Homily for Sunday, 8 March 2015

3rd Sunday in Lent

Readings of the day: Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19:8, 9, 10, 11; 1 Corinthians 1:22-25; John 2:13-25

Here is maybe a difficult question: In whom do we trust? To any of us who have a U.S. bill or coin on hand, I ask us to take it out and look at it. What do our bills and coins say on them about who we trust? They all say, “In God we trust.” This makes our task of knowing in whom we trust easier, right? If our money says, “In God we trust,” it must be true.

If only our answer the question, “In whom do we trust?” were that easy! And even if we are able to answer this question with “God,” are we not then invited to answer some even more difficult questions: In what kind of God do we trust? How do we understand and experience God, so that we are able to trust in God? The trouble, for me at least, is that our readings only help us with these questions if we are attentive to one common way, in our readings today and in all of Scripture, in which God makes God’s self known to us. And what is this common way in Scripture; in our readings today in which God makes God’s self known to us? What is the one consistent trait of God in which we are invited to trust? Stay tuned…

But if we are not so attentive to the one consistent way in which God reveals God’s self to us does God not seem woefully inconsistent to us, especially in the readings we have just heard?

Perhaps when we first hear the Ten Commandments that God gives to Moses on Mount Sinai in our first reading, from Exodus, might our first impression of God be that he is somewhat mean? God promises “mercy down to the thousandth generation” to those who obey his Commandments, but this is only after promising “punishment… down to the third and fourth generations” on those who disobey God’s Commandments. If God were really a God of mercy and kindness, why would God threaten to curse those who disobeyed him at all? It would seem that we cannot trust God to be merciful and kind all the time, depending on how we hear these Ten Commandments.

Our first reading also raises the problem of the anonymous God. The “Big Guy in the Sky” shouts down commands at us from a pillar of fire, just like the one in the Cecil B. DeMille movie, “The Ten Commandments.” God does not seem very friendly. He does not even introduce himself to us by name. God just begins by telling us to do a few things and not to do many other things: “I Am… I Am… I Am the LORD, thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” God is so anonymous; so distant that whoever played God’s voice in “The Ten Commandments” was not included in the credits at the end of the film.

I must admit that God sounded awesome back in 1956. To some of us, Charlton Heston as Moses looked almost as awesome as God back then! And those divine sound effects and fire were well ahead of their time. But, in the Biblical version of the Ten Commandments if not in the movie version, God still may seem distant; anonymous. God shouts forth the Ten Commandments, engraving them with his fingers on stone tablets (I wish my fingers were that strong). God blesses all who obey his Commandments, but curses all who disobey them, all from a distance, as the “I Am” hidden behind a pillar of fire.

I would have difficulty trusting in this kind of God. Would you? I would have difficulty with a God who shouts at us, let alone when people shout at one another. When I was a child, one of my favorite comic strips in the newspaper was called “One Big Happy.” This comic strip centers on six-year-old Ruthie and her eight-year-old brother, Joe. One day, as Ruthie and Joe are arguing, Ruthie says, “Stop shouting at me, Joey! Shouting is against the Ten Commandments”! Joe asks, “Which one”? Ruthie responds, “All of them! They all begin with ‘Thou shout not…”!

And yet if God shouts out the Ten Commandments, God’s shouting, in the person of Jesus, is even worse in our Gospel reading today. God is no longer anonymous and distant as in giving Moses the Ten Commandments. In Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple in John’s Gospel, God is just plain angry: “Take these out of here,” Jesus shouts at the people selling doves near the Temple as he overturns the money changers’ tables, “and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” I cannot say this for sure, because John’s Gospel does not say so, but I wonder how important a role Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple played in his death. At the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry in John, during his first visit to Jerusalem, Jesus becomes violently angry in the Jewish faith’s holiest place, the Temple. Would the cleansing of the Temple, followed by Jesus’ claims in John’s Gospel especially to be God, “I Am,” so offended the people that they would demand that Pontius Pilate have him crucified? Did the people of Israel; the religious leaders in particular, become so unable to trust a God who could be so angry with them that they decided to kill him?

