With death all around, a living God (B24O)

...(F)aith of itself,
if it does not have works, is dead.
Indeed someone might say,
“You have faith and I have works.”
Demonstrate your faith to me without works,
and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works. (Jas. 2: 17-18)

"Paul sets Jesus, the Anointed, and Abraham, the father of many nations, in parallel. Both faced a shameful situation, Abraham’s lack of a son and Jesus’ death by crucifixion. Both despite that shame were faithful to God’s promise. Both are life giving: Abraham by the birth of Isaac and Jesus by the resurrection. Both stand in a line of spiritual paternity. Abraham is the father of the nation of Israel through Isaac and of all the nations through Jesus. As John White in his study of Paul’s use of Abraham notes, 'Faith is only an appropriate response to what is the true source of Paul’s theology, his recognition of God’s benevolent power as creator to procreate life out of negative situations, even out of death itself.'" (xxvi). (Scott, Bernard Brandon (2015-04-12). The Real Paul: Recovering His Radical Challenge (Kindle Locations 2322-2327). Polebridge Press. Kindle Edition.)

I will walk in the presence of God in the land of the living. (Psalm 116) – footnote–using the perhaps less-precise previous NAB translation here because of the apparent clash between "walking before the Lord" and the rebuke of Christ to "get behind me" in the gospel. I'm sure that the translators expected the homilist to straighten that out for us, and I'm sure that almost none of them will. If I have to choose between obeying Christ and the homilist, I'm generally going for the former.

It's September 11, Friday before Sunday, and I'm still struggling to put the pieces of what I want to say together.

The "#neverforget" hashtag is ubiquitous today. I'm sure that for many good souls it's shorthand for remembering the goodness of the human toll of the day, the innocent lost in a few horrible moments, the unquestionable selflessness and courage of the first responders who lost their lives in a desperate attempt to help as many endangered souls as possible. And it's also clear that embedded in the hashtag for many is a vow for retributive "justice," vengeance, upon the perpetrators, and apparently upon anyone who looks like them, worships their God, or speaks in the same language group.

But every time I say the Lord's Prayer with my community of worshippers, and by that I mean my small-c church of those who claim Jesus as God's anointed, it's like a prayer that goes off to God with hashtag "#forchrissakeforget", forget the fear, laziness, treachery, and violence of my life—and as a gesture of desperate faith, I'm imitating in advance the forgetfulness I desire from you. I'm forgetting the debts and slights and sins of those who sin against me. And by me I mean all of us, my small-c church and me, and everyone else I know.

I can only use one hashtag or the other. They're mutually exclusive, at least in the secondary way described above, the one that implies vengeance. "'Vengeance is mine' says the Lord," (Rom. 12:19, ref. Deut. 32:35), but the thing is, in Christ, vengeance is forever revoked. The "God who is not like the other gods" is doing something new. Taking all the horror that people impose upon one another in religion, politics, and war upon himself to the grave, God raised Jesus from the dead with no word upon his mouth except "Peace." Forgiveness, seventy times seven times, to an exponent of seventy. God is out of the vengeance business, and into the business of mercy, dialogue, healing, invitation.

Israel saw it coming in the stunning Servant Songs in Isaiah, the third of which is today's first reading. Was there ever so striking a poem about God's favor upon the victim of violence, a God whose power to create ex nihilo could show through the suffering of one the path to freedom for all? James Alison says it best for me:

This is where Isaiah develops the unparalleled and to this day deeply mysterious “servant songs” by which a separation between God and human victim-making, and yet a generous process of being able to occupy the victim space on behalf of others, begins to become imaginable. This leads, in the final part of Isaiah, now called Third Isaiah, to devastating critiques of the religious culture of those who, after the return from exile, were rebuilding the Temple and setting up a new purity religion, full of exclusions. Isaiah is key to understanding the way in which the utter vivacity of the apparently atheist God who is not-one-of-the-gods removes all religious justification from victimizing. Isaiah’s vision is the most central to the development of New Testament Judaism which sees itself entirely within the same working out of the same insight. (emphasis mine) (Alison, James [2013-11-11]. Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice [pp. 151-152]. DOERS Publishing LLC. Kindle Edition.)

