21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Joshua 24:1-2a, 15-17, 18b; Ephesians 5:2a, 25-32; John 6:60-69

Today’s readings seem almost tailor-made
for this moment in the Church’s life.
In the Gospel, many of those hearing Jesus’ words
are offended and walk away:
“many of his disciples returned to their former way of life
and no longer accompanied him.”
In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians
we hear of Christ’s love for the Church,
“cleansing her by the bath of water with the word…
that she might be holy and without blemish.”
In our first reading, Joshua challenges the Israelites:
“decide today whom you will serve,”
and we hear them reaffirm their commitment to God:
“Far be it from us to forsake the Lord
for the service of other gods.”
It might seem that the obvious message today would be
an exhortation to stay committed to the Church,
to not walk away and return to your former way of life,
to not lose hope in the face of past and present scandals
but to trust in God’s power to cleanse and purify the Church
who despite all the sin and betrayal
remains Christ’s beloved bride.

That would be a pretty good homily.
In fact, that was more or less
the homily I preached two weeks ago.
And I would stand by all of what I said then,
even in light of the tidal wave of evidence
of misdeeds by priests and bishops
that crashed over the Church last week
with the release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report.
I still feel that I must say with the apostles in today’s Gospel
“Master, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life.”

But I don’t think that this
is what the Spirit is saying to the Church
in today’s scriptures.
I believe that today the Spirit
is exhorting all of us to speak truthfully.
Because in today’s scriptures
it is not any misdeed that offends people,
it is not any scandal or sin that sends them away,
but it is the life-giving words of Jesus—
words that are Spirit and life—
at which they take offense.
It is one thing to be scandalized by the sins
of those who claim to speak in Jesus’ name
and choose to follow another path;
it is something else to be scandalized
by Jesus’ words of Spirit and life
and choose to remain
in your untransformed way of life.
On the whole, I would say
that people today are not walking away from the Church
because they are offended by Jesus’ words.
That would be refreshing.
I think they leave because they have come
asking for the bread of life
and have been given a stone or a snake instead.
They come looking for the life-changing challenge
of being a disciple of the crucified and risen Jesus
and are all too often told to just sit there quietly
and not make too much noise.
They come looking for the community of the Spirit
and find an institution more concerned
with saving face than saving souls.

Our leaders bear much responsibility for this.
They bear responsibility because of the unspeakable acts
committed by a relatively small percentage of the clergy,
often against the weakest and most vulnerable
of Christ’s little ones.
They bear responsibility because of the cover-ups
perpetrated by a relatively large percentage of bishops,
who thought that the souls of these little ones
were worth sacrificing for the sake of the Church’s reputation.
They bear responsibility because they too often
have heard Jesus’s words of Spirit and life
and turned back to worship the gods of this world,
gods of pleasure and wealth and pretense,
gods who thrive on secrecy and lies.

Our leaders bear much responsibility.
But, in a different sense, we too bear a responsibility.
If we want a Church
that welcomes people into the adventure of discipleship,
that values truth over reputation,
that speaks words of Spirit and life,
then those words must come from our mouths.
This is the burden of our prophetic call
that we received at our baptisms.
I think of the victims of clerical abuse
and of their families,
who, when the powerful in the Church
told them to just sit there quietly,
raised their voices in divine outrage
and bore the cross of rejection and dismissal.
They bore that burden in hope
that speaking words of truth,
words of Spirit and life,
is more healing than suffering silence
and more powerful than face-saving lies.
They bore that burden
not only for themselves
but for all of us,
because only words of Spirit and life
can save us now.
But they should no longer bear that burden alone.
Let us take upon our own shoulders
the burden of truthful speaking,
by acknowledging the failings of the Church,
by working for a Church that can hear the truth,
by hoping for a Church that can truly be
“the church in splendor,
without spot or wrinkle or any such thing…
holy and without blemish.”
Let us speak Jesus' words of Spirit and life,
and let those who reject those words
turn away to serve other gods.

