November 30, 2014
With no fanfare and little celebration beyond
the ordinary, this Sunday marks the end of the church year.
Granted, this is a liturgical way of organizing
time;
but, during the past 52 weeks, the liturgy has
involved us in the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ,
our shepherd-King for all time and eternity.
Therefore, we Christians have a different view
of time and the way we human beings are supposed to live in it and through it.
Even though we see time differently, we are not meant to live
outside of it.
We take the world very seriously because God took the trouble to
create it.
This stance puts a basic tension at the heart of our Christian
existence.
We are in the world but not of it.
We live here but we are on our way to somewhere else.
That is why we call ourselves "a pilgrim church."
As pilgrims, we pass through constantly changing situations.
Because we are constantly moving from place to place, we must
always be adjusting our language, changing our habits, creating new ways of
living-just to survive.
Pilgrims, however, never quite go native, never lose their
identity, never fully settle down.
They always feel a little out of it because a pilgrim's lot is not
to find a spot to call one's own.
The pilgrims' task is to keep their heads turned toward the goal
until they arrive there purified, purged, forged in the fires of all their
experiences on the road.
You and I, the church, are pilgrims.
But how can the church move without losing her way, how can the
church maintain her identity while changing the world?
That is no small problem.
It is part of the continuing tension we experience.
Other institutions can adapt to their environment as necessary; and,
if they end up as something different from what they were, no matter - they
have served their function.
Not so with us!.
If we break living contact with our origins, if we lose the sense
of our tradition. if our beliefs become blurred and our faith fuzzy,
then we have nothing to say and no authority to say it.
And yet, we cannot be imprisoned in our past,
we cannot get bogged down in our tradition.
If we do not relate our faith to our culture, then we wall
ourselves up in a ghetto.
If we cannot communicate our belief in current language, then we
end up talking to ourselves.
God is present to us now in the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that
was present in Jesus.
And Jesus promised that we would do even greater things then he
did because the same Spirit empowers us
and there are more of us to do great things.
And what mlight some of those good things be?
The Son of Man describes a few of them in today's gospel.
What all of these things have in common is that they make no sense
on the ordinary level of life.
The only time we can be certain of God's presence in our actions
is when there is absolutely no other explanation,
when we do something for no earthly reason.
Then we know we are working out of a different set of values and
living in a different kind of time.
Of course, this does not mean that we should always be doing only
crazy things.
But, every once in a while, we should do something foolish like
feed the hungry or clothe the naked
just to check it out and see if God is still hanging around with
us -- as he used to.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Add