holy cross / low sunday / march 30 2008

"Doubting" Thomas

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

The closing sentence of today’s Gospel reading contains a very profound truth lying at the center of the Christian teaching. It encapsulates the whole PURPOSE of the Gospel:

These [things that Jesus did] are written [in this book] that YOU may believe that Jesus is the Christ – the Messiah – the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.

The purpose of the Gospel is to tell the TRUTH of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. And what God wrought in him, and with him, through him, for him, and by him. The Gospel is most fundamentally the TRUTH of who Jesus is – and this truth contains in itself the life-giving, recreating POWER of God – made perfectly manifest in the resurrection of Jesus Christ – in the fact that THIS MAN who was also the Son of God, who was murdered, CAME BACK TO LIFE, and thus broke the power of death forever – a power which had held everyone until Jesus came and made it otherwise.

These things are written that you may BELIEVE that Jesus is who he says he is, and that believing, you may have LIFE – the same life that he has…. “life in his name.”

The gift that he gives, the gift of “life in his name” is a consequence of his coming to give us everything that he has and everything, in fact, that he IS. “In him was life” (John 1) – so through faith in him, we receive life – the kind of life that is not merely snuffed out by disease or old age or murder.

But we should also notice the other gifts that the Lord gives concomitantly. Two times he says to them: “Peace be with you.” The peace of the Lord is a psychological FACT for those who have “life in his name.” I mean “psychological” in the literal Greek sense of “soulish”. When we come to know ourselves in relation to Jesus – as his disciples, his friends, his brothers – then we will come to know ourselves as HEIRS OF GOD. And as this conviction wakes up in our hearts, then we will have peace – because then we will come to know and to FEEL the truth of what Saint Paul said: “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, not anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8.37ff).

It is this coming-to-know Jesus in faith – as our Lord, as our friend, and most intimately, as our BROTHER – that we find peace and life – the kind rooted in love, which doesn’t grow old or wear out, but casts out fear, and brings healing.

And most importantly: Jesus gives the gift of the Holy Spirit – which is shown to be part and parcel of his gift of himself, the outpouring of his own life – because it is given with his breath, which brings to mind the event of the total outpouring of his life. In Mark’s Gospel Jesus’s death is depicted in terms of his breathing: “And Jesus uttered a loud cry, and breathed his last” (Mark 15.37).

And so we find him here again, having taken up his life again, breathing on the disciples the very inner life of God – the divine breath, the Ruach, the Holy Spirit.

Life, peace, and the Holy Spirit. These gifts we find through faith in Jesus Christ. But this leaves the very practical question of how this WORKS. What is it to have faith in Jesus? How do we get life and peace and the Holy Spirit by faith in Jesus?

In this passage from John, we see in St. Thomas what a response to Jesus IN FAITH looks like. Many people make much of “doubting Thomas” – focusing on Thomas’s incredulity before he had encountered the risen Lord. But in so doing, they risk missing the point. The story is not about Thomas’s doubt before encountering the risen Lord, but about his FAITH AFTER the encounter. Before they saw the risen Lord for themselves, ALL of the disciples experienced the same kind of doubt that Saint Thomas shows here. The notable thing is his faith IN the encounter with Christ. Thomas says “My Lord and my God!” A clear, resounding, unambiguous, and PERSONAL affirmation of the truth of Jesus: Thomas recognizes him to be him whom he claimed to be: both Lord and God.

There are two kinds of responses to the risen Christ depicted in the Bible. When the risen and gloried Christ appears with his wounds having become marks of victory, there is the response of Thomas, on the one hand: where we recognize the victorious actuality of the impossible: that this man in whom we had placed our hope and our trust really is risen, that he really is both Lord and God, that death really has been swallowed up in victory…. Or there is the response of “the tribes of the earth” portrayed in Revelation: Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, everyone who pierced him; and all tribes of the earth will WAIL on account of him” (Rev. 1.7). These are the possibilities: The latter, a doleful realization that Christ has conquered, but that I am a child of the darkness and that I’ve been defeated – but the former, the confession of Thomas, is a recognition that he has conquered, but that he is my Lord and God, and that I therefore have conquered with him.

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

holy cross / easter sermon / march 23 2008

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

Alleluia. Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by dying, and bestowing life on those who were dead.

Christ is indeed risen from the dead. All four of the Gospel accounts are unambiguous on this point. Jesus Christ, the man from Nazareth, the man who was put to death by Pontius Pilate, who had been nailed to a tree, who had had his heart pierced by a lance, who was wrapped in a shroud and put in a grave – THIS man, on the third day after he was murdered, rose again from the dead. He rose and went around, and many of his friends saw him and spoke with him.