It is the cross, the gallows of the Roman empire used almost exclusively to make an example of those who challenged the pax Romana, that becomes, by way of Jesus's death, the "sign of contradiction" branded upon the soul of Christianity of God's rejection of violence and embrace of peace and reconciliation as the true civilizing energy of humanity. It is this cross that Jesus took up, refusing to participate in revolution, king-making, or the mechanics either of empire nor collaboration with it. And it is this cross, the cross of faithfulness, of peace, of healing, of enemy-love, of "our Father," to which the gospel, the "good news for the world" of God's peaceful victory, calls us again today and every day.

He summoned the crowd with his disciples and said to them,
“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,
take up his cross, and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake
and that of the gospel will save it.” (Mk. 7: 34-35)

I guess all I have left to say about that is: #neverforget.

What we're singing this weekend:

Entrance: The Christ of God (Foley, OCP) or Lead Me, Guide Me
Psalm 116: I Will Walk in the Presence of God (Daigle)
Prep Rite: Only This I Want (Schutte)
Communion: Christ the Icon
Recessional: Glory in the Cross (Schutte, Easter verses)

Second thoughts: Je m'accuse (B23)

James of Jerusalem. Icon by
Br. Tobias Haller

1. Jesus and that spitting thing
This morning I was reading Rachel Held Evans' wonderful book Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church when I read this sentence in one of her chapters in the section called "Baptism": "In some Orthodox traditions, the convert literally spits in the face of evil before going under the water." She quotes Alexander Schmemann in other places in this chapter, who was an Orthodox liturgical theologian, and it makes me think she may have read this in one of his books as well.

When Sunday's gospel had us imagining the scene with Jesus and the deaf man with the speech impediment, groaning, spitting, and touching his tongue, I'm guessing a lot of people were wondering what the hell was going on with the spitting. But one homilist mentioned something very similar to RHE's observation, and it made me sit up and take notice. I'm guessing that what's going on here is exactly that. Part of what Jesus is doing in the act of healing is "spitting in the face" of the sickness, making an outward act of disgust and revulsion at the disorder that caused the pain and difficulty of this man's, and so many others', life. Maybe the groaning was part of it too, a belly-roar of sadness and regret to begin to open the man's closed-off hearing and speech.

2. James's letter and the meaning of faith
I'm fairly certain that I've told you about how Reza Aslan's book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, while not convincing on every level in its portrayal of Jesus as one political "messiah" in a long line of many who tried and failed to rouse the populace, even if peaceably, against Rome, really did speak to me about the early church conflicts about who Jesus was and what his ministry meant to the apostles and how his memory should shape the future of the community of believers. This played out largely in the tensions between factions in Jesus's all-Jewish band of apostles and evangelists. Some, like Paul and Barnabas, were looking for ways to bring the "adopted" children of God, the gentile Christian believers, into the community without making them adopt the rigors of the Torah, particularly the dietary proscriptions and circumcision. Others, like James and, at least for a time, Peter, thought that being brought into Judaism was essential to being part of the Way. Famously, in the "council of Jerusalem," some accommodation was made, though it's not entirely clear, between Paul's own version of what happened and Luke's in Acts of the Apostles, what the nature of that was. Nevertheless, on the question of faith and works, a question where Paul seemed to say that works (like the works of Torah, including circumcision and diet) were dead and could not save, James, "the brother of the Lord" and one who, unlike Paul, had been with Jesus during his ministry, said that works, and specifically works of justice, that is, acting in life the way God acted on behalf of people, were a necessary outward sign of inward conversion to Jesus and the way.

