Sunday, April 29, 2018

All Fired Up

Rembrandt's "Storm on the Sea of Galilee
On the road to Damascus in Syria, St. Paul suddenly had a visionary experience of the living Christ. That experience turned Paul’s life “upside down.” He went from fierce persecutor to great evangelizer of Christianity. His one passion was to proclaim the good news, the Gospel: Jesus is alive! And because He lives, we live—God lives in us and we in God.

Paul describes in his Ephesian letter the vision that fired him up: “God gave me the amazing grace to see his plan for us.” And at the center was Jesus Christ, the living Christ who anticipates our future. For Paul, Jesus is the image of the invisible God and in him all things hold together. Jesus is the unique revelation of God, the light who shines in the darkness, the unique transformer of us into God's adopted sons and daughters.

In the Gospel according to John, the author describes, in the metaphor of a vine and branches, the relationship of Jesus to you and me and all Christians. Just as branches can’t bear fruit unless they are connected to the vine, so too we are connected to the living Christ to do good works.

One of my favorite images of our global Catholic community is a boat, which offers many insights into the Church. Imagine! We're in a boat, on a journey, with a map, storms, going off course, people slipping overboard, survivors being pulled in, mutinies, being attacked. And a boat needs a captain when everybody's slipping around. He may not be ideal but if everyone grabs the tiller, we're in trouble. Peter didn't seem the ideal captain, yet what his crew and subsequent crews have done has lasted two thousand years and today has 1.3 billion crew members, along with 300 million orthodox and 800 million protestants under the umbrella of “Christianity.”

Perhaps we might best describe the Church as a global community of disciples who believes in God as Triune, in Jesus Christ as Son of God and redeemer, and who shape their lives accordingly; a community of disciples who remember that belief ritually in the Eucharist, and recognize the Bishop of Rome as the foundation of its unity. This community lives under a huge tent. We continually have to strive to forgive ourselves and one another, and as the prophet Micah said, “do the right and love goodness and walk humbly with our God.”

We celebrate the Living Christ especially in the word proclaimed and the sacrament celebrated. The same Spirit, who transformed the disciple;s in a locked upper room from cowards into heroes proclaiming from the rooftops that Jesus is alive, lives in us and can fire us up to do wonders for God.

Pope Francis’s exhortation “Gaudete et Exsultate” – “Rejoice and be glad” (Mt 5:12) – expands on this, pointing to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount as our “Christian identity card.” Francis sees holiness through the lens of the "beatitudes," for God has chosen us to be holy. God wants all of us to be saints, urges Francis, and not settle for anything less.

The Pope describes how ordinary activities in daily life, e.g., parenting a child, being a good next-door neighbor, doing a job conscientiously, placing ourselves daily in the presence of God, helping the needy:  This is the stuff of holiness. Francis urges us to discern, to examine daily, what's true and right in our decision-making relative to work, career, family, social life and community.

And until Jesus Christ returns in glory and great power at the end-time, remember at the start of each day that we shall pass through this world but once: any good therefore that we can do or any kindness that we can show to any human being, let us do it now.