This is the central mystery of the Christian faith. In the end, beyond the bluster and the politicking, at the metaphysical bedrock of the faith, to be a Christian means to believe THIS – that the only and eternal Son of God became a man, that he was born of a woman, that he grew up, that he was tortured to death by Roman authority, and that three days later he rose again from the dead.

There are all kinds of reasons not to believe this. It sounds like a myth. And this time of year, there has evolved a little cottage industry of Biblical scholars who will appear on cable television to introduce you to a man they call “the historical Jesus.” He’s usually someone around whom one can pretty easily wrap one’s mind. He’s a sage, a prophet, a rabbi, a liberator, a Marxist revolutionary, a capitalist revolutionary, a proto-feminist, a gay rights activist. The most excruciatingly “relevant” biographical detail I’ve ever heard propounded by the television scholars is that Jesus crossed the Hindu Kush, where he learned from Tibetan gurus and lamas how to be the all-round awesome guy who went on to capture the world’s imagination.

All of this represents a common impulse – the impulse to package the Christ into something marketable, something consumable. We want the Christ to be something around which we can wrap our minds – and we understand politics, we understand the impulse to liberate, the desire for liberation; Tibet captures the imagination. So Jesus, in upper middle class, educated, white culture, takes on our form: he comes to look like us. His values and teachings come to reflect the values and beliefs of people who drink Starbucks coffee and listen to NPR.

But all of this bluster obscures the metaphysical claim lying like a scandal at the center of the Christian faith: that the Son of God became a man, was nailed to a tree until he was dead, and three days later rose again. If you want to figure out whether you can believe something, see if you can believe THAT. It isn’t easy. Its much easier to believe in politics or the esoteric. St. Paul wrote:

“For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor. 1).”

We don’t need to package Christ so that he’s marketable, so that he’s palatable, so that we can wrap our bourgeois minds around the mystery he is. We need to MYTHOLOGIZE him. We need to hold up the central impossibility at the center of our faith. We need to hold it up in front of others in the conviction that it GIVES LIFE, and we need to hold it up in front of ourselves as a challenge for the continual renewal of our own minds.

What difference does it make whether Christ really rose from the grave? It makes all the difference in the world. My favorite 20th century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, wrote the following, in a moment of candor:

“What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought. – If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven. But if I am to be REALLY saved, -- what I need is certainty – not wisdom, dreams, or speculation – and this certainty is faith,. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: It is love that believes the Resurrection. We might say: Redeeming love believed even in the Resurrection; holds fast even to the Resurrection.”

The Resurrection means that what was hitherto the central and equalizing fact of human existence: DEATH – that death has been overcome, once and forever. The resurrection of Jesus means that death no longer holds universal sway – that there was ONE man for whom death was not the last word. It means that the sort of life possessed by this man was the sort of life that is not susceptible to the power of corruption.

And if you have ever faced death, either your own or the death of someone you love, then you know that this would be truly good news: that the horrible, silent question mark standing at the end of every human life, has been taken away, and it in its place is light and life, fulfillment and peace.

Our Easter proclamation is our insistence on exactly this point. That the impossible is, in fact, TRUE. That this myth came to pass on a hillside outside Jerusalem. That Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death. That belief in him and incorporation into his life means immortality. Alleluia.

holy cross / good friday sermon / march 21 2008

This sermon comments on the poem Friday's Child by W.H. Auden.

WH Auden was born in 1907 in York, England. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. After having abandoned the faith at about the age of 13 and dabbling in what he would later called the “Christian heresies” of William Blake and Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, Auden immigrated to America and entered the Episcopal Church and lived out his days as an observant churchman.

Temporally, I think this poem speaks clearly to the experience of Good Friday; and it expresses, I think, a common and appropriate psychological response to Good Friday – common, that is, I think among Christians who approach Holy Week and Good Friday intentionally and prayerfully. The poem also gives theological expression to the contemporary cultural situation within which the Church, and the Church’s people, now find themselves called to bear witness to Jesus. Many, especially in Western Europe and America, see a kind of seismic shift in Western culture after World War II and the Nazi Holocaust. We live in a time when indeed the old “analogies are rot” – wherein the idols of human ways of believing, at place sense the enlightenment, have been violently shaken and perhaps overthrown entirely. Think of the sure confidence of secular culture, even in America, beginning really with the Puritan settlement of New England – the kind of certainty that found expression in Manifest Destiny, in the pervasive confidence of enlightened rationalism coming out of the Protestant Reformation, and in the political systems laid on the foundations of such people as Blackstone, Locke, and Montesquieu – or, nearer to us, as the founding fathers of the United States.