The Cross of Jesus Christ presents us with yet another challenge in knowing and trusting in God. This challenge is at the heart of our second reading, from St. Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians. St. Paul says that “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified.” We also hear, “For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.” Is this not a strange argument to trust in God? Who would trust in a God who is foolish; who is weak; who would submit himself to die a shameful death on a cross? Would St. Paul have been very successful at first in convincing the Corinthians, seekers of “signs” and of “wisdom”; Jews and Greeks alike in his audience, to trust in this kind of God? Somehow I doubt it. But eventually our Christian faith gained enough believers; enough people to trust in God even in stubborn Corinth, and around the world.

Why is this? Again, what is the one consistent trait of God in which we are invited to trust? What is the trait of God in which two thousand years of Christians and our sisters and brothers in the faith of Abraham, the Jews and Muslims, have come to trust? This trait is not that God will only bother us when God wants to shout laws at us, is angry at us, or when we want something from God. This trait is not that God is, in a strange way, so foolish and weak that he is actually wise and strong. These arguments to trust in God are not very persuasive, I do not think.

So why would we trust in God? I think we trust in God the more we understand and experience God as the God who wants a relationship with us; who invites us to strengthen our relationships with one another. God does not give us the Ten Commandments just to be mean to us while retreating into the distance behind a pillar of fire. No, God gives us the Ten Commandments to govern and strengthen right relationships with God and with one another.

Jesus did not clear the money changers and their goods out of the Temple just because he felt especially angry that day. No, Jesus invites us to put aside barriers to right relationship with God and with one another: Wealth when it does not serve people in need but selfishly feeds a “marketplace” mentality, even among people of faith.

And St. Paul speaks to us of a God who so desires relationship with us that, in Christ, he willed to die for us; to save us. And so we, too, “proclaim Christ crucified.” Not only on our coins, but in our hearts and on our lips, we as Christians can and do proclaim, “In God we trust.”  

Homily for Sunday, 9 November 2014– Feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome

Readings of the day: Ezekiel 47:1-2, 8-9, 12; Psalm 46:2-3, 5-6, 8-9; 1 Corinthians 3:9c-11, 16-17; John 2:13-22

What is so significant about a building? Today we celebrate the dedication of the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome. St. John Lateran, not St. Peter’s Basilica, is officially the cathedral church; the most important church building of Rome and the seat of the Bishop of Rome, the pope. It was dedicated, or blessed and recognized as a sacred space for worship by Pope Sylvester I on November 9, 324, 1 690 years ago today.

About one thousand years later, Rome had become a chaotic and violent place, so several popes lived in a city in France called Avignon. When they returned to Rome another seventy years later, the Basilica of St. John Lateran was falling apart, and so popes since then have lived near what is now St. Peter’s Basilica.

Do not worry; there will be no quiz after Mass on the dates, names, and places associated with the Basilica of St. John Lateran. But with the history of St. John Lateran in the background, I want to return to our first question: What is so significant about a building, specifically a building for worship; a church building? Why do we celebrate the dedication of St. John Lateran, a church building to which few of us have been; a place that may seem remote to us?

A related question is this: What is Church? If we were to ask everybody here what “Church” means, would we not hear several answers? Maybe Church is a series of buildings. Maybe the Church is the people gathered to worship, whether in one site or in unity (communion) with all people around the world who worship God; with all Christians; with all Catholics who celebrate the one holy sacrifice of the Mass.  Maybe Church is both the people and the building or buildings…

What is the significance of a building for worship? What is Church? These questions are not easy to answer. The readings we hear today may help us to answer these questions; they may not. The prophet Ezekiel speaks in our first reading of the Temple of Jerusalem. Ezekiel uses rich images reminding us of the Genesis creation stories to describe the temple: Water flowing out in all directions; the streams all joining into a great river that gives abundant life to everything along its banks. The temple; the building; the center of worship that is the source of this life is very significant. The temple, Ezekiel says, is to be the new Eden; the new paradise on earth.