This is so brilliantly brought forward in the Letter of James in these few weeks we get to hear it read in the liturgical assembly. When I think of it as the word of a man who perhaps knew Jesus, was possibly a close relative, even a brother, and how in the face of rebellion and the pending siege of Jerusalem he would insist that justification by faith had to be evidence in an egalitarian attitude, care for orphans and widows, and active help in relieving the suffering of the hungry and poor, it gives me a new appreciation for Jesus's preaching and life and death. It feels true to me. I know that I might be mistaken, but for now, I take it as true. There's that great line where James is using Paul's own icon of faith, Abraham, to make his argument about works, calling the person he is addressing an "ignoramus. (2:20)" Could he have meant Paul? A perverse part of me wants to think these titans might have escalated their argument to the ad hominem level for all eternity, but I'm also willing to believe James was correcting a misinterpretation of Paul. That's nowhere near as fun, though! What's the old saying? Two rabbis, four opinions?

3. Finalment, je m'accuse.
In the light of all that, in the light of James's admonition that our works show our faith, in the light of the psalm we sang that gave praise to God who "upholds the stranger and orphan" and "gives bread to the hungry," I was hoping for some rousing preaching about doing something positive, especially in the light of the humanitarian crisis in Europe because of the influx of Syrian refugees. But it was not to be. And then, our beautiful pope, leading by example, announces that beginning with the parishes under his jurisdiction in Rome, monasteries and parishes in Europe should each to adopt a Syrian family. That was something. That was worth an "alleluia."

But then I realized I hadn't done a damn thing myself, so I did some quick searching for entities that were already on the ground and working there, and found some that used over 90 cents of every donated dollar to actually helping people. Terry and I sent some money to Medical Teams International. UNICEF and CRS are also highly rated charities already helping. Will you join us? You have to hear James one more time this Sunday, if you know what I mean.

Donate here to Medical Teams International
Donate here to Catholic Relief Services

Can I get an "Alleluia," somebody? (B23O)

The responsorial psalm Sunday is Psalm 146, a Hallel, one of the psalms that begins with the word "Alleluia," a word meaning "praise the Lord," or "holler to Yah" or something like that. There is so much to like about Psalm 146, especially for a musician. Unlike its more famous neighbor, Psalm 150, it cites specific reasons for which the praise of God is required, which is good, because otherwise, we might get the idea that whatever "blessings" we may have received ourselves, health, a mortgage or two, a relatively functional family, a job that pays more than minimum wage, citizenship in a country that isn't actively trying to kill us, more cars than will fit in our two-car garage, enough discretionary cash to pay for a personal trainer, all of those things that constitute the status quo, is enough of a reason to say, "Praise the Lord."

Psalm 146 has a different idea. Like a pre-exilic foreshadowing of the beatitudes, it sings—sings!—that God should be praised because it is

• God who is faithful forever
• God who secures justice for all the oppressed
• God who gives bread to the hungry,
• God who sets prisoners free,
• Our God who gives sight to the blind,
• God who raises up those who are bowed down,
• The Lord who protects the stranger,
• God who upholds the widow and orphan.

And as if all that weren't enough, it was a songwriter who had the idea, who got so excited about a God who was in there with the poor, in the thick of it with the least powerful people on earth, that the troubador vows, in an ecstasy of thanksgiving, to "give praise to YHWH all my life, make music to Elohim while I live." I know that I have two published versions of this psalm, and I may have written another one back in times of yore, before I kept records. Not LPs, just any written evidence. Just getting in line with my ancestor in faith to keep the word alive, you know. Praise the Lord, and lose the ammunition.

Do you see what a marvelous act of faith it is, in a God who is truly distinguishable from all the other gods of earth, to sing about a God who not only is not aligned exclusively or primarily with the ruling class and priesthood but who is personally involved with the weak and wretched? This kind of spiritual groundbreaking in the Jewish scriptures made it possible for Jesus of Nazareth to suggest that "Blessed are the poor, the meek, the hungry, the sorrowful," announcing in his first "sermon" that the empire of God was gathered around him on the hill, tired, overtaxed, dressed for labor, stressed out worrying about where tomorrow's bread might come from. Not far away, not meritable, not a consequence of birth, not visible by way of the blessing of health or money, but already among you, close enough to grasp. 