Friday’s Child is dedicated to the memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a contemporary of Auden’s. Bonhoeffer, as many of you probably know, was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who studied at Union (Theological) Seminary in New York. His denomination had actively opposed the Nazi rise to power, and Bonhoeffer returned to Germany out of a conviction that he was called to share the fate of his people. As the situation deteriorated Bonhoeffer became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. In 1943 he was arrested after money used to help Jews escape to Switzerland was traced to him. The contours of the plot were uncovered and after being shuffled through various prisons and concentration camps for a year and a half, Bonhoeffer was executed in 1945 at Flossenburg, three weeks before the liberation of Berlin. Bonhoeffer had written movingly about the cost of being a disciple of Jesus. He said

…cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must the asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: “ye were bought at a price, and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us.

Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.

And Bonhoeffer was richly filled with God’s costly grace. His martyrdom was at once obscene and beautiful in the way that only a martyrdom can be – like our Lord’s own suffering and death. At dawn on April 9, 1945, Bonhoeffer was stripped naked in his cell and tortured and ridiculed by the guards. He was led naked into the prison yard where he was made to hanged by piano wire from a meat hook. His hanging lasted half an hour before he died.

In the words of Auden’s poem: this kind of cruelty, perpetrated on such an enormous scale in our time, is what has left all the analogies rot upon which our senses hitherto based belief…. When we are faced with such cruelty, such devastation, such suffering – we can have the experience of being cognitively stripped – of being denuded of all the ground-rules of our believing: all those things that we think God is – like justice and goodness and beauty and mercy and compassion and love – we can find all of that stripped away, mocked, obscenely inverted, or entirely evacuated from our experience, left to hang and to suffocate. And we don’t have to run up against something as spectacular as a genocide to have this experience of epistemic devastation. It can happen – indeed for us it usually happens – in the middle of something as cruelly mundane as cancer or a car crash or Alzheimer’s or a suicide in the family.

At such times – all that we’ve learned from Scripture or heard in church rings hollow. It has no foothold in the soul. And this can be the most painful thing for a Christian – just when we need the Lord’s consolation and mercy the most, to find that its disappeared, along with the Lord himself, withdrawn, having descended to the dead – and we have to endure having learned “all proofs or disproofs that we tender / of his existence are returned / unopened to the sender.”

Mother Therese had this experience. Some of you may have read the recent book of her letters and writings called “Come be my Light” – where we learn that her spiritual life was a rarely mitigated experience of this kind of epistemic divestment, for over fifty years. Fifty years of earnest and constant seeking after the Lord, and his constant withdrawal beyond the horizon of our apprehension. The Lover in the Song of Solomon says:

I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not;
I called him, but he gave no answer.

The endurance of such things is precisely the via dolorosa, the way of suffering: its what it is to take up your cross daily and trudge with Jesus up to Golgotha, to choose with him moment by moment continually to plunge into the darkness of psychic desolation – the sword of grief piercing your own heart also, in the awful emptiness and silence. In the words in Auden’s poem: Meanwhile, a silence on the cross, / As dead as we shall ever be, / speaks of some total gain or loss, / and you and I are free / to guess from the insulted face / just what appearances he saves / by suffering in a public place / a death reserved for slaves”.

It is precisely this freedom to guess – or as Auden calls it at the beginning of the poem, this freedom “to choose” that’s so horrifying, and yet which is God’s own most awesome gift to us. Christians encounter it in a way that MATTERS in these times of desolation and suffering. Because THEN we’re really stripped, then the choice is a REAL choice: not based on rotten analogies, but based on what von Balthazar called “the obedience of a corpse.” The question every believer must ask himself is: Who do YOU say that I am. Sooner or later we will be asked this question at Golgotha, at the place of a skull. Who do you say that I am? This corpse hanging on a tree – who abandoned all his good and useful teaching, all his miracle working in Galilee – who set his eyes toward Jerusalem, and came here for THIS. Who do you say that I am?

I want to leave you with two thoughts. Today we are left in silence before the cross – we end this liturgy with the really horrifying fact that the Lord comes into his Kingdom on the cross: IESUS NAZARENUS REX IUDEORUM.

