You're Invited!!

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

            In terms of the social life, it seems to me that there is nothing bigger in the mind of a kindergartner than being invited to a birthday party.  It’s a sign that you’ve made it in the innocent jungle of social interactions between 6-year-olds.  And it doesn’t seem to leave us.  Even as we progress through school, we want to be invited to a friend’s house; we want to be chosen for the basketball team; we want to be chosen as first chair in our instrument’s section of the band; we want to be chosen as the lead in the play or musical.  And let’s be honest: as adults we still like being invited over: to a friend’s house; to a sports game; maybe for an adult beverage at the local watering hole. 

            Jesus invites Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John in our Gospel today.  And maybe they, too, were just so happy to be invited and chosen.  But it is amazing that they just left everything.  This Jesus, whom they didn’t know well, called them to follow Him, to be his disciples, and they did.  There were no questions, no caveats, no conditions.  They just followed Him.  And, as we know the rest of the story, their acceptance of the invitation took them many places they never imagined: the Sermon on the Mount; the feeding of the 5,000; Mt. Tabor and the Transfiguration for Peter, James, and John; the triumphant entry into Jerusalem right before Passover; the Upper Room as both the priesthood and the Eucharist were established; the Garden of Gethsemane, again for Peter, James, and John; the foot of the cross for John; and the Upper Room again where they saw the risen Christ.  And then they continued the work of Jesus after Pentecost, “teaching,…proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and curing every disease and illness among the people.” 

            We were given the same invitation at our Baptism.  We were called to put Jesus ahead of everything else.  We were invited to be a follower of Jesus and to teach, proclaim the gospel of the kingdom, and heal people.  As we celebrate Catholic Schools Week this week, we celebrate schools that can offer that invitation to our children Monday through Friday, not just in religion class, but throughout the entire day.  But have we, no matter where we went to school, accepted this invitation?  Or do we stand at the fringes of our faith, like the Rich Young Man who wanted to follow Jesus, but was not willing to give up anything to follow Him?  Is the extent of our faith life, our relationship with Jesus, simply going through the motions each week, or do we know Jesus personally?  To put it another way, if I were a stranger and I came up to you and said, “Why do you follow Jesus?  What’s so important about Him?  Why should I become Catholic?” what would you say?  Think about that for a second.  What would you say?

            In our preface, our prayer reminds us that even though we had abandoned God through sin, through Jesus’ blood and the power of the Holy Spirit God reconciled us to Himself, made us the body of Christ and the temple of the Holy Spirit, the Church.  That’s the invitation we received: to claim as our own that reconciliation and the gift of God’s friendship.  Because without God’s friendship, we are at enmity with God, as St. Paul says.  Without God’s friendship, we deserve God’s wrath.  But God invites us to His banquet, and to be a part of Jesus through the Church.

            And that Church is supposed to be one as the Trinity is one God.  This past week we celebrated the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.  Too often, those who are invited, and who seek that invitation, work against that unity by dividing into camps: “‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’  Is Christ divided?”  Pope Francis recently said that there is one word that describes Christians not being united: scandal.  We have grown too accustomed to the disunity of Christians.  We have grown too used to divided Christians.  Instead, there should be one Church of Christ, united in true belief of what God teaches us through the authority of Scripture and the Teaching of the Apostles and their successors; united in governance under the one Vicar of Christ, the visible sign of the unity of the many Christians spread throughout the world; united in the sevenfold sacramental economy of salvation, where we receive God’s life of grace in the way Jesus Himself established.  If we have friends, and many of us probably do, who have left the Church, how have we invited them to come back home to the Catholic Church?  If we have Christians friends, and I’m sure all of us do, who are non-Catholic Christians, have we done our best to explain our faith to them to promote understanding? 

We have received the greatest invitation, better than a birthday party, or a spot in the band or the play, or a member of a sports team.  We have been invited to be a part of the one Church of Christ and to use our diverse gifts and personalities to spread the kingdom of God and invite others to follow Jesus, not from far away, but in a close, intimate relationship with Him.  Yes, we may have to leave some things behind that were dear to us, like Peter, Andrew, James, and John did.  But we will receive a hundredfold in this life and in the life to come if we accept the invitation from Jesus to follow after Him and become fishers of men.

Happy Anniversary!!