These are the right words to sing this Sunday as Jesus crosses into the Gentile territory and heals a deaf man with a speech impediment, using, if the Revised New American Bible's footnotes can be believed, the same gestures and groanings that other healers of his time used. But this kind of healing was a sign of the God of Psalm 146 drawing near, the God of Isaiah, whose approach would be signaled by the healing of the desert and the bodies of those whose broken bodies are stumbling home from exile.

The letter of James, the "just," the "brother of the Lord," the leader of the church in Jerusalem, is a warning to anyone in the church (or out of it, or in any church) who thinks that the signs of God's favor and blessing are anything other than the ones delineated in the psalm or, to the point, in the teaching of "brother" Jesus. Showing partiality to the rich and entitled over the poor is roundly condemned, specifically because that's not what God is like. But (sarcasm alert) no need spend too much time analyzing James here, because we certainly don't have that problem in our time or in this country. Or in our church.

A friend of mine wrote on Facebook yesterday that he loved Pope Francis because "he makes me want to be a better person." Why do you think that is? Maybe it's because Francis mirrors for us God's predilection for the poor. Unafraid, he frequents prisons, embraces the sick, walks in the barrios and slums, inevitably with a smile on his face, radiating love, except in those moments when you can see anger flash across his face about the scandalous inequalities of modern civilization.

Maybe the "so what?" question remains. So what if Jesus healed a man who with a speech impediment a couple of millennia ago? What has he done for us lately? That's a fair question. So I'm saying thank you today to all my friends and colleagues over the years who have worked in hospitals and clinics, healing the sick and bringing the presence of Christ into the pain and fear that sickness brings. Thank you to Christ in the speech therapists, and I'm thinking of one particular one today, helping a musician maintain the ability to sing in spite of an illness. Thank you to Christ in the junior high school singer in my youth choir who gave a concert with her voice teacher at an eldercare facility, and who started playing "You Are My Sunshine" on her guitar, and was overcome with emotion as the residents took up the refrain with her, and brought the little house down.

Thank you to all of you, Christ in the alleluia-makers, Christ in the musicians, who week after week sing a word of healing to people who are told by "civilization" that they can never be good enough, that they're not beautiful, that they don't hate the right people; to you whose hands and breath intone the music of Ephphetha, and invite the chosen of God into the song that heals the universe. "Be strong: fear not! Here is your God, he comes to save you!" You and I may not always "do all things well," but God is strong in our weakness. May our song of God's gentle reign break the spell of greed and rivalry to which all are subjected through the week, and lead the world, one assembly at a time, into an "alleluia" for the One who raises up the lowly, and secures justice for the oppressed.

Here's what we're singing this weekend at St Anne:

Entrance: Open My Eyes

Psalm 146: Praise the Lord, My Soul (Cooney)

Prepration of the gifts: Turn Around

Communion: You Are Mine (Haas)

Closing: Over My Head or Healing River

We're also debuting these weeks at the choir mass a new (partly revised) mass setting called Mass of Christ the Servant. This is always nervewracking for me, not because I don't think it's singable or worthy, but because you just never know, as a songwriter, how other people will react to your music. It's utterly unpredictable. Nevertheless, "I will praise the Lord all my life, make music to my God while I live." Or die trying.

Second thoughts - Adding to and subtracting from the law

In your observance of the commandments of the LORD, your God,

which I enjoin upon you,

you shall not add to what I command you nor subtract from it. 

So, in this new "second thoughts" category, I want to offer when I can some thoughts from after experiencing the word of God in liturgy, rather than in preparation for it. It is so often a different experience, and I thought I might try to capture it on Mondays when I have time and memory.