I would like to leave you at the foot of the cross. But I would like to point out that if you are at the foot of the cross, you are with Mary. If you’re at the foot of the cross, you’re standing there with Mary. Our task is to hold to Jesus in faith, with Mary, even here. Mary’s greatness lies in the fact that she held on in faith to Jesus. We keep finding her in the Gospels, next to Jesus, despite her constant discovery of the rotten analogies: depite having constantly to face the identity of her Son outpacing her ability to understand, hearing him say “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I would be in my father’s house?” and “Woman what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come,” and “Who are my mother and my brothers? Everyone who hears the word of God and keeps it is my sister and my brother and my mother…” And finally on the cross she holds on in faith even as the most intimate analogies are stripped away. Msgr. Romano Guardini said: “…at last [Jesus] severed the very bond of son-ship, appointing another, the man beside her under the cross, to take his place! On the highest, thinnest pinnacle of creation, Jesus stood alone, face to face with the justice of God. [And Mary’s greatness is in that] From the depths of her co-agony on Golgotha, Mary, with a final bound of faith, accepted this double separation – and once again stood beside him!”

Our vocation is – with Mary – to confess Jesus to be as Messiah even in the face of the cross’s awful silence, to hear in that silence the voice of God’s total self-disclosure, and to know Jesus to be our king and savior by knowing “his suffering in a public place / a death reserved for slaves.”

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

holy cross / maundy thursday sermon / march 20 2008

The outline of this sermon comes from the Instructions to the Newly Baptized of St. Cyril of Jerusalem.

Tonight we celebrate Maundy Thursday. As I mention every year, the word “Maundy” comes from the Latin phrase “Mandatum novum” – or New Commandment – the phrase from St. John’s Gospel, where the Lord says “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” And the Epistle of 1 John, John writes “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God.”

The Lord’s MANDATUM NOVUM, his new commandment, is that are to love one another as he has loved us, because love is from God. If we love, then we show that we are born of God, and that we know God.

Tonight we celebrate the institution of the holy Eucharist. It is a fitting celebration to go under the name “Maundy Thursday” – as it is in fact the institution of the Lord’s own loving self-gift. It is mystically axiomatic that the Eucharist is the fountain of love, because it is the sacramental prism through which our Lord’s own self-gift is refracted, by which he continually gives himself to us – in which the sacrifice of the Cross is re-presented to us – presented to us again and anew.

For God is love (1 John 4.16), and Jesus is God. When Jesus gives himself, it is the self0-gift of God, who is love. In the Eucharist therefore we have the divine gift of pure love to and for us. In this respect St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians:

“For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

It is the Lord himself who took bread and said “this is my body”, who took wine and said “this is my blood.” The teaching about the Lord’s real presence in the Eucharist is not some bizarre doctrine invented by men. It is simply a reiteration of what the Lord himself claimed. We may therefore approach the sacrament in the confidence that we are communing with God in love. For it is God’s own mandate, part and parcel of God’s own self-disclosure.

And indeed the Lord did not equivocate. He did not say that this is like his body, or merely a symbol of his body. In fact, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you, he says. And John says that “After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.”

These are difficult truths, because they are spiritual truths. These are truths apprehended by faith. All the most central truths of Christianity are like this, including the most fundamental truth: that Jesus Christ, the only and eternal Son of God, was born of a Virgin, and died for our sins on the Cross. When people tell me they have trouble believing in our Lord’s real presence in the Eucharist, my reaction is that THAT is not the difficult teaching – the difficult teaching is that God himself gave himself to us and for us on the cross, that God, who made the heavens and the earth, was nailed to a tree and died. If you can believe that – and you HAVE TO believe that to be a Christian – then surely you can believe that the gift of the Cross is refracted – is re-represented – in the Eucharist.

The Lord gave himself to us once for all on the Cross – but his gift of himself on the Cross is renewed at every mass, on every altar, every day, in every part of the world. For he promised that he would be with us ALWAYS – because that is what true love is: the real and abiding and mutual presence of the lover and the beloved. It was the Lord’s will not to give himself for us once, and then to cease to give, but to give himself for us not only once, but always and forever. And so he gave us the Eucharist: the glass in which the eyes of faith apprehend the all-overcoming love of God in Jesus Christ.

Inspired by the Holy Spirit, David sang in the OT of “bread which strengthens our heart, and oil which gives us a shining countenance”. He thus prophesied of the Eucharist – the nuptial feast which gives us strength, because it is God’s gift of himself to us, and which makes the countenance of the faithful glad.

When we, with faith, receive Christ’s gift to us, we allow him to build himself up within us – we allow his grace (which is his own self-gift) to strengthen our faith, to knit us ever more closely to himself. This is how Christ is honored in our bodies (Phil. 1.20), and how we “become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1.4), how we, as St. Paul says, “attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4.13).

