pope: the spirit is silent guide toward unity

"It is the Spirit, in fact, who guides the Church in the way of all truth and unifies her in communion and in the works of ministry," the Holy Father said. "Unfortunately, the temptation to 'go it alone' persists.

"Some today portray their local community as somehow separate from the so-called institutional Church, by speaking of the former as flexible and open to the Spirit and the latter as rigid and devoid of the Spirit."

"Be watchful! Listen," he urged. "Through the dissonance and division of our world, can you hear the concordant voice of humanity? From the forlorn child in a Darfur camp, or a troubled teenager, or an anxious parent in any suburb, or perhaps even now from the depth of your own heart, there emerges the same human cry for recognition, for belonging, for unity."

The Pontiff reminded the young pilgrims that it is the Holy Spirit "who satisfies that essential human yearning to be one, to be immersed in communion, to be built up, to be led to truth."

"This is the Spirit’s role," he continued, "to bring Christ’s work to fulfillment. Enriched with the Spirit’s gifts, you will have the power to move beyond the piecemeal, the hollow utopia, the fleeting, to offer the consistency and certainty of Christian witness!"

From here.

sermon for pentecost 10 / trinity 9

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In today’s Gospel reading our Lord tells a parable about a sower, who sows good seed, and who has an enemy who then comes and sows weeds among the wheat. And when the grain comes up, the weeds come up with it. The landowners servants ask whether they ought to go and tear up the weeds. The landowner tells his servants to let the weeds and the wheat grow together “lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.” The master is concerned for the wheat: he does not want to endanger any of it. So he says: “Let both grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”

The Lord does not leave us to guess at the interpretation of this parable. At the behest of the disciples, he gives us a point-by-point explanation: “He who sows the good seed is the Son of man; the field is the world, and the good seed means the sons of the kingdom; the weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the close of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age. The Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”

There is a kind of rudimentary theodicy in this parable. [A theodicy is an account of the existence of evil.] God has sown good seed. He has created the world and all that is in it, and he has said that it is all very good (Gen. 1.31). Yet even in this parable, we may discern a mysterious and personal malignant power, working secretly, behind the scenes of creation, to bring destruction and ruin. We can almost hear the whispering of the Serpent in the enemy creeping through the field by night, planting weeds while the world slumbers: “You will not die. For God knows that when you eat… your eyes will be opened….” (Gen. 3.4-5).

Surely we are like the sheaves of wheat, straining upward toward the sun, and watered by the dew. And an honest examination of conscience will disclose a million instances of the beguiling voice, seeking to cut us off from the sunlight, whispering in our ear: You don’t need to listen to the voice of the Lord, you have no need of his commandments, you don’t need to serve him, you don’t need to worship him, you don’t need to love him.

And we are individually sown among unique weeds because we are each susceptible to particular beguilings, and particular predispositions to deception. One will be tempted by power, tempted to dominate and control situations and people; another will be tempted by indulgence in food or drink; another will be tempted by greed and the desire for material gain; another will be tempted sexually, to live by a standard other than what has been taught in Scripture. We are each surrounded by inducements to sin that are peculiar to us, to our proclivities and backgrounds; but the form is always the same: You don’t need to listen to what God has said; you don’t need to honor and obey him; you don’t need to love him; you are different; you are exempt; seek fulfillment on your own. That is the substance of the Serpent’s words to Eve, and that is the substance of his words to each of us. We all live in the world, and we are all surrounded by weeds that seek to cut us off from the sunlight and from the dew. And this is how it will be until the close of the age, when “the Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”

But what are we to do in the meantime? We are to do what every successful sheaf of wheat does: to strain upward toward the sun, which is Christ; to drink up the dew, which is his teaching, the catholic faith: we are to grow strong in the Lord and the power of his might, to shoulder out the causes of sin, and to close our ears to the enticements of the world, the flesh, and the devil, knowing that however they may strike our fancy, they lead only and inevitably to the furnace of fire where men weep and gnash their teeth. We are to live in the conviction that Christ has conquered, and that we have but to stand aside, to deny ourselves that the Lord of creation might break forth powerfully and unstoppably within us.

