When I
realized what Gospel reading we’d be breaking open together today, my first
thought was: “God makes it so easy on me sometimes. I get to go into a Catholic Worker Community
and preach about how Christ is encountered in the stranger, and in the sharing
of food.” Then, I thought and prayed a
little more, and had a second, more anxious, realization: “God makes it pretty tough
for me sometimes. I have to go into a
Catholic Worker Community and try to tell them
something about how Christ is encountered in the stranger, and in the sharing
of food!”
But, I
don’t, not really. A homily shouldn’t
try to tell you something new. It’s
proclamation, it’s celebration, it’s naming the grace that is animating this
place. It’s drawing out that the one we
name ‘visitor’ (or ‘traveler’ or ‘sojourner’ or ‘stranger’) is sometimes
Jesus! In a deeper sense, is always
Jesus. It’s pointing to the guest who
becomes a host, like Elijah before him with the widow at Zarephath, and in taking
our bread, blesses us. I’m not going to say
anything new, and that’s OK, because Jesus didn’t either, not with these two,
on the Way. He listened. He made present anew the God who always hears
us when we cry out “Keep me, O God!” And
he spoke of their heroes, of Moses and the prophets. And he showed them something they may not
have wanted to see before, because it was too hard: that the pattern exemplified
in Moses and the prophets is consummated in the Messiah who suffers.
Then,
he takes bread, says the blessing, breaks
it and gives it, and they know they’re encountering their Messiah who suffered. In the breaking of the bread they know that
they are so beloved that God would break for them. And they recognize the hands of the one in
whom that love took on flesh, flesh that consented to be pierced for our
salvation, crucified by the lawless, and then raised. Because the God of life is stronger than
death.
There’s
breaking in this story, that’s what strikes us about it, but there’s a
making-whole as well. There’s a rising
in the dying. And that’s what warms our
hearts. At the start of the tale, hearts
are broken, and the church is fractured.
They’re dismayed, to be sure, at their Lord’s death. But they’re fractured too, torn apart, in
schism, because the testimony of the women is disbelieved. The testimony of the God of life is rejected
because it’s spoken by those whose voice is improper, invalid, speaking out of
turn. The roar of resurrection is faring
no better than did its master. The
church is broken. But Jesus breaks that
it might be made whole. And at the end
of the story, that’s what we find. By
the time these two travelers make their way back to Jerusalem they find that
the Lord has appeared to Simon, that he’s growing to the point where he make
his first Sermon in the Spirit at Pentecost we read in our first reading and
proclaim, one in voice with the women, one in voice with the Lord, one in voice
with the Church: God raised this
Jesus, of this we are all witnesses.
In
Christ’s breaking, he makes us whole. He
makes us whole as Church, strangers no longer, sojourners together. We experience the radical healing of fissure
that the Pennsylvania Amish showed when they attended the funeral of the
shooter who had opened fire in their school house, and prayed, and, after some
time, welcomed into their home the mother of the shooter, to occasionally care
for a girl wounded by that shooter, never again whole in body. Who could have wrought such a making whole,
but Christ, who knew wound, who broke for us.
He makes
each of us whole, as loved sinners.
Christ who offered no resistance to lawless men, resists our attempts to
fragment our selves. Because we try to
do this a lot. Once we’ve awoken to our
sins, we seek to seal them off in a silo.
We notice some lies escape our lips, maybe, and rather than admit we’re
risking becoming a liar, we seal off our lies in our sin silo and try to offset
that one with a silo of pious or kindly acts.
But, it doesn’t work, because we can never get the scales to tip the way
we want them to, not on our own. So,
Christ shatters those boundaries, as surely as he broke the bread, as surely as
he broke. And our eyes are opened, and
we see we are one: a liar being redeemed, a loved sinner.
Dorothy
prayed that her movement would be the “mighty army of little ones that St.
Therese had promised.” Mighty. Little.
One… in Christ… united, because he broke for us.
No comments:
Post a Comment