I'm pretty clear about the "not adding to" the law part, at least that's what I was getting at when I wrote last week. Maybe because I'm an American, and thus a descendant of British jurisprudence, but in America we take our law pretty seriously. If you don't think so, count up the number of lawyers we have, the size of the legal code, the time it takes to become a lawyer, and, finally, the number of jails and prisons we build with public money to deal with the most serious of lawbreakers. I don't care about all that today, except that American approach to law is quite rigorous compared, say, to some older European nations like Italy. And we tend to put all laws on a very high plane of respect, whether they're constitutional provisions or local ones. And where I think we Catholics might get into trouble is when we make the transference from civil jurisprudence to ecclesial law. 

Worse, when we make God into a judge, enforcer, and executioner of the law, forgetting that Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God, and that "he who has seen me has seen the Father." If God wanted to be seen as a judge, Jesus could have looked a lot more like one. In fact, he even says in one gospel, "Friend, who made me your judge or arbitrator?" (Lk 12:14) (I write that with a smile: don't take that too seriously!)

But we do that, all of us do in our own way, those of us in positions of authority maybe especially so. We set up ways of working in our dioceses and parishes, ways of organizing worship or membership or sacramental preparation at home, and I think it's fairly often that our rules become laws and suddenly everyone is negotiating a maze of laws that, if not obstructing the great commandments to love God and neighbor, at least make them more difficult objects of focus. 

Which is not to say that structure isn't important. It's just that, like everything else in the church, it ought to be at the service of, well, service. The role of all church leadership is service, from the lowly parish musician to the pastor. I create structures, sure, to facilitate participation, to honor the guidance and discernment of councils, popes, bishops, and tradition, to maintain fairness and equality among church members, but when those structures and rules stop becoming ways of serving and start being a means of controlling people or enforcing a "one size fits all" kind of faith or worship, then I have to begin to wonder whether I've tread into territory where my mouth is full of religion, but my heart belongs to the Divider.

It gets confusing. I used the example of funeral music (wedding music is the same) in my Wednesday post about the weekend scriptures. We have traditions in the church about what is appropriate music for worship and what isn't. Those traditions are on a continuum, not everything is cut-and-dried by any means, but when they come into conflict with grief or with marginal or incipient faith, what then? The grieving widow who wants "Marine Hymn" for her husband's funeral, or the Catholic fiancé of an "inquirer" who has her heart set on a song from a vampire movie for their wedding? And before anyone responds too quickly, this in a church where bishops and pastors regularly defy (or disregard) church law regarding, say, the baptism of children of catechetical age, and withhold confirmation and even Eucharist until later, when the law is clear that the sacraments of initiation should all take place at the same time?

I think much of this goes back to a loss of communal identity in the church, which simply means that we haven't rediscovered who we are in an era when fundamental self-understanding of who God is and who Christ is and what difference it makes for the church is in flux. I think this is a good thing. It's uncomfortable to live in this cloud of unknowing, but it's where we belong. It gives us the opportunity to focus on the big issues that the gospel yesterday provides: people are hungry. Worry about feeding them first, then worry about the consequences and the law. "You disregard God’s commandment," Jesus admonishes us, "but cling to human tradition." 

We know that, at the time the second gospel was written, there were rivalries and divisions in the church that resulted from competing theologies of membership. Some Jewish Christians wanted non-Jewish converts to be subject to the Torah and undergo circumcision; others, Paul among them, were adamant that God's call to faith justified, and there was no need for compliance with other laws of Judaism. Some of this disagreement may have made its way into the animosity that appears in the gospels between Jesus and the scribes and lawyers. Whatever its origin, though, the experience seems to be endemic to religion: laws made by the community and its leaders tend to be taken too seriously, the forest of laws and traditions soon obscuring the light on the river, where the voice of Abba calls each one "beloved," and opens the heart to the realization that all are thus called, brothers and sisters of the Firstborn, Jesus. It may not be necessary to cut down the forest so much as to keep in mind that the voice, the light, and the river are still there, and that they are our goal. Staying together on the path with intentional compassion as the flock makes its way together to the glade is something to strive for, as well as trying to hold fast to just who is the good shepherd, and who are the sheep.

