Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Easter
April 18, 2010\
St. Martin de Porres, Cincinnati
(Based on Acts 5:27-32, 40-41; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-14)
It’s been said that we really can’t appreciate a meal unless we’re truly hungry. And I’m sure you have had the experience of being out on a really hot day for some hours, perhaps participating on some sport or taking a long walk or doing some gardening – and then finally getting a glass of water that tastes better than water ever did. Actually, that’s just what beer companies rely on in their advertizing, isn’t it? Aaaaah! A cool one!
Something similar happens in our inability to appreciate fully the incredible event of the resurrection. We’ve celebrated Easter so often that it can become routine. Just another end to another Lent. If we are to get a small touch of what it really means, we need to try to put ourselves in the sandals of the disciples as it happened to them.
Just imagine their situation. They had left all to follow this wandering preacher: family, homes, friends. And surely in some instances it would have involved painful conflict; Jesus alluded to that reality when he said he had not come to bring peace but division: father against son, mother against daughter. They had made critical choices, and now it had ended in smoke. The promises of Jesus had come to naught. He was a failure, stripped and crucified like a common criminal. And worst of all, they had failed him. They were burdened with the sense of guilt that in his hour of need their fear had been too great: remember that it was in the garden when he was being arrested that they all fled.
And then comes the third day. The accounts in the four Gospels are a classic picture of the confusion that takes over when some totally unexpected event – an earthquake or tsunami -- occurs in a community. Rumors are flying everywhere. “Did you hear . . .” “Someone said the body was gone!” “Mary Magdalene says he appeared to her – but she’s a woman, how can you take her seriously?” “They say Peter saw him, but how can that be when those guys on the road out of town spent the afternoon with him?”
People just don’t come back after death! It’s all too much. Even after he showed up in the ‘upper room’ and showed the evidence of the nails, we read that some believed and others didn’t. And besides, before they can even begin to comprehend what is happening, he’s gone again.
They don’t have any instructions, no plan on what to do. So they go back to their ordinary lives. To fishing. “Hey, Peter, if you’re going out tonight, I’m in.”
And that is where he takes the next step. He appears as a stranger on the beach. He even gives them a tip on where to fish. And even though they haven’t a clue who he might be, well, when you’re not getting anywhere you’ll listen to anybody.
And then there is that beautiful line that could send a shiver down your spine, it’s so stark. “It’s the Lord!” It’s the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved,’ his favorite, who is so attuned that he gets it. The Lord who has risen is no longer tied to particular places. He doesn’t have to be in some holy place, like the Temple or a special room set aside for public appearances. He’s present to us in our everyday worlds. The worlds of work and daily life, of family and friends and relationships.
The whole series of stories is a paradigm of our journey in the spiritual life. The Lord always comes to us as the Stranger. In strange experiences. In people who come into our lives unexpectedly. In events that confuse us and upset our expectations and make us have to re-think what it’s all about.
I believe this message of new hope coming to us in unexpected ways has a special urgency for us these days. We are being stretched and challenged by two disturbing developments in our lives as people of faith.
The first is the unending cycle of stories in the media about the shameful acts of child abuse and cover-up in our church.
Anyone who is spiritually alive has to be asking: Where is the Lord in all this?
I believe that, whatever we may think of the actions and the priests and bishops involved, something more profound is happening. The Lord who is the Stranger is challenging us to go to a deeper place, to ask ourselves what is at the heart of our faith. Where do we really place our hope?
You know, we can get it all mixed up and miss the point. We put priests on pedestals and make them into idols, as if they aren’t weak humans like everyone. We can make an idol even out of popes, tricking them out in all the hoopla of celebrities. The pope is coming, the pope is coming! Just think: for centuries, before our modern means of communication, people in London or Madrid or Dublin or, much less, Johannesburg would hardly have known who the pope was. It could take months or years for the word to reach them.
What’s central? Where do we ground our hope?
I once heard a talk by a Canadian priest who was a missionary in Latin America that focused for me a question I have been dealing with ever since.
He said that when he went down there he and the priest with him discovered that their parish was larger than the diocese they had left. They had 80,000 baptized members and it took days to get out to one of the many isolated villages. It was clear that there was no way to provide Mass on Sunday for all these people. So they trained teams of lay men and women to go out, two by two, to catechize the people. The team would spend five days, Monday to Friday, for two hours a night. And then move on to the next village. And here’s the question he left us with: those 10 hours will be the only formal religious formation these people are going to receive in their entire lives. What do you say to them?
It’s a great question, and he didn’t give us his answer; he left it to each of us to work out our own answer. I’m still working on it, but I doubt if I would spend time worrying telling them whether the pope was a conservative or a liberal. . . .
Where is my center? Where is yours?
Here’s one person’s answer in our present context. She’s a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a Catholic.
Part of her column reads like this: Why do we stay? We Catholics hear that question a lot these days. Many of us have asked ourselves that question in the silence of our souls. [After naming people who inspire faith in her, she says] Like so many of the faithful around me, I defiantly love this church. We don’t like what the people in power are doing, but they can’t touch the mystical body that lives and dwells within us. Why do we stay in a church that seems heartless? Because this church still has a heartbeat. You can hear it pounding in the pews, louder than ever, when we say those words: “We wait in joyful hope for the coming of the Lord.”
And then there is another form of strangeness we are going through, perhaps more pointedly. We here are dealing with the disturbing prospect of leaving St. Martin de Porres behind and joining with three other parishes to form a new church community. No one has to be reminded that letting go of a church home that has meant so much to us all is very painful. Where is the Lord in this?
I can’t take away your pain. But maybe I can offer a way of looking at it that might lead us to see something different going on. When we enter into the forming of the new community, we’re going to see what we have taught ourselves to expect. What will that be?
During Holy Week, as you may know, I have presided for years at the liturgies out at Grailville in Loveland. This year the community there was confronted with a disturbing situation. The woman who trains and leads the choir found herself in the hospital with arrhythmia. And she would be there all week, unable to lead the group in the complicated music they had prepared. It was a frightening prospect. But the members developed a response, with one person leading one song and another leading a different one. It was daunting for them but they got through it. And afterwards I was talking to one of the leaders of the community. We agreed that it had actually worked quite well. Different, but good. Then she came out with a wonderful phrase. She said, ”It was a different kind of beautiful.”
“A different kind of beautiful. “
Driving home, it occurred to me that her words might describe the way to look at the new community: “A different kind of beautiful.” It could even form a logo or slogan for the parish: “Join us and you’ll meet a different kind of beautiful.”
You know, with the Lord’s help you have built a beautiful community of faithful sisters and brothers here at St. Martin de Porres over many years. Just as they have built a beautiful community at St. Mark’s in Evanston, and at St. Andrew’s down on Reading Road, and at St. Agnes in Bond Hill. There’s a beauty in each one. But we can make idols of church buildings, and ways of doing things, too, just as we can do with priests and popes.
Maybe the way to think of the new parish is that, no matter what the setting is, it will be a new kind of beautiful: The shiny faces of beautiful new brothers and sisters sharing their faith. The same Lord, and the same faith, and the same Baptism, and the same God and Father of us all. The same table at which our deepest hunger and thirst is satisfied. Just new faces: A different kind of beautiful.
As we receive the risen Lord let’s pray that we may be given the sensitivity of that disciple whom Jesus loved. That we may know him so intimately that we will discover the traces of his presence in all the strange and beautiful ways he surrounds us each and every day of our lives.
Amen?