He has already won, we have only to get out of the way of his victory. Yet this is hard. It means self-denial. “For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life” (Matt. 7.14). And this is why we must keep our eyes, our minds and our hearts, fixed resolutely on Jesus Christ – because he is the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, by which we are saved. He alone has conquered, and in him alone is our salvation. Like sheaves of wheat straining ever upward toward the sun, we must look constantly to Jesus, to seek him, to sigh after him, to wait on him. And like watered plants, we must live by the doctrine of the Church, “by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4.4).

And though this is hard, we can stand in the conviction of St. Paul, who said in today’s reading from Romans: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

catholicism 101 -- part 13

Catholicism 101
(The outline of this series is taken from Father Vernon Staley’s book The Catholic Religion.)
Church of the Holy Cross
May 25, 2008
Part 13
Christian Duty: Christian Belief: The Three Great Creeds: Concerning God

• “…maker of heaven and earth.”

• If we go back in time, to the beginning: “In the beginning God…”

• God is first. He precedes all.

• From all eternity, unto endless ages of ages, God is there.

• Remember, though, that the eternity of God means preeminently that he exists outside of time – not that he exists forever “in both directions” (though it means that too).

• Last time we talked a little bit about God as eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so it is.

• God cannot be eternally Father without eternally being Father of the Son. Likewise the Son cannot be eternally Son without being eternally Son of the Father. And the Holy Spirit is their mutual delight, their mutual love.

• This is the inner life of God – the “divine economy” – what we may licitly say about what God is like “inside”.

• The aseity of God means that he alone is self-sufficient, self-sourced.

• He is that greater than which nothing can be conceived.

• He is perfectly perfect (so to speak). He needs nothing to increase his perfection. He lacks nothing.

• Creation is therefore a mystery. It has baffled philosophers since the beginning of philosophy: why is there something rather than nothing?

• Our appeal to God’s eternity (i.e. his timelessness) take the contradiction out of the doctrine of creation, but not the mystery.

• There was never a time at which the created order was not. But “prior” to the beginning there was God alone.

• Why did God create? That’s the mystery.

• It seems we may say that God created, mysteriously, out of love – that before we existed, God loved us.

• It seems also that, because God is eternal, his act of creation is an eternal (timeless) act. There was never a time at which God did not create.

• It seems to be a part of his nature to create.

• So we might say he “owes it to himself” to create – i.e. in order to be who he is.

• In any event: God does create. And he creates “ex nihilo” – out of nothing.

• There was not some block of raw material from which God constructed the universe. There was nothing. And out of nothing God called something into being, by his word.

• “By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.” (Heb. 11.3)

• Cf. Genesis 1: “And God said… and it was so.”

• Cf. Psalm 33.8-9: “Let all the earth fear the Lord; * let all who dwell in the world stand in awe of him. / For he spoke, and it came to pass; * he commanded and it stood fast.”

• This is why God as Creator is differentiated from all finite acts of creation. When we create something, we create it out of something. When God creates, he creates out of nothing.

• God creates as Trinity:

• Genesis 1.1-2 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

• John 1.1ff: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”

• Psalm 33.6: “By the word of the Lord [the Son] were the heavens made, * by the breath of his mouth [the Spirit] all the heavenly hosts.”

• The six days of creation need not be understood as six twenty-four hour periods (how could the day be measured before there was day and night?). Genesis is depicting the hierarchy of creation. Each stage of creation is succeeded by more perfect elements, until we reach the creation of men and women, the apex and pinnacle of God’s created work: finally, moral / spiritual creatures made in the image and likeness of God.

• You can believe in the Biblical account of creation and believe in Evolution.

• The Bible is not a science text. As a datum of communication, it has a different purpose: to disclose God. As such, Genesis is the story of God’s creation, of man’s relationship with God, and of the poisoning of that relationship by sin, and the beginning of God’s plan of redemption. It was not written by modern people obsessed with empiricism and scientific method and whatnot. It is as much (or more) poetry than history in the modern sense of that term.

• In creation we see God’s first language. God reveals himself in his act of creation, and in what he has created. The “analogiam creationis” – or the “analogiam entis”.