And this is why these two mysteries are yoked together: the MANDATUM NOVUM, the Lord’s command that we love one another as he has loved us, and the institution of the Eucharist. Because the Eucharist is the fountain of God’s love: where the once and forever gift of his Son on Calvary is perpetually given to us and renewed within us.

Therefore “let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12.1-2).

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

catholicism 101 -- part 7/8

CATHOLICISM 101

(The outline of this series is taken from Father Vernon Staley’s book The Catholic Religion.)

Church of the Holy Cross
March 9, 2008

Part 7
Christian Duty – Initiation into the Life of Grace / The (beginning of the) Sacramental Life

- We have seen what the Church is – that it is the sphere within which God is active, the sphere of grace; that it is the home of the Truth. But what about individuals? How do we stand in relation to the Church?

• We are concerned with those who are within the Church (this is, after all, a discussion within a church).

• ALL PEOPLE (including those who are not members of the Church), from our point of view, should maintain an open and suppliant heart. They should constantly seek the truth for its own sake, honestly search for God, and do good.

• But we are after SALVATION, union with God, eternal fulfillment, deliverance from death. What then must we do?

• “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. HE WHO BELIEVES AND IS BAPTIZED WILL BE SAVED; but he who does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover" (Mark 16.15ff).

• But we all see in this baptism that its impossible just to believe in the sense of passive acknowledgement.

• “But some one will say, "You have faith and I have works." Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith. You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe -- and shudder. Do you want to be shown, you shallow man, that faith apart from works is barren?” (James 2.18ff).

• Its not enough just to “believe” in the sense of believing something to be the case. That’s not the what the Scriptures mean. They mean FAITH – which is ACTIVE.

• “Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses” (1 Timothy 6.12).

• The life of faith is a FIGHT. Its something we DO. It’s a “taking hold” of eternal life. It doesn’t stop with “making a good confession”.

• There are two stages of faith:

• “the good confession” – cf. the man born blind from John 9: “Lord I believe!” AND HE WORSHIPPED HIM (John 9.38); or the father of the epileptic / mute child from Mark 9: “Lord I believe! Help my unbelief!” (Mark 9.24); or Mary and Martha and Lazarus from John 11: “if you would believe you would see the glory of God” (John 11.40).

• This is essentially acknowledging that Jesus is who he claims to be – the Christ, the Son of the Living God, he who is coming into the world, etc. Acknowledging his power.

• Then there is “fighting the good fight of the faith” – which follows on from the “good confession”. It is entailed by the acknoweldgement of Christ’s power over all. Because if he has power over everything, then he has power over YOU. Fighting the good fight means acquiescing to his power in YOUR life, your particular circumstances. Its not enough just to “believe” passively – “even the demons believe – and shudder.”

• So the Lord says “signs will accompany those who believe” in the more complete sense of “believing” – because the more complete sense of belief means making oneself susceptible to the power of Christ in your particular life. Therefore “you will take up serpents,” and speak in tongues and heal the sick, etc.

• This is symbolic. We should not be snake-handlers. It means that the Lord of Creation is now your Lord – through FAITH. You are no longer a slave to natural power, but to supernatural power. You are prone now to grace, you look for it, you find it in your life, you take hold of it, you make use of it to be transformed.

• This transformation is a transformation to make us able to see the power and glory of God, and to dwell in it (in HIM) forever. “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12.2).

• 1) Faith, 2) Baptism (from the Lord’s words in Mark 16, above).

• Baptism is sacramental initiation into the sphere of Grace – which is Christ himself.

• “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (Romans 6.3)

• To be baptized means to be mystically incorporated into the sphere of divine power which begins the supernatural transformation of your personhood. Because baptism is baptism “INTO HIS DEATH” – that is, into the place where divine power delivers EVEN FROM DEATH – into Christ himself (because he IS the Kingdom of God – the place where God’s will is carried out, where his power is manifest): “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6.4).

• “And you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead” (Colossians 2.12).

• “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body -- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free -- and all were made to drink of one Spirit…. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Corinthians 12, passim).

• And “the Body” is the one (catholic) Church (cf. Colossians 1.18 & 24).

• When we are baptized, we make solemn vows (or they are made on our behalf, and we later ratify and renew them for ourselves). See Book of Common Prayer p. 302.

being catholic -- what it means according to the bible

We believe in one… Catholic Church.

