Sunday, May 15, 2022

What's in a Name?: Homily for the 5th Sunday of Easter

 Acts 14:21-27

Ps 145

Rev 21:1-5a

Jn 13:31a, 34-35

 

The first reading from Acts gives us history  anchored in a specific time and place.  Among other things it suggests that Paul and Barnabas could have benefited from GPS or at least a good travel agent.  They certainly covered a lot of ground in the first missionary efforts of the Church.  At times Acts is a combination travelogue and introductory course in missiology. It describes the difficult work of spreading the message of Jesus crucified and risen from the dead to the world well-beyond Jerusalem.  Acts describes the challenge of sharing the Good News with those who would not have heard it otherwise.  

 

Much was happening as the community came together, growing in leaps and bounds.  It developed a unique identity such that in the reading on Tuesday we heard  “For a whole year they met with the Church and taught a large number of people, and it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians.”  

 

"and it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians."

 

As Paul, Barnabas and the others spread out in their missionary efforts, what came to be known as the Church was gaining a foothold, and the believers were given a name. That name would serve as a concise description of these people. 

It was a name that would accrue more and more associations—both positive and negative—over the ensuing millennia. 

 

Associations to the word Christian emerged, and continue to emerge, from observations of how Christians conducted-- and continue to conduct--themselves 

in the public arena,  even when 'being a good Christian' is used to advance an immoral agenda. There is nothing Christian about the intentional taking of human life at any point from conception to natural death in old age.   

 

That religious belief has a profound effect on behavior was well illustrated in Rodney Stark's book: The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History.

The book considers the period covered by Acts and into the first two or three centuries of the Church, a rather narrow span of time given the two millennia of Church history. 

 

Stark described behaviors in the early Church that he contends drew many to embrace Christianity.  One of the most fascinating was the Christian community's response to plague.  From the very beginning Christians acted on the mandate 

to care for the sick.  Stark suggests that caring for the afflicted diminished the community's incidence of plague as a result of immunity developed from low-level exposure to the infectious agent; a primitive form of vaccination if you will.  In addition; the nascent Christian Church held, even then, absolute prohibitions against the taking of child-brides and against abortion.   

 

If the first reading from Acts gives us a history.  anchored in time and place,  Revelation indicates a point well-beyond the horizon anchored neither in time nor geography.  It hints at what is to come in veiled language.  The images are strange, but strange is the only way to describe that which we cannot know in this life.  The reading does not tell us the how or the when.  But it assures us 

that we WILL be transformed in that instant when vital functions cease and everything changes.  We are reminded of this in a preface for the funeral Mass: 

“Lord, for your faithful people life is changed, not ended. . . . It is a great comfort knowing “there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain for the old order has passed away.”    Pain.  Suffering.  Sorrow. Those experiences that mark our lives on earth will come to an end in that final moment.  

 

The Gospel brings us back to the meaning of Christian, and associations people make upon hearing the word Christian.  Our identity as Catholics, is anchored in Jesus’ mandate.  “I give you a new commandment: love one another.  As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.”  Christian identity should be apparent in those who follow Jesus’ command.  But, because we are sinners, that identity is not always visible.

 

Back in the seventies, a time during which some truly awful church songs were foisted upon us, and which, alas, remain firmly implanted in cheap, ugly, disposable "worship aids" and loose-leaf lectionaries, one of the most annoying and wrongheaded featured a thumping marching chorus and the stunningly narcissistic self-aggrandizing lyric: 

“They will know we are Christians by our love, by our love.

They will knoow woooo  we are Christians by our love.” 

 

That last know-wo sometimes sounded like the communal passing of a kidney stone.  

Musical value:  close to zero

Theology:  little to none.

Narcissistic index:  like American Express, priceless

 

Perhaps if the verse read, 'they SHOULD know we are Christians by how we show our love,' the words would be less grating, the sentiment less condescending, and more descriptive of a goal which we should seek.  

There is nothing wrong with the conditional sense.  Rather than assuming 

that we manifest our love so perfectly that others will immediately see us as different it is more realistic—and humble—to admit that we have to work at it.  

Just because we proclaim ourselves Christians it doesn’t mean that the love part derives automatically, without effort, prayer, and self-examination.  

 

“The Lord is gracious and merciful, 

slow to anger and of great kindness. 

The Lord is good to all

and compassionate toward all his works.”

 

That is a great consolation even when we act in a way that prompted Dr. Rieux, 

in Camus' The Plague to observe: "as you know Christians sometimes say that sort of thing without really thinking it. They're better than they seem." 

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Spring has arrived in Boston as evidenced by the photos taken in the backyard of our three house grouping of satellite communities.  It is unfortunate I cannot transmit the aromas. 








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