April 11, 2021

Acts 4:32-35

1 John 5:1-6

John 20:19-31

What is a church? This seems like a very simple question, but in reality, it is complicated, and I became aware of this when we spent an entire semester during the preparation for the diaconate to learn about it in detail. Of course, since it was taught at a university they couldn’t just call it the study of the church, they had to give it the fancy name of ecclesiology, ekklisia being the Greek word for church.

If you ask a child, as I did my son, they will invariably say that a church is a place where we go to Mass. I continued to press my son Ben on other things that it might mean, and his answers changed but they were always based on the concept that church is a “place” where we did various things religious in nature. And, unfortunately, many children grow into adulthood and retain that same outlook. Even if they continue to practice their faith, it remains a destination where they practice religion as they understand their duty to do, completely separate and distinct from the rest of their lives. We go to the grocery store to get our food, we go to the stadium to see a game, and we go to church to do religion, which for many is the practice of doing just enough to stay on the right side of God so when we die we won’t be left out of His will.

The first reading today demonstrates that the first Christians, those Apostles and disciples that actually knew Jesus of Nazareth, had a completely different conception of what a church was. Saint Paul refers often to the churches he founded at various places around the Mediterranean, but he was never referring to a building. The early churches did not have a building of their own, especially after the Jewish people who rejected the Gospel barred them from assembling at their synagogues and temples. They met in one another’s houses, they broke bread at the dinner tables of fellow followers of The Way, and later they hid in catacombs and other out-of-the-way places when the persecutions began. No, to them the church was a community and a way of life, where they put into practice the teachings of Christ and associated with others that did so, mutually reinforcing one another.

Saint Paul several times in his letters uses the comparison of the Church to the Body of Christ. Modern business consultants will taut this same general concept as some new idea about group synergy or the benefits of diversity, but it is actually right there in first century epistles. Paul taught that just as the body has a hand, which is different than an eye, and both are different than a foot, yet each does it job very well and enables the body to function perfectly, so too a well-functioning community has all sorts of people with different skills, knowledge, and viewpoints which also, working together and cemented by a love of God and love of neighbor, become the Body of Christ bringing the kingdom of God to our world. The Catechism teaches that, “In Christian usage, the word "church" designates the liturgical assembly, but also the local community or the whole universal community of believers. These three meanings are inseparable. ‘The Church’ is the People that God gathers in the whole world. She exists in local communities and is made real as a liturgical, above all a Eucharistic, assembly. She draws her life from the word and the Body of Christ and so herself becomes Christ's Body” [CCC 752].

In other words, a church is a place we go, but that is a small part of what it really means. In its full meaning, it is not somewhere we go or something we do, but who we are, where God, neighbors, and self all meet. The second reading from the first letter of John, a letter written to help heal a division that had developed in the community addressed, reminds them of the meaning of their baptism, to be the children of God. Then in the Gospel, which one has the doubts? It is Thomas, the one who was away from the community. And when Jesus returns to bring back the lost sheep, He comes not to Thomas alone but to the community. Jesus had promised that He would be wherever two or more were gathered in His name. And in just a few weeks Christ before his Ascension will give us His great commission to go and make disciples by baptizing them, welcoming still more people into the community of His followers. As Father Oscar challenged us last week in his Easter homily, we should obey the risen Lord and make disciples. But we must not stop there but then to bring them into our community of joyful disciples.

We will say goodbye to one of those joyful disciples this week, due to the death of our parishioner Candi Beverly. She had been a parishioner here many years, and I'm told was married in our church, the same community but in the old church building back when it was on Highway 501. She covered three different hours in our adoration chapel – she was a great disciple who loved our community and was a great part of the Saint James community. She lived out the vision and mission of Saint James to the end and will be missed by the many who knew her.

Today is Divine Mercy Sunday. The Divine Mercy novena begins on Good Friday and runs through Easter Saturday. Then, the Church gathers to pray the Divine Mercy chaplet to remind us all of Christ's unending grace that He wants to bestow on all of humanity if we would only ask for it. Once again, the Church wants to gather as a community, and asks that it be prayed in the three o'clock hour on the Second Sunday of Easter, three o'clock being the traditional hour that Christ died. While we gather in one church as a small community, we are also therefore gathering simultaneously as a larger world-wide church to pray as one. Saint Faustina understood Christ as requesting this. In her diary, she wrote the words that Jesus said to her: “It is My desire that it be solemnly celebrated on the first Sunday after Easter. Mankind will not have peace until it turns to the Fount of My Mercy” [diary no. 699].

We now continue our Mass with the Liturgy of the Eucharist. We also call this communion since we receive it as a community and therefore this breaking of bread should bring all of us together who approach the altar to receive it. Let it have this affect in our lives, and therefore we receive the Body of Christ in the Eucharist so that we become the Body of Christ in his Church. Let us all offer ourselves and the abilities that God has given us to establishing His Church on earth and bring it closer to being His Kingdom.