianity in relation to other faiths, and of Catholicism in relation to Protestant denominations.   

Our parish council has decided not to allow our church to be swept along with that reactionary response. More positively, we want to seize the opportunity that the Silver Anniversary of the Council presents. That’s what I meant at the beginning saying that we want to “make Pentecost” here as never before. So we’ve chosen today’s feast to announce a three-year renewal program that we hope will revitalize our parish. The program will begin with an old-time tent revival on our front lawn next October 11^th.  Our Parish Council’s President will give the details in a brief presentation immediately after Mass.

All of this is geared towards making 2012 that special year the Mayans promised. We want this fiftieth anniversary of Vatican II to bring the “harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust” promised not by the Age of Aquarius, but by the New Order Jesus referred to as the Kingdom of God.

Join me then in opening ourselves to the Spirit who, Paul tells us in today’s second reading, “prays through us.” Allow the Spirit to pray through you now.

 Come Holy Spirit. Fill our hearts as you filled the hearts of the disciples on that first Pentecost. Renew our parish. May God’s kingdom come.

 (The pastor sits. While everyone prays, “The Age of Aquarius” plays in the background.)

Readings:

Acts: 15-17, 20a-26

1 John 4:11-16

John 17: 11b-19

                Do you remember when your faith was simple and childlike? I do. I was a student at St. Viator’s Catholic School on the Northwest Side of Chicago. I was learning my catechism. I was an altar boy. And I was in love with Sr. Rose Anthony, my fourth grade teacher. She was young and pretty, and we were her first class. And I felt sorry for her, because our class was mean and often reduced her to tears. (But I digress already . . .)

                In any case, as a fourth grader (and even before) I remember mastering that first question in the Baltimore Catechism: Who is God? That’s the question raised by the readings for the Seventh Sunday of Easter. Who is God? According to today’s readings, the answer is surprisingly simple. God is love. What God’s love means is revealed in Jesus. We are called to follow Jesus’ example, and to avoid that of Judas.

                That’s the thrust of today’s readings.

                But let me get back to Sr. Rose Anthony. Weren’t we all smart at the age of 9? The good sister convinced me that I knew who God was and everything else the Catechism taught us. Its answer to the question “Who is God?” was: “God is the Supreme Being who made all things.”  That satisfied me. And I believed it with all my heart. It was proven true by the miracles of Jesus which were self-evidently factual. They were “proof” that Jesus was God and that our claims about him were correct. What couldn’t be explained was “mystery” – to be accepted “on faith.” No problem.

                Now it’s very different – at least for many of us, isn’t it? Problem is, we’ve all grown up. And it often seems that everything about our faith has been turned upside-down. They call this the post-modern world. Scientific awareness is a fact of life. We know about evolution, the superego, class struggle, and relativity. Modern scripture scholarship has made us conscious of the fact that the early church transformed the historical Jesus of Nazareth into a “Christ” of faith who would be nearly unrecognizable to his contemporaries. Besides that, we are all strongly influenced by what scholars call the “principle of analogy” whether we’ve heard it or not. It holds that we cannot expect to have happened in the past what is presumed or proven to be impossible in the present. With that principle at work miracles have changed from a proof of claims about Jesus to proof’s opposite. They are cause for skepticism and disbelief. Jesus walked on water? Yeah, right. 

             So we’re skeptical before accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds. And we’re skeptical about miracles and anything “supernatural.” However, most of all we’re skeptical about that invisible man up in the sky watching us constantly and before whom we’ll appear after death to give an accounting of our stewardship. That’s the image most of us have of that “Supreme Being” we learned about in the fourth grade whether our source was Sr. Rose Anthony or Billy Graham. 
               Does that mean we’ve become atheists? Not necessarily.  It does mean however that the God of “Theism” – the belief in a God “up there” in a separate world is no longer tenable for many of us.  And neither is the Jesus up in the sky who transmigrated there liturgically on Ascension Thursday..

