Holy Mother Church
A Reading from St Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians:
May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, so that you may have all endurance and patience, joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him, provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven.
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.
What is the purpose of the Church? Such would seem to be the unspoken question on the minds and in the hearts of the postmodern Western world. Why go to Church? What is it for?
Some will say that organized religion is on the wane because we’ve embraced a scientific materialism, but that’s hogwash. Modern science was born of religious men and women; there’s never been a conflict before. That’s a modern myth. Indeed, the great irony is that as organized religion wanes, so too does faith in basic science. Besides which, belief in ghosts, UFOs, horoscopes, Bigfoot, pagan gods, and public hunger for the paranormal more generally, have only increased throughout my lifetime.
Concurrently, civil society has collapsed. Book groups, bowling leagues, Boy Scouts, fraternal lodges, and just about anything else that involves voluntary in-person commitment, have one and all withered on the vine. So the issue, I think, is social, not necessarily religious. The Enlightenment came along and turned us all into individuals, so now the devil just sits in hell with his feet up on his desk, because there isn’t anything left for him to do.
Technology plays a role; virtual community is undeniably easier than actual community, and a good deal less messy, even if it’s the spiritual equivalent of a junk food diet. And consumerism shoulders a lot of the blame as well, it being our society’s replacement religion. When you’re conditioned from birth to view everything through the lens of production and consumption, Christianity doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.
Is the Church for profit, or is it for entertainment? Because if we can’t place it into one of those two clear-cut categories, then Americans simply cannot comprehend it. We’re either making money, or we’re spending money. Nonprofit doesn’t enter the equation.
The word “church,” believe it or not, derives from the Greek ἐκκλησία, literally the “gathering of the summoned.” This would be the assembly of the citizens in an ancient city-state. The Christian Church consists of those called out from the world into Christ—called, indeed, to be Christ for this world, to be His hands and feet and voice. We are, in a very literal sense, made into His Body, made into His Bride.
In Jesus Christ, God became Man that Man might become God. In Him, the divisions between Creator and Creation, the human and the divine, are forever done away with. As we are made one in Him, so we are made one in God, partakers of eternal life, the life of true divinity. And the Church is the result of that. We, as Christians, together as the Church, are the continuation of Jesus’ Incarnation. That’s what everything here is about. Everything we do, we do to be one with Jesus.
We come to Christ through Baptism, baptized into His death, that we need never fear death again, and into His eternal life, already begun. We are given in Baptism His Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, who is His life and breath and love. And we are given His Name: we are called Christians, little Christs.
Then we come to Communion, the Lord’s Supper, the Holy Eucharist, where we are given Jesus’ Body and His Blood. And now you can do the math: when we have the Name of Jesus, the Life of Jesus, the Body and the Blood of Jesus, what does that make us? It makes us Jesus! Not individually, of course, but all of us together, all of us made one, living in our unity if not our uniformity. We are made into Jesus and sent out into His world.
Why do we study the Scriptures? Because the Scriptures give us Jesus. Why confess our sins? Because Jesus here forgives. Every week we are gathered in, forgiven, taught, fed, blessed, renewed and resurrected, then sent out again for a world in need of salvation. That’s what the Church is. That’s what Christianity is: broken, lost, and wayward sinners, called into union with Christ, called to die and rise again, called to proclaim the Good News.
Our archetype and matron is the Mother of Our Lord. The Blessed Virgin Mary is the counterpart of Christ: as God becomes human in Jesus, so humanity is joined to God through Mary. She is humanity lifted up, mortality made immortal. She knows union with Christ in body and soul and bears Him into our world; so too are we called as the Church to birth our Lord in our own age, through labor and suffering and joy and new life.
Everything that was promised to Mary is promised as well to us all. She is the Church in microcosm. What she is as an individual, we are as a community, and someday the whole world, indeed all worlds, shall be as well. The Church is a preview, a prophecy, a community called out of time, to reveal to the cosmos its universal destiny, that God at the last shall be all in all.
Mary, the Church, and the Apocalypse are really all one and the same: we are all of us the Creation made one with our Creator; all of humanity, all of reality, gathered back into the bosom of our God. What Mary was, we are, and all of the world will be.
Christ reveals, through the Church, here in time, the eternal truth of the Gospel: that God and Man are one in Christ; that sin and death and hell are conquered; that nothing and no-one in all of Creation can separate us from our God. That is the purpose of the Church. That is what Jesus has made of us, and what He makes us still: every morning, every Sunday, every Easter.
Do you have what it takes, to shoulder the Cross, to defy the devil, to raise up the damned from the dead? I should say that you do not! But Jesus does. And by His grace, He makes us His; He makes us into Him. We are His Body. We are His Church. We are the Resurrection and the Life! And by the victory of the Christ, we have already won.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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