The Coronation of King Charles III reminds me that many of us had to memorize English playright Shakespeare's lines, such as “All the world’s a stage."
The "stages of life" have been compared to stages of prayer. At thirty, we pray we will wake up in love. At forty, we pray we wake up successful. Fifty, to wake up wise. Sixty, to wake up content. Seventy, to wake up healthy. At eighty, we may pray we will wake up!
These stages can also resemble the life of the Church.
The word of God in the Book of the Acts describes the beginnings of Christianity. The early Church is diversifying: Gentiles and Jews, Greek, Aramaic and so on. The challenge then and now is to stay united as we grow in diversity.
In today’s passage, the community is neglecting some people in need. It solves the problem by ordaining deacons. The Greek word diakonia means service. And the Church continues to do so much good.
The letter of Peter evokes the image of a spiritual house, a living temple of God. The living Christ is the cornerstone or center, and we are the living stones.
Churches evoke images of stained-glass windows; biblical heroes and heroines; vaulted ceilings lifting our eyes upward to God; brilliant light symbolizing Jesus Christ.
We are living temples: God lives within us and we live within God. Our good deeds build up this temple.
In the Gospel, Jesus says we have a dwelling place with God.
What precisely will this place be like? We don’t know! I just returned from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and I still can't tell you!
Our visit began with Mass in the tomb of Jesus.
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 trust that God will catch us, and bear us away within himself. God will transform us into his likeness to dwell with God forever.
Another image of the Church, a boat, offers so many insights into who the Church is and our history. Imagine! We're on a journey, with a map, and stormy weather, getting off course, being attacked, people slipping overboard, survivors being pulled in.
A boat needs a captain. A person may not seem an ideal captain—too lax, too strict—but if everyone grabs for the tiller, we're all in deep trouble. Peter didn't seem ideal, yet what his crew and subsequent teams have done has lasted over two thousand years for billions of people.
There are many models describing this community founded by Jesus: institution, mystical body, people of God, servant, herald of the good news, sacrament or sign of God's grace. No one model can fully capture the reality. So, what is this Church?
We might best describe it as a community who believe in God as Triune and in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and 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 unity.
This global community lives in a “huge tent.” Some people show goodness, others not so much. Like so many other things in life, we continually have to strive to get our lives “on track” and, as the prophet Micah said: “do right and love goodness and walk humbly with our God.”
And what does this community do? We 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” 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: baptismal water, Eucharistic bread and wine and healing oil.
The Spirit transformed the disciples from cowards hiding behind closed doors into heroes proclaiming fearlessly that Jesus is alive. That same Spirit lives within us, and can fire us up to do wonders for God if we will only let the Spirit do so.
We are a community of disciples that stretches back to the first century of our Christian era, and that will continue until Jesus Christ triumphantly returns to transform this universe into a “new heaven and a new earth.”
Meantime, to paraphrase the 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.
