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February 1 - February 27, 2021
Don’t come talk to me of God, come to my door with religious pamphlets, or ask me whether I’m saved. Hell holds no threat more agonizing than the harsh reality of my own life. I swear to you that the fires of hell seem more inviting than the bone-deep cold of my own life. And don’t talk to me of church. What does the church know of my despair—barricaded behind its stained-glass windows against the likes of me? I once sought repentance and community within your walls, but I saw your God reflected in your faces as you turned away from the likes of me. Forgiveness was never given me. The healing
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The last thing that Jesus asked of us before he ascended, was that we go to all peoples and nations and preach his presence.22 However, that must be understood precisely in an incarnational, not theistic, way. The challenge is not, as the woman just quoted makes clear, to pass out religious tracts, establish religious television networks to make Jesus known, or even to try to baptize everyone into Christianity. The task is to radiate the compassion and love of God, as manifest in Jesus, in our faces and our actions.
When Israel’s great prophets are called, God initiates them through an interesting ritual. They are asked to physically eat the scroll of the law, to eat their scriptures.23 What a powerful symbolism! The idea is that they should digest the word and turn it into their own flesh so that people will be able to see the word of God in a living body rather than on a dead parchment. The task of taking God to others is not that of handing somebody a Bible or some religious literature, but of transubstantiating God, the way we do with the food we eat. We have to digest something and turn it,
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I think this idea better fits what Jesus meant when He said we must eat his flesh and drink his blood. We must take His life inside of us and allow it to nourish us and become part of our flesh - our lives.
Jesus taught us that the kingdom of God works like yeast. We are asked to let the things he taught transform us, from the inside, like yeast transforms dough and as summer transforms a tree. Our digestion of the word of God must make us look different physically. Thus, our first task in preaching is a silent one. We must transubstantiate God in order to give a human face to divine compassion and forgiveness. Only rarely need we preach using words.
He continues to roll back the stone from the caves we entomb him in.”
Spirituality, as we have already said, is not a law to be obeyed, but a presence to be seized, undergone, and given flesh to.
in the Western world, an ever-growing number of people are questioning the validity of the church and are seeking to find God, moral guidance, and to express themselves religiously outside the walls of the Christian churches.
Our theological libraries are full of excellent books on ecclesiology, but church attendance continues to plummet. Good theology is important, but something else too is needed, a better spirituality of ecclesiology, better practical, personal reasons why, to have a kingdom, we want and need a church.
The Church Is the People … Apostolic Community Before all else, the church is the people. Long before there should be any mention of buildings, ministers, priests, bishops, popes, organizations, institutions, or moral codes, there should be mention of a community of hearts and souls, previously separated by many things, coming together.
To be in apostolic community, church, is not necessarily to be with others with whom we are emotionally, ideologically, and otherwise compatible. Rather it is to stand, shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand, precisely with people who are very different from ourselves and, with them, hear a common word, say a common creed, share a common bread, and offer a mutual forgiveness so as, in that way, to bridge our differences and become a common heart.
Apostolic community is not had by joining others who share our fears and, with them, barricading ourselves against what threatens us. It is had when, on the basis of something more powerful than our fears, we emerge from our locked rooms and begin to take down walls.
Thus, when it is the Spirit of God and not fear that unites us in community, no distance of time or place can separate us.”6
Church community can never be a functional substitute for emotional and sexual intimacy. It is not intended to be. One shouldn’t go to church looking for a lover.
d. ONE ROOF, ONE ETHNICITY, ONE DENOMINATION, ONE RULE BOOK, OR ONE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER Apostolic community is also not a question of simply living together in one house, being united by common blood, being part of a single religious denomination, having a common rule book, or being bound by a common book of prayer.
One of the things that apostolic community is often confused with, but is not, is the togetherness that is brought about by having a common mission.
But a common mission, precisely, creates a team—to win the Superbowl, to produce a product, to police the city, to run an organization, or even to catechize our children—but it does not, of itself, make for apostolic community. Church community must be founded on something else.
What? If church community is not to take its foundation in like-mindedness, a shared fear, the need for intimacy in our lives, a common roof, a common ethnicity, a common denomination, or a shared mission, on what basis does it found itself? On gathering around the person of Christ and sharing his Spirit.
Hence the basis for Christian ecclesial community, church, is a gathering around the person of Jesus Christ and a living in his Spirit. And that Spirit too is not some vague bird or abstract tonality. The spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, is defined in scripture as charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, fidelity, mildness, and chastity.7 Living in these virtues is what binds us into community in such a way that we are immune from separation by distance, temperament, race, color, gender, ideology, social status, history, creed, or even death. All who live in these virtues are
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It demands that there be some real sharing of life together, namely, that we pray together; that we celebrate our rites of passage together; that we celebrate some of our everyday joys, fears, and feasts together; that we are responsible to each other and open to each other as regards mutual correction and challenge; that we are responsible together for the ministry of the church; and that we have some common sharing of finances (even if this means only that we contribute financially to the support of our local church and its projects).