Solemnity of the Dedication of St. John Church

           

1958 Original Church

Ordinarily, we would be celebrating the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord today and closing out the Christmas Season.  That is what our parishioners who today attended our St. Thomas Aquinas site celebrated.  But for us at St. John the Evangelist, this day is a special day of a different kind: an anniversary.  55 years ago today, this Church was dedicated to the glory of God under the patronage of St. John the Evangelist.  55 years ago today Bishop Joseph Albers, first bishop of Lansing, celebrated the Rite of the Dedication of a Church, initiating this place as a temple of the true God.  55 years ago today, prophecies were fulfilled: the oracle from the Book of Malachi, that “From the rising of the sun to its setting…Incense offerings are made to my name everywhere, and a pure offering”; the oracle from the Book of Isaiah that we heard this morning: “foreigners who join themselves to the Lord…To love the name of the Lord, to become his servants…Them I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer; Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be acceptable on my altar, For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples”.  In this place a pure offering is made.  In this place we, most of us Gentiles, that is, non-Jews, who have been joined to the Lord through Baptism so that we can love the Lord and be His servants, we have been brought to this mountain, represented in the raised sanctuary, and our sacrifices, joined to the one perfect sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, made present for us in sacramental signs in the Eucharist, are accepted by God.  This place is a house of prayer for all peoples.  Brothers and sisters, to quote David in Psalm 118: “This is the day the Lord has made.  Let us rejoice and be glad in it”!!!

            Now, we believe that God exists in all places.  He cannot be contained because of his immensity and transcendence.  And yet, we have this place, this building, which we have set aside for the worship of God and the edification, the building up, of His People.  Why?  For one, we also believe that God, whom the heavens and the earth cannot contain, chose to limit Himself and take flesh, born of the Virgin Mary.  God chose to be contained as the Divine Nature was united to Human Nature in Jesus.  As we say in the Creed, “by the power of the Holy Spirit, he was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man.”  God chose to make a temple for Himself as He joined Himself to us in the Incarnation.  Secondly, we are people who operate by our senses.  Everything we know comes through our senses.  And so we build a place that becomes for us a physical reminder that God dwells among us.  We set aside a place where we can come and offer worship to God: to thank Him for His goodness; to ask for His blessing; to lift up in prayer our brothers and sisters. 

This building becomes a symbol, a sensible reality that points to an invisible reality.  This building is a special kind of symbol, a sacrament.  I don’t mean that we’re adding sacraments to the seven Sacraments instituted by Christ to confer grace.  But it is a sacrament in the sense that it is a physical reality that gives us the opportunity to receive grace, because as we enter the nave of the church and enter our pew, or go to light a candle at the Holy Family corner, or pass some time in prayer at the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, we can receive God’s life, what we call grace. 

This building also is a type of sacrament because it is meant to represent us.  We are the living stones that are being built up into the temple, as St. Peter reminds us in the second reading today.  God desires each of us to be part of his heavenly temple.  He is crafting each of us into an individual stone that will fit perfectly into the New Jerusalem in heaven.  Each of us has a different role to play in the building.  Christ Jesus is the cornerstone, with the twelve apostles making up the rest of the foundation of the heavenly temple.  And we build on that foundation, and add to the structure and beauty of the temple as we are chiseled so that we can fit into the place God has set aside for us.  But, unlike stones which are inanimate, we the living stones, can also form ourselves, and hopefully we cooperate with God in being formed into the right stone for the right place, rather than forming ourselves to our own standards, and risk being thrown out of the construction of the heavenly temple because we have made ourselves have no place in the temple of God.  But, if we let God cleanse our temple, our soul and body, as Jesus did in the Gospel, then we know we can have a place in the building up of the temple not made by human hands, but made by the hand of God.

Our prayers remind us, too, that we are the temple of God, and this building symbolizes what we are called to be.  The Prayer over the Offerings says, “Recalling the day when you were pleased to fill your house with glory and holiness, O Lord, we pray that you may make of us a sacrificial offering always acceptable to you.”  And our preface continues the theme: “For in this visible house that you have let us build and where you never cease to show favor to the family on pilgrimage to you in this place, you wonderfully manifest and accomplish the mystery of your communion with us.  Here you build up for yourself the temple that we are and cause your Church, spread throughout the world, to grow ever more and more as the Lord’s own Body, till she reaches her fullness in the vision of peace, the heavenly city of Jerusalem.”  May we truly be stones that are fit to be a part of the heavenly temple, to which God calls us through Baptism.  Because, as Bishop Albers said about the students (though it applies to all of us) as he dedicated this church on 12 January 1958, “The greatest possession they have today or ever will have in their entire lives is that of their Faith.  Should this be lost, everything will be lost.  And no matter what material success they may attain later on, before God their lives will be a failure.”

I wish to close with words of gratitude, again quoting Bishop Albers: “I wish to use this occasion to express my appreciation to everyone who has helped in the realization of this building whether through contributions, advice, planning, counseling or other ways.  I am especially grateful to the many thousand donors who have given of their means…I am confident that Almighty God will reward them with an increase of Faith and a greater love and devotion to Him and to souls, for their generosity in providing these means to care for the young men and women here at Michigan State University.”