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: 1 Kings 19:4-8; Ephesian 4:30-5:2; John 6:41-51

This past Friday the Church celebrated
the Feast of St. Lawrence,
a deacon of the Roman Church
in the middle of the third century,
who was killed during the persecution
launched by the Emperor Valerian
by being tied to a grill and roasted to death.
He is probably best known
for allegedly having said, in the midst of his torture,
“turn me over; I’m done on this side.”
As a result, he is the patron saint
of both cooks and comedians.
Less widely known,
though historically better attested,
is the story of how,
when he was arrested,
he was given three day
to turn over the treasure
of the Roman Church to the emperor.
As the chief deacon of Rome,
Lawrence had charge
of the Church’s financial resources,
as well as for providing care
for the poor and the sick of the city.
But rather than let the Emperor be further enriched
by his persecution of the Church,
Lawrence went and distributed
the resources of the Church
to the poor of the city of Rome.
He then brought a group of the poor
before the imperial officials,
saying, “These are the treasure of the Church.”
It was perhaps because of this insolence
that the emperor decreed
that he die a particularly painful death.

About a century and a half after his death in Rome,
Lawrence was remembered by St. Augustine
in a sermon preached in northern Africa.
Augustine connected Lawrence’s liturgical role as deacon,
distributing the chalice at communion,
with his role as martyr, witnessing to Christ:
“[In the city of Rome] he ministered
the sacred blood of Christ;
there for the sake of Christ’s name
he poured out his own blood” (Sermon 304).
In our Gospel reading today,
Jesus speaks of the Eucharist
as his gift of himself for our sakes,
so that we might have life:
“the bread that I will give
is my flesh for the life of the world.”
For us and for our salvation,
Jesus holds nothing back;
he gives himself wholly to God
so that he can give himself wholly to us.
Lawrence knew that to receive
the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist
is to receive his act of self-giving into ourselves
and to be transformed.
Augustine says, “Just as he had partaken of a gift of self
at the table of the Lord,
so he prepared to offer such a gift.
In his life he loved Christ;
in his death he followed in his footsteps” (Sermon 304).

Paul, in our second reading, underscores this same message:
“be imitators of God, as beloved children,
and live in love, as Christ loved us
and handed himself over for us
as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.”
We are all called to imitate Christ’s self-giving:
perhaps not like Lawrence,
being violently consumed by material fire
(though we should never forget that to this day
there are Christians around the world
who are laying down their lives for their faith),
but assuredly we must let ourselves be consumed
by the spiritual fire of love,
the fire that that burns away, in Paul’s words,
“all bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling”
and makes us “kind to one another,
compassionate, forgiving one another”
just as God has forgiven us in Christ.

Another deacon of the ancient Church,
Ephraem the Syrian,
wrote of the Eucharist:
“In your bread hides the Spirit
who cannot be consumed;
in your wine is the fire
that cannot be swallowed.
The Spirit in your bread,
fire in your wine:
behold a wonder heard from our lips.”
When at communion we say “amen”
to the words “The body of Christ,”
we are not simply saying that we believe
that Christ is truly present
under the appearances of bread and wine,
but we are saying “amen”—so be it—
to his entire life of self-sacrificial love;
we say “amen” to taking his spiritual fire
into our very selves
so that we can burn as beacons of love,
a love that is willing to surrender itself entirely
for God and our neighbor.

But all this sounds very idealistic
in the face of the present reality of our Church.
The past few weeks have revealed, once again,
the deep sickness of abuse and secrecy in the Church.
The recent revelations concerning
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick,
the retired Archbishop of Washington DC,
and his decades-long predatory sexual behavior
directed at priests, seminarians, and children,
is one more straw on the poor camel’s back,
one more case of the abuse of power in the Church,
one more case of we clergy closing ranks and covering up,
one more case of choosing the strong and the well-positioned
over the weak and the vulnerable.
And you, the people of God,
might feel that the time has come
to do what many have done already:
to just walk away and be done with it—
to be done with the abuse and the lies
and the broken promises.
I would be hard put to tell you
that you shouldn’t go.
But I will tell you this:
the Church is Ted McCarrick,
but it is also Lawrence of Rome.
The Church is filled with leaders
in whom the fire of spiritual love has grown cold
and been replaced with a passion for pleasure and power,
but it also has saints on fire with the love of Jesus,
who know that the Church’s true treasure
is found in the poor and the weak,
the outcast and the forgotten.
The body of Christ is infected
with a disease of abuse and deceit,
which can only be healed if we let a fever burn within it,
the fever of the love that burns in the heart of Jesus,
that burned in Lawrence,
that burns in us now through God’s Spirit;
the fever of a love that seeks justice for victims
and that holds the powerful accountable,
the fever of a love that can feel at times like rage
but burns with an intensity greater
than any bitterness, fury, and anger that we can muster.