               But that God “up there” and that Jesus “up in the sky” is not what we find in today’s readings. The author of the Epistle of John writes not of a Supreme Being. Instead he says that God is love, and the ones who abide in love, abide in God and God in them. What John is describing Is not the God of Theism, but the God of “Panentheism.” No, I didn’t misspeak there. I didn’t mean to say “Pantheism;” I said “Panentheism.”  Pantheism is the belief that everything is somehow “God.” “Panentheism” is the belief that what we call “God” is everywhere and in every creature. God is the one (as St. Paul said) in whom we live and move and have our being. God is the source of life in which I am immersed like a sponge in the sea. That’s the God we find in today’s second reading. God is an energy, a relationship – the most wonderful we have experienced.  God is love.

                But then again, John’s definition might not help us much. The word love, as our culture uses the term, is probably even more debased than the word “God.”  Love is another word for infatuation and the feelings that accompany “love at first sight.”  Often the word simply refers to sex. But of course, none of that is what John is referring to in his letter. Jesus acknowledges that in today’s Gospel. He says that love as he understands it is actually hated rather than admired by the world – and so are those who practice it. The world has no place for the love that Jesus counsels nor for the people who truly follow Jesus’ model of love.

                Why would that be? It’s because the love embodied in Jesus threatens normality.  Jesus lived a life totally at the service of others, of the poor, the sick, the ostracized, and the despised. And the center of his message, God’s Kingdom, had to do with radical social change that would create a world with room for everyone. Our culture doesn’t want change. It’s content with the way things are. It doesn’t even want to admit that poor people exist, though they constitute the world’s majority. When was the last time you heard a presidential candidate even refer to the poor? No, it’s all about the “middle class” and the “one percent.”

                Jesus had no trouble speaking about the poor. It’s an honored biblical category. Jesus himself was poor. In Luke’s version of the beatitudes, he calls the poor “blessed.” He says “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.”  He curses the rich. “Woe to you rich,” he says, “You have had your reward!”

                Commitment to the poor, commitment to God’s Kingdom made the Romans and Jesus’ own people hate him. It made the Romans, it made his own people kill his followers. In the case of Jesus and the early church, embodying love as understood and exemplified in Jesus led to torture and death row.

                The fact is our culture hates people on death row. It hates the people our government tortures. Its discomfort with the poor also borders on hatred. Let’s face it: our culture likes neither the kind of people Jesus came from nor the kind of person he was. It does not like people who, following Jesus, want radical social change.

                 So in the end it’s easier to say “Jesus is God,” than to say “God is Jesus.” We can deal with Supreme Beings who are omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and all those other “omnis” we traditionally ascribe to God. We don’t want to deal with, be challenged by, and be changed by a poor prophet who harshly criticizes what our culture holds dearest – pleasure, profit, prestige and power. We don’t want to struggle with what Jesus might have meant about leaving all we possess, giving it to the poor and following him to the cross.

                  No, it’s much easier to be like Judas who is recalled in this morning’s first reading. There the apostles select Mathias to replace Judas as one of the Twelve. Poor Judas! In today’s readings, he assumes his familiar role as the embodiment of the world’s values. Those who put these liturgical readings together probably wanted to contrast Judas’ greed with the generosity we are called to by Jesus’ example. Be like Jesus. Spurn the “bottom line” concern of “the world.” Don’t love money the way Judas did.  (I’m not sure that’s fair to Judas. We can return to that question another day. For now, let’s just take things at face value.) Yes, the readings invite us to contrast Jesus’ way with the way of Judas.

                  So where does that leave us on this Seventh Sunday of Easter? We are called to re-conceptualize God and our relationship to God.  The God of theism belongs to the past – to our spiritual childhood. Embrace Panentheism our readings suggest. God is in us; and we are in God. God is in everything and everything is in God. Our vocation is to make God’s presence visible in the world. Each of us represents a point in history and in this cosmos where the incredible Energy of Love that burst forth 17 billion years ago in the Big Bang manifests itself today. The example of Jesus, his commitment to God’s Kingdom, and to the poor, oppressed, despised, ostracized, tortured and executed makes evident what Love means. Do we share that commitment? Are we following Jesus’ example?