About the Eucharist - collection of "Gentle Reign" posts

I have gone back over the posts I've done over the past three years that specifically focus on one aspect of the Eucharist or another. Of course, many more speak of the Eucharist, but these are the ones most specifically about the sacrament. Whenever you see a strange-looking series of alphanumerics in a title, that's my shorthand for the Sunday it appeared. For instance, "B21O" means "the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B." I hope this makes things easier to search if you're looking for something specific.

You can see all of these posts at once in your browser by clicking the "Labels" link to the right that says, "About Eucharist."


Final thoughts 2—Bread of Life: Sign and foretaste of heaven

Final thoughts 1—Bread of Life: Looking beyond the manna and the man

Bread of Life—To whom shall we go? (B21O)

Bread of Life—Giving thanks, always, for everything (B20O)

Taken, Blessed, Broken, Shared: Being the Bread of Life (B19O)

Bread of Life—Liberation and transformation (B18O)

Bread of Life—The hand of the Lord feeds us

It takes a village to pitch a no-no (or feed 5000. or the world) (B17O)

Intimacy for Mission - my 'homily' for the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ

We proclaim the death of the Lord

Real Presence

Thy true religion in our hearts increase (B22O)

The internet was abuzz a few months ago about the funeral of Vice President Biden's son Beau. There were lots of critics of the funeral liturgy celebrated because, aside from the celebrity of the deceased, his family, and the invitation-only attendees, it was as liturgically flawed and mawkishly homely as most of the hundreds of funerals I’ve attended over the years. We Catholics have a really, really good funeral liturgy. We just tend to be loath to impose it upon people in toto in their moment of grief. I’m not sure why, since we impose other laws and rites on them, but this just doesn’t seem the time. Or maybe we aren’t really sure about the resurrection, and this is just the time our lack of faith reveals itself. At any rate, let’s just say that the funeral may not have been our finest moment in really public worship. But it was not, by my estimate anyway, in any way worse than what most parishes do all the time. Focused on the accomplishments or personality of the deceased, we very often miss the opportunity to focus on the One who gives life to both the deceased and to us from the beginning of time to the end. It’s just the way we are. A memory of the beloved in hand is worth two anamneses in the theological bush.


But this Sunday's liturgy speaks, perhaps in an oblique way, to this issue. The equation set up in the gospel between true worship and just living brought this controversy to mind. I have encounter in my parish over the years a false dichotomy set up between the law (in contemporary usage, meaning the liturgical law guiding ritual and church law in general) and "real" Christianity, which is somehow loving everybody and doing whatever we want with ritual so that our freedom as Christians isn’t unnecessarily constricted by the pettiness of rubrics. Some see liturgical law as parallel to the pharisaic dietary restrictions being challenged in the gospel story yesterday, as though following the rite of the Church or insisting that participation in the Eucharist is for the baptized were a “mere human precept” that can be swept aside by anyone who wants to for the purpose of not being “exclusionary.” 


It’s certainly true that, built into the very fabric of Christianity, there is a tension between belonging (to an “in” group of those who have accepted the gospel) and mission (to serve and evangelize those not within the group.) The sense of baptismal belonging can easily degenerate into a mentality of “in” and “out”, a ghetto or parochial tunnel vision which segregates the Church from the world. The gospel has us keep reevaluating our vision, though, and helps us to see, when we have the courage to reflect upon it, that membership in the Church is a sacrament of the rest of life. As sacrament, it is a sign, a symbol with the weight of reality, of what our lives outside of the church milieu represent, and even more than that, of what God is doing in the world. God’s work is not restricted by the work of the Church, though to some extent the participation or non-participation of the Church in the enterprise of agape on God’s behalf can either promote or hinder the emergence of the empire of God.


