With the announcements about the parish leadership, I find it important to re-affirm that the parish is the branch of the vine that is Jesus in each particular place. Our parishes must be active places; places of communion that bear fruit for the building of the kingdom of God. The more diverse the better!
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Homily:
5th Sunday of Easter – Cycle B
One of the things that has been made abundantly clear to me
ever since the first day that I arrived in Logansport is that there used to be
three parishes here (did you all know that?).
As I understand it, the three parishes here in the city used to be a
little territorial and, at least in the early days, it was taboo for members of
one parish to attend Mass at one of the other parishes. I can imagine the scene quite vividly: a
young man tries to slip in the back of the early Mass at the parish to which he
doesn’t belong; he is noticed, nonetheless, and hears a few whispers and
receives a few looks of suspicion from the congregants seated around him; he’s
an outsider and he knows it. Now, while
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this behavior is excusable, I will say that
it is understandable. The ethnic groups
that made up each parish were trying hard to maintain their identity and so
were anxious about allowing others to infiltrate and possibly dilute their
heritage.
The early Church faced similar challenges. Today, in particular, we remember the
challenge it faced in receiving Saul, also known as Paul. When Saul left Jerusalem, he was the most fervent
persecutor of the disciples of Jesus; but when he returned—having encountered
the risen Christ on the road to Damascus and having been baptized by the
disciple Ananias in Damascus—Saul was now a disciple himself. Having heard nothing of this, the community in
Jerusalem was suspicious of him.
Thankfully, the disciple Barnabas had gone to Damascus and had seen for
himself how Saul had converted and how he was now proclaiming Jesus as the
Messiah. It was, therefore, on the
testimony of Barnabas—a trusted member of the community—that Saul was then
accepted into the community of believers.
Nevertheless, Saul continued to encounter
difficulties. Among the Hebrew-speaking
Jews, he was heard and accepted. Among
the Greek-speaking Jews, however, he was being rejected (they even attempted to
kill him!). It’s hard to say what it was
that caused the Greek speaking Jews to react so negatively to Saul, but I
suspect that it had something to do with the fact that, although he was a Jew,
he wasn’t a Greek-speaking Jew, and
so they had a hard time accepting him; and thus we see how the unifying force
of Jesus was still being limited by the weaknesses of human nature.
In the Gospel reading today, we heard Jesus declare that he
is the vine and we are the branches.
This is a very rich image. A
vine, like any plant, needs both the trunk and the branches to grow and to
continue living. Each plant has only one
trunk but a variety of branches and so in using this image Jesus is giving us
an image of the Church. He is the vine,
the trunk which penetrates down into the soil with its roots to extract water
and minerals from the ground and thus is the source of life to the branches,
and we are the branches, who extend out into the world to absorb what is good
in it, like leaves absorb the rays of the sun, so as to provide growth to the
vine and to produce its fruit. The great
diversity in shape and size of the branches is what makes the vine strong,
allowing it to endure through changing conditions so that it may continue to
grow and produce fruit.
In spite of this very organic ideal, however, we still face
the same debilities of human weakness that limited the early Church. Human nature has been redeemed, but it hasn’t
changed. In spite of all of our best
efforts, we still struggle to accept varied expressions of the one faith that
we received in baptism. Sometimes this
is limited by the barrier of language; other times, there are more aesthetic
barriers: the music, the preaching, our particular devotions, etc. Our human weaknesses keep us from seeing that,
as branches on the vine, we are rich and healthy because of our diversity; instead, we convince ourselves that we
are limited by it.
So, how do we get past these limitations? I suggest that we stop talking and start
acting. Two years ago, as we prepared to
leave for the youth mission trip, I took note of how the Hispanic kids were all
huddled together at one end of the sidewalk and the Anglo kids were huddled
together on the other side. I told them
that I wasn’t going to let them be like this throughout the whole trip. In other words, I would expect them to mix
together. Little did I know that God already
had a plan. As these kids traveled
together, prayed together, worked together, and served together, the
Hispanic/Anglo differences seemed to melt away.
By Thursday night (our last night at the camp) there was no way to
distinguish one group from the other: they had mixed together completely. You see, when they stopped worrying about who
they were standing next to and instead focused on the acts of love that they
were being given to do, they no longer paid attention to their differences and
preferences; rather, they allowed those to fade into the background.
In the second reading today, we heard Saint John invite us
to “love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.” In other words, he is saying that our love
must be expressed in works, not just words, if it is to be true. And, from what I saw on the youth mission
trip, love expressed in deeds makes us blind to our differences because we are
focused instead on extending our branches and producing fruit. Thus, if our community is struggling to be
truly integrated (and I’m not saying that it is), then perhaps we need to focus
more on doing the work of building God’s kingdom: that is, the work of serving
the needs of our community; because it is in them that we will look past our
differences; and it is in them that we will know that we belong to the truth.
My brothers and sisters, we—the Catholic Community of Cass
County—are the branch on the vine extended out into this place in order to bear
fruit so that the vine will be strengthened and will continue to grow. Fruit bearing branches are active, however,
and so we cannot be idle; rather, we must engage in good deeds if we hope to
produce fruit; and the abundance of diversity in our community means that the
potential for a rich harvest is great.
Let us, then, boldly engage in these good works so that, rather than
being cut off and thrown into the fire like the branches that produce no fruit,
we might be a fruitful branch that is pruned so as to produce fruit even more
abundantly: fruit by which God our heavenly Father will be truly glorified.
Given at All Saints Parish:
Logansport, IN – May 3rd, 2015
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