This is my homily for yesterday, the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time. The readings for yesterday are here. FYI, my wife's feedback for this one is that it was too much "head" and not enough "heart". Too lecture-y. It's something I'm always fighting. My original plan was to have a mixed-denomination couple join me at each of the masses and share their personal experiences, but none of the couples I asked were able to be available.
"Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us."
One of the reasons that the Bible has lasted so long – the New Testament for 2,000 years, parts of the Old Testament for a thousand years or more longer – is because it is so true in its portrayal of human nature. Is anything more human, more believable, than John complaining to Jesus that some guy was invoking Jesus’ name who wasn’t a disciple? John is saying, Hey – he can’t do that. He’s not one of us. He’s not in our little club. We’re the true followers of Jesus, not him.
“We tried to prevent him, because he does not follow us.”
When I was a kid, it was common knowledge that Catholics went to heaven, while Protestants went to hell. I say “common knowledge” because it was something that we, as Catholic school kids, had somehow absorbed. To be fair, I don’t remember any of my teachers at St. John School actually teaching me that. But my mom once told me that, when she was a little girl in the 1940s, all her Catholic school friends, and not a few of their parents, believed it, too. I think it was something that was widely believed among Catholics. I’m pretty sure that quite a few Protestants believed the opposite, too: that they are the ones who will go to heaven and we’re the ones who will end up in hell.
In a way, those views were understandable. For hundreds of years, the Church in the West was split between Catholics and Protestants, and sometimes it was awful and ugly. Blood was spilled. Wars were fought. Thrones were toppled. Bad feelings and antagonisms persisted. It all became very tribal: the identity of the Catholic tribe was rooted, at least partially, in “I’m not a Protestant”. And the identities of the various Protestant tribes were rooted, at least partially, in “I’m not Catholic.” The bad blood spilled over into the New World. Catholics in the US always have been a minority, and there have been times and places when we’ve been persecuted.
Jesus told John, “Do not prevent him… whoever is not against us is for us.”
Bad feelings between Catholics and Protestants lasted for centuries, but fortunately, they have receded in more recent decades. One of the chief reasons is the 2nd Vatican Council in the 1960s. Vatican II tried to press the reset button on Catholic-Protestant antagonism. At Vatican II, The Catholic church reached out in friendship to Protestants, Orthodox and all who bear the name Christian. Rather than define ourselves as not being the other tribe, Vatican II pointed out the many things that Catholics and other Christians have in common. Among them: the grace of baptism, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the inspiration of sacred scripture, and communal, liturgical worship. That’s quite a bit in common. I sometimes think that we hold more in common than we have things that separate us from one another.
Perhaps most importantly of all, the church fathers of Vatican II stated that Protestants, Orthodox and other Christians, far from being our enemies, are our sisters and brothers. When we come together, we should not only tolerate one another; we should embrace one another as sisters and brothers. The Council went even farther, and stated that members of those other churches and denominations are in communion with us. Not only do we have much in common; we share real bonds of unity.
At the same time, the communion which binds us isn’t perfect. Not yet. We’re not completely united. We’re in this state of nearly-but-not-quite-but-almost-there.
Because we’re not quite there yet, not yet completely unified, the Council did one more notable thing: it instructed us to work to try to get us all the way there. We should reach out the hand of friendship to those with whom we aren’t quite all the way in perfect communion, and say, “Let’s talk, to see if we can work out the things that divide us.”
The word we use for those conversations is ecumenism. We are called to be ecumenical – which means we are called to work for unity with our fellow Christians.
Still, the splits and divisions between Christians are real, and they’re painful for a lot of individuals and a lot of families, including some St. Edna families. There are so-called mixed couples among our parishioners, where one spouse is Catholic and the other is some other type of Christian. It’s possible that there are some mixed couples here with us this morning. They are trying to work out, as best they can, how they can be married to one another while belonging to two different churches. Many of them also are working out the dilemma of what they should teach their children. These are complicated questions. Some couples have found fruitful and lifegiving ways of addressing them.
These couples are engaging in what I call grassroots ecumenism. While church leaders and academics get together for formal dialogues and conferences to try to achieve unity at the high levels, these couples are actually living and working through unity, right here, on the ground, in a very practical way.
In my view, a lot of the most important ecumenical outreach happens locally. Our local Christian churches cooperate with one another in various ways. The PADS shelters which provide shelter and food to homeless people are run by many churches, some Catholic, some from a variety of Protestant denominations. Some of our St. Edna parishioners volunteer at PADS shelters at other churches, including at some Protestant churches. Our St. Edna Community Table program, which provides hot meals to hungry people during the summertime, when the shelters are closed, is a member of the Summer Suppers program, in which Catholic parishes and Protestant churches take turns providing those meals. Through these programs and others, we’re united in our concern for those in need. We don’t let our denominational differences stand in our way.