The word “catholic” comes into English via the Latin cognate “catholicus” which in turn comes from the Greek cognate “katholikos”. This Greek word comes from the elision of two Greek words: the preposition “kata” and the noun “holos”. “Kata holos” means according to, or in accord with, the whole. In what follows I will give some remarks about my intuition that CATHOLICISM, as such, is the immanent manifestation of the life of God. To be catholic is to participate in the oneness of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to share in each of the divine persons being mysteriously in “accord with the whole” of the Godhead.

The origins of catholicity are to be sought in the final chapters of the Gospel of Saint John – that portion which Father Raymond Brown called “The Book of Glory” – chapters 13-21. The center of this section of John is our Lord’s “high priestly prayer” which he prayed the night before he suffered, at the Last Supper.

The first thing to notice about our Lord’s high priestly prayer is that he was praying in the presence of the Apostles (see Mat. 26.20) – the eleven disciples (Judas having left) whom he had chosen “to be with him and to be sent out to preach and have authority to cast out demons” (Mark 3.14f), from among the many who followed him. In the Lord’s high priestly prayer, we see the interpenetration of the Church’s unity and its apostilicity: the Lord is praying for the Apostles specifically, saying “And now I am no more in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to thee. Holy Father, keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.”

So we may see that the unity of the Church is not something that is crated by the Church’s members. Rather it is a fact granted to the Apostles by our Lord’s prayer for them – and this unity is constituted by the unity of God himself. We are one (IF we are one) because we have been given the life of God, who is a Trinity of persons in unity of substance. The Church is one because God is one, and because God has poured out his life to and for the Church: “The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one” (Jn. 17.22).

Note our Lord’s reference to the gift of glory. The glory which he gives to the Apostles is nothing less than the glory he has received from the Father: “I glorified thee on earth, having accomplished the work which thou gavest me to do; and now, Father, glorify thou me in thy own presence with the glory which I had with thee before the world was made” (Jn. 17.4f).

We should notice that the gift of unity is an outgrowth, a consequence, of our Lord’s gift of HIMSELF to and for the Church. In John 6 he says: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh." Therefore the Church is constituted at once as ONE, as Apostolic, and as Eucharistic. It should be no surprise then that the Lord prays this prayer within the context of the Last Supper – at the institution of the Eucharist: the night when he took bread and wine, blessed God, and gave it to his disciple saying “This is my Body / This is my Blood… DO THIS…”

So likewise we can see what Saint Paul means when he chastises the Church at Corinth, when he writes to them: “What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not. For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this…” (1 Cor. 11.22f). So Saint Paul also says: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” To share in the Eucharist is to announce one’s participation in the Body of Christ, which is the Church (Col. 1.18). Hence we can see the multiplicity of related meanings of the word “communion” – as in “Anglican Communion” on the one hand, and “Holy Communion” on the other.

….

In 1948 the Archbishop of Canterbury received the report of a commission on Catholicity subtitled: A Study in the Conflict of Christian Traditions in the West”. Members of the panel which produced the report included such Anglican Catholics as the poet TS Eliot, the great liturgical scholar and Benedictine monk Dom Gregory Dix, and Michael Ramsey, who would himself go on to become Archbishop of Canterbury. In the opening of their report, they wrote: “It is often remembered that in the seventeenth chapter of St. John our Lord prayed for the unity of His disciples: it is sometimes forgotten, however, in our modern discussions that this prayer for their unity was linked with His prayer for their sanctification in the truth: 'Sanctify them in Thy truth; Thy word is truth'. The unity of Christians, coming as it does from the unity of the Father and the Son, is interwoven with their sanctification in the truth which our Lord delivers.”

So returning to the Book of Glory, our Lord prays not only for the Apostles, but for “those who believe in me through their word” (Jn. 17.20). He prays that those who believe in him THROUGH THE TEACHING OF THE APOSTLES might be one with the Apostles, and thereby one with himself, and thereby one with the Father. But this is all through the ministry of the WORD, through the Apostles’ teaching, because the Apostles are given authority to teach what the Lord himself taught and to do the works that he himself did. In the closing verses of the Gospel of Saint Matthew, the Lord says: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, TEACHING THEM TO OBSERVE ALL THAT I COMMANDED YOU; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age." And Christ’s teaching, his commandments, his “word,” comes from the Father: “…I do nothing on my own authority but speak thus as the Father taught me” (Jn. 8.28). And the Lord says of the Apostles: “I have given them the words which thou gavest me, and they have received them…” (Jn. 17.8), and “they have kept thy word” (Jn. 17.6). The Lord says clearly that to hear those whom he sends is to hear him; and likewise to reject those whom he sends is to reject him: “He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Lk. 10.16). The unity of the Church is the unity of the Lord with the Apostles – “I in them and thou in me” (Jn. 17.23) – and it is therefore not to be taken for granted; it is a gift, and it is given not just to anyone, but expressly to “those who believe in me through their word” (Jn. 17.20).