Sunday’s gospel was set up by a passage from the Torah that assured us that observance of the law is wise and intelligent, a sign of our awareness of God’s nearness to us, and we are admonished that we in our careful observance we are not to “add to what I command you nor subtract from it.” Then, the responsorial psalm has us proclaim together the core of the law: “They who do justice will live in the presence of God.” The beginning of the letter of St. James, with characteristic practicality and directness, then said the following:


Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.

 Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this:
 to care for orphans and widows in their affliction 
and to keep oneself unstained by the world.



This great letter, written by the leader of the Jerusalem church and possibly the "brother of the Lord" who knew Jesus and his message personally, proclaims that religion and action are inseparable; that the truth of faith, that is, of God’s saving presence in the heart of the believer, is not simply confessional, internal, or a matter of “belonging,” but is a matter of action, a matter of being like God, and risking one’s own livelihood for the sake of the powerless and afflicted. The gospel, then, goes on to admonish us about the way we want to condemn people who don’t follow our rules, like hungry people who eat without washing their hands:


“Well did Isaiah prophesy about you hypocrites, as it is written:
 This people honors me with their lips, 
but their hearts are far from me;
 in vain do they worship me,
 teaching as doctrines human precepts. 
You disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition.”



Jesus is always concerned that conversion precede discipline, that our desire to be “in” be informed by our commitment to God and the work of justice in the world. He does not, it seems to me, subscribe to the false dichotomy between law and love. He rather sees obedience to law as an outward expression of an interior reality, and that reality is the conviction, acted on in every aspect of life, that every other person is a beloved child of God to the very same extent that I am, and that my service of the other is my connection to the life of God. Agape is one. God is agape. As human beings, we keep order and pass on our beliefs about this very God through our rites and laws. But our adherence to them, and our way of passing on the laws, really must be informed by our conviction that others also already live in the all-encompassing sphere of divine favor, and that doing justice to others is underpinning truth of the Torah. And by justice, Torah means “the way God treats people,” or “the way things would be if the world were completely transformed into the reign of God.”


Getting back, then, to the Biden funeral: what does it say about some of us “Catholics” that we cannot do any better than criticize the music or the prayers at the funeral in a family whose public life has been devoted to the plight of widows and orphans and immigrants, whose passion is universal health care, education, and equality? As with the Kennedys, why does our conversation turn to the public “sins” of the man, the weakness, the apparent bad judgment or bad choices, rather than to the extraordinary way in which they used their prodigious talent and influence to do the very things the gospel of Christ urges us to do? Where is the mercy, the non-judgment, the appreciation of gospel life?


Inaction brings its own judgment upon itself, as we know from Matthew 25. Those who think that their religion and its rites alone will count them among the blessed are in for a rude awakening, if we are to believe that apocalyptic parable (Mt. 25: 31-46). Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deluding yourselves. There is no dichotomy between belonging and mission, between law and love, for those with ears to hear the gospel. Love precedes and informs law; belonging is for mission, which expands the circle of belonging. True religion is living in agape, the love-life of God, which only God makes possible. Those who live in love live in God, even sinners. Even Democrats.

Here’s what we're singing in the parish:

Gathering: Lead Us to the Water (Kendzia)
Psalm 15: Those Who Do Justice (Haas)

Preparation Rite: Change Our Hearts
Communion: Lord, When You Came (Pescador de Hombres)
Recessional: Let Justice Roll Like a River (Haugen)

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this:

to care for orphans and widows in their affliction... (Jas. 1:27)

Final thoughts 2—Bread of Life: Sign and foretaste of heaven

Rethinking our idea of God, learning God’s ways based upon the Jesus of the gospels and not upon Baal or Zeus or the human emperors whose wealth and power we crave, will necessarily cause us to rethink our idea of what heaven is. It can help us get an idea of how the eucharist is a “foretaste of heaven,” since heaven, we imagine, describes the dwelling of God, or the realm or sphere of divine presence and influence. And I keep coming back to that hymn in Philippians that Paul quotes near the outset of that letter, “Though (Christ) was in the form of God, he did not imagine that equality with God was something to be hoarded. Instead, he emptied himself, and took the form of a slave.” Whatever else we say about God, it must include this central notion of our faith that God empties himself, does not cling to divinity, in order to love and serve. Clearly, already, heaven must be more like the kitchen than the banquet hall; more like the servants’ quarters than the throne room; in the image of the venerable British drama, more like downstairs than upstairs.


