The word of God in the Book of the Acts takes us back to the beginnings of Christianity. The early Church is beginning to diversify: Gentiles as well as Jews; Greek-speaking as well as Aramaic-speaking disciples. The challenge then and now is – with so many languages and cultures – how to stay united as we diversify.
Suddenly in today’s passage, a problem arises: the community is neglecting some people in need. But it solves the problem by ordaining some as deacons. The Greek word diakonia means service. And that is why the Church continues to have so many agencies which do so much good for others, especially the needy.
The letter of Peter evokes the image of a spiritual house, a cathedral, a living temple of God. The living Christ is the cornerstone or center, and we are the living stones.
Churches evoke for me images of the great medieval Gothic cathedrals: stain-glass windows that tell the biblical story of salvation; vaulted ceilings that lift our eyes upward to God; stone carved biblical heroes and heroines that inspire; and brilliant light that symbolizes Jesus Christ.
We also are living temples: God lives within us and we live within God. And our good deeds are the stones that build up the temple of God.
In the Gospel, Jesus says we have a dwelling place with God.
What precisely will this dwelling place be like? We don’t know! Death is our most radical act of faith. We let go of our earth-bound existence, all we call human life, our very selves with unconditional trust that God will catch us, like a trapeze performer, in that great leap of faith into the darkness of death and bear us away within himself forever.
The letter of Peter describes the Church as a spiritual house. I would to reflect on another image of the Church, a boat, one of the oldest in Christianity and a favorite of mine. This image offers so many insights into who the Church is and the history of the Church. Imagine! We're in a boat, on a journey together, with a map and stormy weather, people slipping overboard, survivors being pulled in, mutinies, getting off course, being attacked.
A boat needs a captain in the middle of all this. He may not be ideal—too lax, too strict--but if everybody grabs for the tiller, we're all in trouble. Peter, for example, didn't seem an ideal captain, yet what his crew and subsequent crews managed to do has lasted over two thousand years and today has over 1.2 billion Catholics.
Moreover, there are many models that can describe this community of disciples or Church that Jesus founded: an institution with a structure, mystical body, people of God, servant, herald of the good news, and sacrament or sign of God's grace. No one model can fully capture the reality of the Church. So, the question is, what is this Church?
Perhaps we might best describe the Church as a community who believe in God as Triune and in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and the redeemer of humankind, and who shape their lives according to that belief; a community which remembers that belief ritually especially in the Eucharist, and recognizes the Bishop of Rome as the foundation of its unity.
This global community lives in a “huge tent.” Some people show goodness, others not so much. In fact, some are downright dysfunctional, making a mess out of their lives and the lives of others. And like so many other things in life, the Church lives with some messiness and muddles through as best it can. But we continually have to strive to do the right thing, to forgive ourselves and one another, to let go of feelings of resentment and bitterness, and get our lives “back on track” and, as the prophet Micah said centuries before Jesus: “do right and love goodness and walk humbly with our God.”
And what does this community do? We remember and celebrate the awesome presence of the Living Christ, gloriously alive, in our midst. He is our way into eternal life, our true Good News who scatters the “fake news” all around us, and our life who overcomes death. We retell the stories of Jesus; we celebrate the sacramental presence of the living Christ in liturgical signs like baptismal water, Eucharistic bread and wine and healing oil. The same Spirit who transformed the disciples from cowards hiding behind closed doors into heroes proclaiming fearlessly that Jesus is alive, that same Spirit lives within our global community, within us, and can fire us up to do wonders for God if we will only let the Spirit do so.
In the final analysis, we are a global community of disciples that stretches back to the first century of our Christian era, and that will continue perhaps for many more millenia until Jesus Christ triumphantly returns to transform this universe into a “new heaven and a new earth.”
Meantime, to paraphrase the 16th century Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila, the living Christ has no body but ours to continue his work; no hands, no feet but ours; ours are the eyes with which living Christ looks compassionately on the needy; ours are the feet with which he walks to do good; and ours are the hands with which he helps others. Amen.