The Church’s unity – its oneness – therefore comes through its share in and its reception of the words of God (the theou logoi or, loosely speaking, a unity of theology), which the Father has given to the Son, and which the Son has given to the Apostles, and which the Apostles have preached to “all nations”. The Father’s gift of his Word to the Son is constitutive of the Father’s having eternally begotten the Son. That is, the Father’s gift of the Word to the Son is an eternal gift, and a gift so tightly given and so closely received, that it constitutes the very essence of God as Son. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn. 1.1). This, again, can be seen in the Nicene Creed: the Word of God is “begotten of his Father before all worlds,” “of one substance with the Father,” and “very God of very God.”

Christ’s gift of the Word of God to the Apostles is shown to be the essence of the oneness of the Church as the Body of Christ. As I have mentioned, this discourse in John is presented in the context of the institution of the Eucharist, where the incarnate Word gives HIMSELF to the Apostles: “This is my body which is given for you” (Lk. 22.19). And therefore the Church rightly recognizes the yoking of preaching the Word and ministering the sacraments: “Give grace, O heavenly Father, to all bishops and other ministers, that they may… set forth thy true and lively Word, and rightly and duly administer thy holy Sacraments” (BCP p. 329). In full expressions of the Church, therefore, we recognize that to proclaim the Word of God is to imitate Christ in his offering himself to the Father, because the Word of God is not just the abstract teaching of the Apostles, and not just the Bible, but rather as John 1.14 says “the Word became flesh.” If to preach the Gospel is to proclaim the Word of God (and it is), then it is not merely to proclaim a teaching (it is that; but its not JUST that), but it is even more fundamentally to offer the flesh of Jesus Christ. The whole reason for preaching, for proclaiming the Word, is because it is the enterprise of holding up the unique, which is to say the one flesh of Jesus Christ who is the Word of God: “‘and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.’ He said this to show by what death he was to die” (Jn. 12.32). When Jesus speaks of his being "lifted up" he is speaking, in essence, of his proclamation of himself as the Word of God.

The unity and apostilicity and catholicity of the Church are therefore all part and parcel of baptized believers in Jesus being “consecrated in the Truth.” The Lord prays: “Sanctify them in the truth; thy word is truth. As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be consecrated in truth. I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (Jn. 17.17ff).

And this unity is the essence of the Eucharistt. It is a perpetuation of the Apostolic power of lifting up the Word of God, which has become unique flesh. To offer the Word is therefore to offer a spotless and immaculate victim, the flesh of the man Jesus of Nazareth, who is of one substance with God the Father. Preaching the gospel and offering the Eucharistic sacrifice are forever and inextricably linked precisely because God’s perfect offering of his own life to humankind is forever and inextricably linked to the offering of perfect human nature to the Father in Christ’s “one oblation of himself, once offered” on the cross. In the crucified flesh of Jesus Christ there is at last perfect intercourse between God and man – a perfect, loving, simultaneous, and mutual outpouring of natures – because it is the ONE Christ who is crucified, and “although he be God and man, yet he is not two, but one Christ” (Athanasian Creed). Christ’s sacrifice is the loving and simultaneous self-offering of God to man, and of man to God.

But it is realized immanently only by those whose faith in Christ is circumscribed by the teaching of the Apostles, viz. "those who believe in me through their word.”

A final note: the realization of the Church as One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, is both the reality which the Lord has bestowed on the fellowship of those who believe in him and who have been baptized into his Body, and it is also an eschatological vision, something that will not be fully manifest until the end, when he returns in glory to judge the living and the dead, at the vindication of the Lamb of God as conqueror and judge. In a sense then, we like the Jews are “waiting for Messiah” – whose age is marked by peace and well-being, an abundance of wine on the lees, and fat things full of marrow, the curing of disease, and the resurrection of the dead. As the visionary of Revelation says: “Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, every one who pierced him; and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen.”

So we are now waiting for him to come again in glory and to manifest what he has already in himself and within his followers: namely, conquer death. Then, and perhaps only then, will it be evident just how it is that we are one as he and the father are one, how it is that our faith and devotion are KATA HOLOS – in accord with the whole Body of Christ, and therefore in accord with the essential and eternal fellowship that belongs to God alone – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

catholicism 101 -- part 6/8

CATHOLICISM 101

(The outline of this series is taken from Father Vernon Staley’s book The Catholic Religion.)