2. The Church Is the Rope—Baptism and Conscription The church is the people, but it is also the rope that consecrates us and takes us where we would rather not go. To be baptized into a Christian church is to be a consecrated, displaced person. What is implied in that?
call”). Thus, ekklesia, church, literally means to “be called out of.” But what are we called out of? We are called out of what our normal agenda would be if we had not come upon the traffic accident, seen the woman being stabbed outside our window, or, in our case, met the person and the gospel of Christ and the community of faith on earth. Church puts a rope around us, takes away our freedom, and takes us where we would rather not, but should, go.
3. The Church Is the Sarx—the Exzemed Body of Christ “Unless you eat my flesh, you cannot have life within you.” When Jesus says this, as we have already seen, he is referring to his sarx, his flawed, exzemed body, as it is met in the community of believers and he is mandating that we must also deal with this if we wish to deal with God. In essence, this means two things: First, that community is a constitutive element within the Christian quest. My task is not to walk to God as an individual but to be within a community that is worshiping God. Second, what is taught here is that, in this
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To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of soul … because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves.
“In my Father’s house there are many rooms.”16 This is not a description of a certain geography in heaven but a revelation of the breadth of God’s heart. The bosom of God is not a ghetto. God has a catholic heart—in that catholic means universal, wide, all-encompassing. The opposite of a catholic is a fundamentalist, a person who has a heart with one room. Thus, any spirituality of the church needs to emphasize wide loyalties and inclusivity.
The task of church is to stand toe to toe, shoulder to shoulder, and heart to heart with people absolutely different from ourselves—but who, with us, share one faith, one Lord, one baptism, and one God who is Father and Mother of all.
To attempt to make spirituality a private affair is to reject part of our very nature and walk inside of a loneliness that God himself has damned.
Spirituality is not a private search for what is highest in oneself but a communal search for the face of God. The call of God is double: Worship divinity and link yourself to humanity. There are two great, equal commandments: Love God and love your neighbor. There can be no real Christian spirituality divorced from ecclesiology. To deal with Christ is to deal with church.
In community the truth emerges and fantasies are dispelled.
Because Ten Thousand Saints Have Told Me So I go to church because by far the majority of good and faith-filled persons that I know go there. Moreover, not only do they go to church but they tell me that whatever goodness and faith they carry is, in an essential way, fostered there.
I go to church because I realize the impotence of my individuality, the limits of my private self. Alone, standing apart from community, I am no more powerful than my own personality and charisma,
As a world organization—with a heart for justice, peace, and the poor—it is far from perfect, but it is the best of a bad lot and it offers positive hope. The first thing I should do, if I hope to help bring about some justice and peace on this planet, is to begin to dream with others within a worldwide body of persons committed to the same dream.
Few things—and we certainly all admit this—stretch the heart as painfully as does church community. Conversely, when we avoid the pain and mess of ecclesial encounter to walk a less painful private road or to gather with only persons of our own kind, the heart need not and generally does not stretch. Going to church is one of the better cardiovascular spiritual exercises available.
the most central of all mysteries is the paschal one, the mystery of suffering, death, and transformation. In Christian spirituality, Christ is central and, central to Christ, is his death and rising to new life so as to send us a new Spirit.
What is the paschal mystery of Christ? How do we enter that mystery and live it?
Pentecost has just taken place because, as scripture tells us, the Holy Spirit is not a generic spirit, but a spirit that is given to each of us in a most particular way for the particular circumstances that each of us finds himself or herself in.
These words of Jesus define the paschal mystery; namely, in order to come to fuller life and spirit we must constantly be letting go of present life and spirit.
We must distinguish between two kinds of death, two kinds of life, and between life and spirit.
two kinds of death: There is terminal death and there is paschal death.
There are also two kinds of life: There is resuscitated life and there is resurrected life.
Resurrected life is not this. It is not a restoration of one’s old life but the reception of a radically new life.
The paschal mystery, as we shall see shortly, is a process of transformation within which we are given both new life and new spirit. It begins with suffering and death, moves on to the reception of new life, spends some time grieving the old and adjusting to the new, and finally, only after the old life has been truly let go of, is new spirit given for the life we are already living.
Put into a more colloquial language and stated as a personal, paschal challenge for each of us, one might recast the diagram this way: 1. “Name your deaths” 2. “Claim your births” 3. “Grieve what you have lost and adjust to the new reality” 4. “Do not cling to the old, let it ascend and give you its blessing” 5. “Accept the spirit of the life that you are in fact living”
It is rather something we must undergo daily, in every aspect of our lives.
The paschal mystery is the secret to life. Ultimately our happiness depends upon properly undergoing it.
Unless we die in infancy, we will have many deaths in our lives and within each of these we must receive new life and new spirit.
All of us must continually let go of the God of our youth in order to recognize the God who actually walks beside us today.
Like all things temporal, our understanding of God and the church too must constantly die and be raised to new life.
Unless we mourn properly our hurts, our losses, life’s unfairness, our shattered dreams, our radical inconsummation, and all the life that we once had but that has now passed us by, we will live either in an unhealthy fantasy or an ever-intensifying bitterness.
It is necessary to let our roots bless us. This is true not only if those roots were healthy but even if they were negative or positively abusive. One of the great anthropological imperatives, innate in human nature, is that we eventually must make peace with the family. No matter how bad your father and mother may have been, some day you have to stand by their graveside and recognize what they gave you, forgive what they did to you, and receive the spirit that is in your life because of them.
God asks only one thing of us, that we “act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly with our God.”