                  God is love, and the one who abides in love, abides in God, and God in that lover. What could be simpler? What could be more challenging?

Readings for the Sixth Sunday after Easter:

Acts: 10:25-28, 34-35, 44-48

1 John 4-7, 10

John 15:9-17

 Israeli Zionists are no longer God’s people. The Palestinians are. And ironically, the Zionists are their oppressors. That’s the central thought I’d like to leave with each of you this morning. (And don’t worry; you’ll have time to talk back at me after I finish speaking. I want to hear what you think.)

                My conclusion about Zionists and Palestinians is based on four considerations. To begin with it could be reached by just paying attention to the news – to what’s been happening in Gaza for the last two years and more. In Gaza the Zionists have created a virtual prison camp very reminiscent of the ones imposed on the Jews during World War II. In Gaza, Zionists have severely limited access to food, water, and medical care. They’ve have attacked private homes, schools and hospitals; they’ve killed with impunity thousands of men, women and little children.

                Besides the news, my conclusions are also based on the writing of people who should know. Leading Jewish intellectual, Noam Chomsky lends support here. So does Jimmy Carter in his book Peace Not Apartheid. (Remember President Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Middle East Peace Process).  Just this month, Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, another Nobel Peace Prize winner, and a hero in South Africa’s struggle against the hated apartheid system of segregation, called for a boycott of Israeli goods. Like Carter, he says the Zionists have created a system of apartheid in Palestine every bit as unjust as South Africa’s before 1994. All  three, Chomsky, Carter, and Tutu might agree that enforcers of a Hitlerian system like the one in Gaza, and enforcers of an apartheid system suggestive of South Africa cannot pretend that they are somehow underwritten by the God of the Bible as revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.

                My third reason for saying that Palestinians not Israeli Zionists are God’s people is my own observation. A few years ago I went on a three-week fact-finding tour of Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. My own eyes, and the conversations we had with all sides in the conflict convinced me that the Palestinians, not the Zionists deserve our support as Christians.

                However my real motive for bringing all of this up this morning is contained in the readings for the Sixth Sunday after Easter in today’s liturgy. That’s my fourth reason for saying Israeli Zionists are not longer God’s people; the Palestinians are. Today’s readings tell us that God is love, that Jesus reveals the shocking meaning of that familiar statement, and that in the light of Jesus’ revelation, God has no favored nation at all – not the Israelis, not German Arians, not white Afrikaners, not Americans like us.  

                However, please note: saying that God has no favored nations at all is not the same as saying that God is neutral and has no favored people. God as revealed in Jesus is definitely not neutral. (To understand what I’m saying, it’s crucial to distinguish between “nation” and “people.”  “Nation” refers to nationality, race, and sovereign states. “People” transcends all of that. “God’s people” could be found in any nation, among any race, in any sovereign state – or in no sovereign state as happens with the Palestinians who have no state of their own.) The (biblical) fact is God favors some people over others. God has made what theologians call a “preferential option” for some and not for others.

                To show you what I mean, let’s begin by considering today’s second reading. Today’s selection from the First Letter of John makes two very important statements. The first is that God is love. The second is that the example of Jesus tells us exactly what that means. John is saying that by looking at Jesus we can know who God is.

                Jesuit theologian, Roger Haight, can help us understand. “Jesus is not God,” Haight has said. Rather, “God is Jesus.” That might sound confusing at first. But here’s what he means. To say that Jesus is God presumes we know who or what God is. But, of course, we really don’t. God is invisible. No one has ever seen God. However, to say that God is Jesus addresses our lack of knowledge and the nature of “the incarnation.” It means that Jesus’ example lifts the veil of ignorance between us and God. By looking at Jesus, considering his words, deeds, life’s circumstances, and choices, we get a clear idea of who God is and the nature of his love. Jesus is not God. God is Jesus.