I cannot ask you to stay by ignoring
the Ted McCarrick’s of the Church.
But I will ask you to stay
because of the Spirit in the bread
and the fire in the wine;
I will ask you to stay
because at the Lord’s table
where Lawrence’s soul caught fire
our hearts too can come to burn
with the love of Jesus,
the love that is the fever
that can purify and heal the Church.
I will ask you to stay because it is your Church.
Don’t let anyone take it from you.

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15; Ephesians 4:17, 20-24; John 6:24-35

Homily preached at the 13th Annual Meeting of the Boston Colloquy in Historical Theology.

I am put in mind of our vocation
as historical theologians
when I hear of the Hebrews in today’s first reading,
given miraculous bread by the Lord
to sustain them on their desert journey,
bread that appears each morning
for them to gather before it vanishes,
bread that is identified in today’s Gospel
as a foreshadowing of Jesus Christ,
God’s incarnate Word,
the true bread that has come down from heaven.
“On seeing it, the Israelites asked one another, ‘What is this?’
for they did not know what it was.
But Moses told them,
‘This is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.’”

The Word of God
has been spread abroad in human history.
It lies before us like miraculous bread,
the food of the kingdom upon which we will feast eternally,
waiting to be gathered so that it may nourish us
on our pilgrimage through that history
to the new Jerusalem.
We gather what has been spread abroad,
the supersubstantial bread of the Word,
finding it sometimes in the most unlikely places:
Christologies of mixture and early Christian dialogues,
the writings of James of Eltville and of Reginald Pole,
texts from St. Thomas and, yes, even Scotus.
We come across a previously unknown manuscript
or some long-ignored passage in Augustine
and we ask one another, “What is this?”
It is the bread that the Lord has given us to eat,
and not just us, but all of God’s pilgrim people.

As we ply our craft, in archives and classrooms,
committee meetings and academic colloquies,
we should always bear in our hearts those words:
it is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.
And even more we should bear in our hearts the words of Jesus:
“Do not work for food that perishes
but for the food that endures for eternal life,
which the Son of Man will give you….
I am the bread of life;
whoever comes to me will never hunger,
and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”

The bishop Theophylact, writing in the 11th century, said
“He is the bread not of this ordinary life,
but of a very different kind of life,
which death will never cut short.”
But the true mystery of the Word made flesh
is that the bread of extraordinary life
is given to us mortals in this ordinary life,
the ordinary time of human history.
We seek out the bread of deathless life
amidst the ambiguities of the past,
power-plays and human failings,
stumbling efforts at human holiness
and the sanctified stubbornness of saints.
The task of the historical theologian as theologian
is to gather the manna scattered on the shifting sands of time,
which do not provide the comforting stability of abstraction.
We seek the bread of life that death will never cut short
in a confrontation with thinkers
possessed of mentalities very different from our own,
but with the confidence that because
they too hungered for food that never perishes,
they too thirsted for the living water,
it is not impossible that we can hear
echoed in their words
the one Word of life.
The chasm imposed by historical distance
cannot separate us from these friends,
not because we have honed
our skills of historical imagination—
though I hope we have done that—
and not because we have labored
to acquire facility with dead languages—
though I hope we have done that—
and not because of we have toiled
to gain paleographical skills—
though I hope people other than me have done that—
but because we, like they,
have been given to eat of the bread of life.
They, like us, have hungered and thirsted,
and they, like us, have been fed by Christ
with the bread of angels
so that the one Word might sound in their words.
We gather their words with care,
for it is the bread that the Lord has given us to eat.