Chains

Propers: The Second Sunday of Easter, AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Church is boring as hell.” So I was informed this week just past, and by a believer no less, though of what denomination I couldn’t say. “Ah, but we aren’t trying to entertain you,” was my reply. “We are trying, in part, to free you from your need to be forever entertained.”

This morning’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles presents to us a remarkable picture of the earliest Christian community. The believers in Jerusalem, under the headship of James the Just, held all things in common, with no-one claiming private ownership. And there were no needy amongst them, we are told, for any who held wealth in property or land sold off their excess assets in order to bring the proceeds to the Apostles, who then distributed the funds as each had need.

This was a hallmark of early Christianity: the pooling of resources to aid any who had none. A little later, in the Book of Acts, a dispute arises as to whether the dole is fairly dealt, with Hellenized Christians protesting that poor Hebrew Christians receive the lion’s share. The Apostles, busy with preaching, thus assign deacons to care for the orphan and the widow.

Deacons are clergy, mind you, called to the Office of Word and Service. Giving was so important that it needed a full-time staff. It was central to our liturgy, central to our faith. Indeed, the Eucharist is preceded even today by the Offering, when Christians of old would bring for all whatever they had in excess: bakers would bring bread, weavers fabric, herders meat or milk or wool. Their extra would provide for others’ dearth.

These days we pass a plate, collecting money. But it isn’t an entrance fee. It isn’t the ticket price. It’s the spiritual discipline, central to Christianity, teaching us to give. And it isn’t just to free the poor from their poverty, but also to free the wealthy from their wealth. Possessions, debts, and desires become an insatiable hunger within; every major faith tradition teaches us this truth. We become enslaved to mammon. We feast and can never be filled.

The ways in which the early Church condemned the hoarding of riches—from Jesus and James through Acts and the Didache to the Church Fathers of Constantinople and Rome—make us today uncomfortable, and make the Church feel political, because we are Americans. We fought for 50 years a Cold War against the existential threat of Communism. We’ve read The Gulag Archipelago. We believe in free markets and free enterprise. Most importantly, every poor American sees himself as but a temporarily embarrassed billionaire. We can’t help reading Acts politically because we are political beasts.

At the risk of sounding glib, one can sum up modernity thusly: society became individualized; the individual became psychologized; psychology became sexualized; and sexuality became politicized. That’s just how we think now. That’s how we see the world. Yet back when Acts was written, nobody was looking through the lens of Left or Right. No, they would have read it in terms of hierarchy, of status, of the value of human beings.

Everyone in ancient Rome lived upon a spectrum. There was always someone above you, a dominus, a patron. You always had to bend the knee, unless your name was Caesar. And there would always be someone below you, even if you were a slave; for indeed, there were wealthy slaves, and slaves who owned slaves, down to the seventh degree. The people  above you had more value, had more freedom, had more power. The people below you were largely disposable. But not amongst the Christians.

The most shocking aspect of Christianity for pagan Rome was how we loved each other, how we called strangers brother or sister, how we were willing to die for one another when so many subjects and citizens of the Empire seemed more ready to kill each other. That leveling of society scandalized an entire civilization which had never really thought that way before. Paul had to reprimand wealthy Christians who tried to segregate the poor to  separate tables at the Eucharist. He got into a shouting match with Peter over the latter’s sometime distinction between Jewish and Gentile believers in Jesus Christ.

At one point, a wealthy Roman curious about Christianity was told by the Church that if he wanted to be baptized, he would have to stop raping his slaves. This upset him greatly. “Can I not do what I wish with my own?” he replied. They were his property; it was his right. Who were these Christians to tell him otherwise, to take from him what he’d earned? That rich rapist had to be freed from a spiritual slavery to sin so perfidious, so unquestioned, that he held it as a virtue.

So much of what we take for granted in our postmodern world—human rights, rule of law, abolition, equality, public education, care for the poor—these were not self-evident. They flowed from the side of that Man on the Cross. Jesus overturned the Western mind.

My point today is simply this: the radical love of Jesus Christ annihilates all boundaries. There is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Jesus Christ. And when we’re one in Jesus, then we are one with God. In ancient Rome, the truth of the Gospel horrified the powerful and brought hope to all of the oppressed and all the poor. It was our charity—literally our love—that marked us as a people set apart. “By this they shall know you’re My disciples, if you have love for one another.”

A lot has happened in these last 2000 years. We are far removed from that first Christian community in Jerusalem, geographically, culturally, linguistically, economically. Yet we are still the Church, still the Body and Bride of Christ, together the inheritors of His Spirit and His truth. And this world still needs the Gospel, the Good News of our Lord. We too live within an intricate web of sin, a slavery so ubiquitous we rarely know it’s there.

We are enslaved by debt, by division, by reductive and ignorant politics, by a military-industrial complex, and by billionaires who keep warehouses of workers in sweatshop conditions so that they may ride their ugly little rockets off to Mars. We are enslaved by exhaustion, by busyness, by the myth of productivity. We are enslaved by the consumerist mindset that divides all of life into profit or consumption—so that if something neither makes us money nor entertains us we don’t then know what it’s for.

Anxiety and mental illness are through the roof because we no longer have a category for meaning or purpose or love, no conceptual space available for anything that isn’t entertaining or distracting. “Church is boring as hell,” she said. But alas, hell isn’t boring. Hell is so pervasive and frenetic and diverting that it doesn’t give you time to think, doesn’t give you time to be, doesn’t give you anyone to love—just a hunger that can never go away, never be sated, never be filled.

Christ has come to free us from that, to free us from damnation. Hell is not simply some pit beneath the world. Hell is any human being reduced to merely appetite, who cannot love another as himself because he has no self to love, only desire, desperation, and need. Jesus is our Resurrection. People don’t know what the Church is for, because they don’t know that they’re dead! They just buy things and wish it made them happy.

Christ is alive. Someday the cosmos will confess. Until then, His Church exists as the prophecy and promise of salvation, the eternal reality of God made Man present here and now. He leads us all to freedom through the waters. He feeds us all abundance at His Table. And once we have been freed in Christ from sin and death and hell, He looses us to liberate the world. Thus does Jesus’ charity shatter every chain.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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