There is a problem with this, though. Has anyone here ever been to Jerusalem? Those of us who have know that Jerusalem is very dry for much of the year. There is no major river near Jerusalem. The Pool of Siloam was next to the temple in ancient times. The valleys around Jerusalem fill with water during the rainy season, but there is no river anywhere nearby. Also, in Ezekiel’s time there was not yet another temple. The first temple had been destroyed and Ezekiel was speaking to people of Israel in exile in Babylon. And so Ezekiel’s prophecy cannot be primarily about the importance of a building. Ezekiel is speaking of the primary importance of the people who would worship in the temple once it had been rebuilt. Ezekiel calls the people of Israel; the Jewish people not to become obsessed with the physical rebuilding of a temple, but to become the dwelling place of God within themselves; to become, with God at the center of their worship and community, the source of new life to the world around them. Ezekiel calls the people to be living stones of a new paradise.

We, too, are called to be living stones of a new paradise, the Kingdom of God. St. Paul reminds us in our second reading as he reminded the Corinthian Christians of his time: “You are God’s building… Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you”? We are, as Church, living stones built upon one “foundation… Jesus Christ.”

Our Gospel reading from John is less direct than St. Paul on this point, but still communicates the same message: We are living stones of a new paradise, the Kingdom of God. But does not John have a strange way of communicating this message? Instead of the images of building and giving life that we hear from the prophet Ezekiel and from St. Paul, Jesus speaks in John’s Gospel of destruction of the temple. Jesus acts in a destructive way, overturning the tables of the money changers and driving them and those selling “oxen, sheep, and doves” from the temple. “Stop making my father’s house a marketplace,” Jesus says, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”

What brings Jesus to such anger? It is tempting perhaps to overlook the cleansing of the temple, which challenges our image of the mild-mannered, peaceful Jesus. Like Ezekiel, Jesus reacts to the people’s obsession with a building; obsession that turns sacred spaces, not only buildings but the hearts of the people, into mere marketplaces: Buy this; consume that; I want more… Cleansing; overturning; destruction of this obsession must take place if we are to become living stones of a new paradise built on Christ as our foundation; if we are to be raised up to be the Church God calls us to be.

Might this message hit close to home for many of us? We at St. Kateri are one parish made up of five church sites. In a short four years, we have done, I think, remarkably well in recognizing that St. Kateri Tekakwitha Parish is more than the buildings here at Christ the King, at St. Thomas the Apostle and St. Salome; St. Margaret Mary and St. Cecilia. We are St. Kateri Parish. We are one parish built on one foundation, Jesus Christ. We are the faithful of one Diocese of Rochester; one universal Church; living stones of a new paradise; the one Kingdom of God that is fully present but, as it were, still under construction.

Our feast today of the Dedication of the Basilica of St. John Lateran, then, is not primarily about a remote church building in Rome. Today is an opportunity to re-dedicate ourselves; to renew our commitment made in baptism and confirmation to be one Church; to allow the Holy Spirit of God to dwell in us more and more deeply.

It is no accident that we are anointed with the same sweet-smelling Oil of Chrism, blessed by the bishop during Holy Week, in baptism and again in confirmation. Chrism is used to anoint newly-ordained priests in holy orders. And the same Chrism is also spread over the altar of when a church building is newly dedicated for worship.

This weekend [after this Mass], we celebrate two baptisms here at Christ the King. We celebrate six baptisms in total this weekend in our parish. We are invited on this Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome to remember our own dedication; our own baptism, when God’s Spirit first dwelt in us, when we, not a building, first became Church, living stones of the Kingdom of God; living stones of a new paradise with Christ as our foundation.