On the night before he died, Jesus famously prayed that we all may be one – that we all may be united in him. He asks us all to be one body. The good news is: we’re a good deal of the way there already. All of us should try to live ecumenical lives, and resolve to do what we can to break down barriers to true brotherhood and sisterhood with other churches, whether Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox or some other Christian faith heritage. Let us pray for the grace and wisdom to be ecumenical, and see the good in others – even if they’re not on our team or in our tribe. We live in a world that is badly divided in many ways. Let’s see if we Christians can show the way to unity and peace.
I really like this, Jim. Yesterday's Scripture readings lend themselves well to thoughts about ecumenism. I think you are right that there is more that we have in common than that which separates us.
ReplyDeleteIt was the deacons' weekend to preach here, too. It coincided with the USCCB's Priesthood Sunday, and it was strongly suggested that the homilists focus on that. To me, the scripture readings for this weekend were the wrong ones for that. Our priest wasn't the one driving that theme, he said to the deacons ahead of time that he didn't want the homily to be about him. K struggled to mesh the readings with the priesthood theme, but I thought he did a good job. He usually runs his homilies past me, and I did suggest one change. There was some Serra Club boilerplate about suggesting to likely-seeming young men that they consider the priesthood. I reminded K of when we tried to suggest a college major to our oldest son. "How did that work out?" It didn't. It got his back up. He chose his own path, and it worked out fine for him. So K took out the problematic part, and said something about the wind blowing where it will and being open to the promptings of the Spirit.
As a mom I resent it when it is suggested that parents try to influence their kids into a particular vocation. It's not their life.
I always groan a bit when I'm asked to preach on some theme determined by the pastor or the bishop. I don't know what I could say about the priesthood. If there aren't enough priests, I'm not sure that preaching about it will solve anything.
DeleteYour mom's memory, and yours, coincide with the feeling I got in grade school that your salvation was somewhat questionable if you weren't Catholic. But it didn't hold water, half my relatives were Protestant. And later all of my in-laws were. If Protestants were second-class Christians, we surely married a lot of them in my family.
ReplyDeleteI really should have tried to clarify what the church actually teaches about this, but I sort of ran out of time, and it's not that easy to articulate. I hope I got across that it isn't the simplistic dichotomy a lot of us learned.
DeleteJim, yeah, I realize that. Nostra Ataete (pretty sure I spelled it wrong) was ground breaking. But people had been working out their own understanding long before that.
DeleteKatherine, right. For the ecumenical content in my homily, I used the Vatican II document Unitatis redintegratio as my primary source. But you're right that the church was moving in that direction prior to the council. Are you familiar with the case of Rev. Leonard Feeney, SJ from the 1940s (I think it was)? He was slapped down by Rome, and I think expelled from the Society of Jesus, for interpreting the doctrine, "Outside the church, no salvation" in the narrow, too-simple way my mom understood it as a schoolgirl.
DeleteIn fact, it occurs to me that my mom and her schoolkid circle in the 1940s learned the Catholics-heaven/Protestants-hell dichotomy because of the brouhaha over Feeney. I assume it generated a lot of conversation and controversy at that time, and somehow that trickled down to the schoolkid level.
Deacon Bill Ditewig once said that Vatican II was a "Council of Three Popes", the three being Pius XII, John XXIII and Paul VI. Pius laid the groundwork, John initiated it, and Paul carried it through. I guess we could say, "... Seven Popes (and counting)" because the next four guys have tried to carry on the work of unfolding what the council taught. Well, I assume John Paul I would have done so!
Yes, I knew about Fr. Feeney. I guess with there being basically no one in my family of origin who wasn't in a mixed marriage (to begin with) we took that stuff with a grain of salt. At least they didn't make me and K get married in the sacristy like they did my grandparents.
DeleteIn a small town it's pretty hard to find a Catholic to date if you don't want to date the guys you went to grade school with. I knew too much about those guys.
Feeney was excommunicated, but was later reconciled toward the end of his life.
DeleteWhile excommunication does not mean that one is no longer a Catholic, many people think of it as being kicked out of the church. So the joke at the time was that Feeney was kicked out of the church because he taught that outside the church there is not salvation. A rather simplistic interpretation of a complex issue.
When I was in Catholic school in the 50’s our teacher, a nun, specifically taught us that nobody but Catholics could go to heaven. That precipitated my first public dissent against Catholic doctrine. My best friend’s father had died a few months earlier. He was Jewish and I liked him a lot. He was kind. I refused then to believe that he hadn’t gone to heaven just because he was Jewish and not Catholic. The first instance of what became a lifetime of dissent. We were also explicitly taught that we would commit a serious sin if we ever entered a not Catholic Church unless it was to go to a wedding or a funeral.
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