The god for whom Jesus was mistaken in the narrative of John 6 and in the other multiplication gospels enters history on a white horse to disrupt it, breaking the laws of physics, casting aside the harsh reality of laboring for daily bread, setting things right by giving everyone a winning lottery ticket and free meal pass. But Jesus had rejected that sort of messianic mission, as the stories of the temptations in the desert suggest. The God of Jesus is not like Pharaoh or Caesar, nor a magician who produces abundance by legerdemain. The true God enters history with all its unfairness, violence, and ungodliness, subverting it from within through solidarity with us, and showing us by example how the greedy and violent dynamics of history can be overcome by agape, the selfless solidarity of other-centeredness.


There is a familiar metaphor for heaven that works for me here. It’s an image in which heaven and hell are exactly alike, with people sitting across from each other at great banquet tables laden with rich food and drink. Angels bring plate after plate of wonderful dishes to the center of these tables. The trouble is, the forks are all three feet long. The people in hell are starving, the food is turning, because they can’t reach from their forks to their mouths to feed themselves. Those in heaven, on the other hand, are laughing and full, because they are feeding each other. They’ve learned the lesson of the kenotic Christ, who came “not to be served, but to serve.” He is the image of the invisible God.


In the letter to the Ephesians we heard during these Bread of Life weeks, St. Paul asks believers to “be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us.” To “live in love,” we have been shown by Jesus, is to serve the other person, to “enter history on behalf of the poor,” in Nathan Mitchell’s phrase, and not to cling to our correctness or status or imagined “goodness” if it gets in the way of solidarity with the other and putting the other’s needs above our own. Within the community, this means we ought to remove from our lives “all bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling...along with all malice.” Imitating God means living in agape, which is focused upon the needs of the other at our own expense: “be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.” To St. Paul, it doesn’t matter who is right and who is wrong, it only matters who does right, and doing right is a matter of imitating God, emptying ourselves into history “as Christ loved us and handed himself over to us.”

Solidarity with others at this level, being-like-God when God is a servant and not a despot, is a dangerous business. The food that strengthened Elijah in the desert came to him because he was in flight from the persecution of Queen Jezebel and her husband, Ahab. Jesus and his disciple Paul both experience capital punishment at the hands of the empire. That having been said, this political nature of eucharistic life and solidarity among us is not a coercive or violent movement, but a movement of people who choose life. It surrenders rights, rather than claims them; this is how God is, not even hoarding the status of divinity, but surrendering divine right and rightness to be God-among-us. I say this as a way of countering any claim that the Eucharist is essentially a “spiritual” exercise: it is, quite to the contrary, a sign of the integrity of humanity, body and soul.


Maybe that’s why we have the Eucharist, finally, as a meal. It is God emptied into bread and wine, but it remains real food for real people, bodies and souls, confronted by and then surrendering to a divine presence that transforms us into someone we could never become on our own: Christ. In Christ, humanity becomes divine. But this is not to say that we rise to some new kind of superiority or splendor: it is to say that we are more and more transformed by agape into servants of the world in the image of the God by whom we were created. The sign and foretaste of heaven brings us ever closer to the dwelling place of God: with the human race. We arrive at the beginning, in Eliot’s phrase, and discover it for the first time. Christ, as he did with Zacchaeus, has come to stay in the house of a sinner. Our house. Heaven, the dwelling-place of God, is with the human race.