Church of the Holy Cross
February 24, 2008

Part 6
What is the Church FOR? (cont’d.)

• The Catholic Church is the HOME OF THE TRUTH.

• Recall what happened in the fall. Humans became blinded by psychological (= “soulish”) disorder. St. Paul in Romans (1.21 & 25): “for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened…. they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator…”

• So humanity, almost since the very beginning, has lived in a kind of darkness and delusion.

• But Christ came to dispel that darkness, and to reveal once more the truth about God, and more than that: the Truth OF God. So Saint John says of Jesus’s birth: “The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world” (John 1.9).

• And again he writes: “Yet I am writing you a new commandment, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining” (1 John 2.8). And John goes on to say the “new commandment” is to obey Jesus. Yet St. John also says that this is really “no new commandment, but an old commandment which you had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word which you have heard” (1 John 2.7).

• Jesus – all that he taught, and what’s more, his VERY PERSON – that is to say, all that he IS – is the divine Truth that was from the beginning. He is himself the Word of Truth that was in the beginning with God and that was God (cf. John 1).

• So his coming in the flesh means the advent (the arrival) of the divine Truth in its fullness, in its completeness. Jesus discloses God himself – what God has, what he wants, and who he is. There is nothing more to be disclosed of God than what is revealed in and by and through the Son.

• So St. John says that Jesus was “full of grace and Truth” (John 1.14).

• And Jesus himself says “I am the Truth” (John 14.6).

• And Jesus delivers the Truth in its fullness to the Church – because the Church is the custodian and guardian of Christ’s presence in the World. Catholics (and Orthodox), when they pass a church, will cross themselves – because Christ himself dwells within and is proclaimed within. (He is sacramentally present in the Tabernacle behind the Altar, and that Sacramental Presence is a sign the much deeper implications of his promise “I am with you always even to the end of the ages” (Matthew 28.20)).

• To the Apostles, Jesus says: “And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for HE DWELLS WITH YOU, and will be IN YOU. I will not leave you desolate; I will come to you” (John 14.16ff).

• Again, Jesus says to the Apostles: “But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14.26).

• And again: “When the SPIRIT OF TRUTH comes, he will guide you into ALL THE TRUTH; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16.13ff).

• So Saint Jude writes to the Church: “contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1.3).

• And Saint Paul writes to Timothy (1 Tim. 3.15) of “the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the PILLAR AND BULWARK OF THE TRUTH.”

• The Church as the home of the Truth is a consequence of Christ’s promised and abiding presence, to which the angels and God himself bear witness in the book of Revelation (Chapter 21): “And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband [this is the Church: see Ephesians, below]; and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, THE DWELLING OF GOD IS WITH MEN. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away." And he who sat upon the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new." Also he said, "Write this, for THESE WORDS ARE TRUSTWORTHY AND TRUE." And he said to me, "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the fountain of the water of life without payment. He who conquers shall have this heritage, and I will be his God and he shall be my son. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, as for murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and sulphur, which is the second death."

• The “bride adorned for her husband” is the Church. In Ephesians 5, Paul writes: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.”

• This, by the way, sets the standard for Christian husbands. What is a husband’s love according to the Word of the Lord? Giving yourself up for your wife – GIVING YOUR LIFE (dying) FOR HER. Devoting your life, your work, all that you do, to her and for her – as an icon of Christ’s love for us. That (and only that) is the marriage vocation for Christians.

• And about the “lake that burns with fire and sulfur” – that is because the God of Truth “is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12.29), and because the vindication of “him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1.23) will mean that all will be consumed by God’s fire in the end; and hence the refusal to live in the Truth means being tormented by God’s presence, rather than being purged and transformed by it. “Where can I go then from your Spirit? where can I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139.6). Hell is the PRESENCE of God (not his absence) for those who obstinately go on in darkness, who “lie and do not live according to the truth” (1 John 1.6). But “if what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you will abide in the Son and in the Father” (1 John 2.24).

• In a sense, then, the WHOLE POINT of the Church is to teach the truth. So that humanity may be delivered from the darkness that sets us stumbling and keeps us bound in falsehood and deceit and violence and death. The Church was instituted by the Lord SO THAT the dwelling of God would be with men – that his presence might be healing and merciful and salutary. That we might be consumed by the divine fire in love rather than judgment.

• A final point (John 8.31ff): “"If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." They answered him, "We are descendants of Abraham, and have never been in bondage to any one. How is it that you say, `You will be made free'?" Jesus answered them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not continue in the house for ever; the son continues for ever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”