                And what is it that Jesus reveals concerning the love of God? To reiterate, he tells us that it is partial. God’s love favors some and not others. Even before Jesus, the whole idea of “chosen people” supports that, doesn’t it?  Apart from that, however, we have Jesus’ words. He clearly did not approve of his day’s religious establishment or its leaders. He called them “hypocrites.” In Luke’s version of the Eight Beatitudes, he says, “Blessed are you poor,” and “Woe to you rich.” Those are statements about whole classes of people, and about whom it is that God approves and whom he rejects. In the Last Judgment scene in Matthew 25, Jesus talks specifically about rewarding those who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, and show concern for the imprisoned. Those who don’t do such things are clearly rejected – and quite definitively.  

                Besides all that, the very choices that Christian theology tells us God made in presenting God’s Self in Jesus tell us much about whom God favors.  God didn’t choose to incarnate God’s Self in the rich and powerful, though we might have expected that God would. God didn’t appear as a king, a priest, an intellectual, or even as a respectable person. Rather, Jesus as God’s fullest revelation was the son of an unwed teenage mother. He was homeless at birth. According to Matthew, he was an immigrant for a while in Egypt. The religious people of his day said he was possessed by the devil. They cast him out of their houses of worship – in effect excommunicating him. Jesus’ enemies called him a drunkard and friend of prostitutes and other sinners. The occupying Roman authorities considered him an insurgent and terrorist. (If they had “drones,” they would have killed Jesus that way because he met their “profile” of a terrorist.) In any case, Jesus ended up a victim of torture. He died a victim of capital punishment.

                Those choices on God’s part as revealed in Jesus tell us who God is and where God is to be found. God’s chosen people are the unwed mothers, the homeless, the immigrants, the mentally ill, the excommunicated, those identified by empire as terrorists and insurgents, the tortured, and executed. That’s hard for us to hear, isn’t it? It runs so counter to what we’ve always been taught and believed about God’s impartiality.

                That sort of shock puts us in good company. And that brings us to this morning’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. There the Spirit of Jesus forces a reluctant Peter to draw unexpected and very uncomfortable conclusions about God’s choices, and about his own religious identity. Peter has just been visiting a man called Cornelius, a gentile – a non-Jew who has shown interest in Jesus. (At this point, it’s worth noting, Peter is not himself a Christian. In fact, as Elaine Pagels has recently argued, Peter never was a Christian. He and James and Andrew were Jews who thought they had found the Messiah in Jesus.) So for Peter, there was no salvation outside what he understood as the Chosen Nation – Israel. And yet, in Cornelius’ home, Peter has witnessed unmistakable signs that these non-Jews (Cornelius and his family) have received the Holy Spirit of Jesus. The whole family, Peter finds, is speaking in tongues and prophesying.

                In the face of such evidence, Peter is forced to draw an uncomfortable conclusion: every nation is acceptable to God. There are no chosen nations. Israel is not God’s chosen nation. What a bitter pill that was for Peter to swallow.

                In today’s final reading – from the Gospel of John the Evangelist – Jesus tells us swallow that same pill. John’s Jesus tells us that we are to follow his own example – to love with the kind of partial love Jesus embodied. Realize, Jesus says in effect, that the people we tend to despise are really God’s specially favored ones: those unwed mothers, the immigrants, the poor, the imprisoned, tortured and people, like Jesus, on death row. In the Middle East, God’s favored ones are the Palestinians even though our whole culture, the media, and our preachers and pastors tell us the opposite.

Accepting that means informing ourselves, reading outside the culture. It involves telephone calls to the White House and to Congress. It involves voting. Bishop Tutu says it involves boycotting Israeli products. It involves prayer and reflection.