We Are the Church

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
 Cycle B
Feb 13/14, 2021

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/021421.cfm .

Happy Valentine’s Weekend / Day, St. Agnes.  Or if you prefer, Happy Singles Awareness Day!  Also, happy last weekend of the Carnival, Mardi Gras season. I am going to pose two questions to you this evening / morning.  They are:

What is your definition of the Church?
What did Jesus intend the Church to be?   

       
You may not have a quick answer for these two questions.  I would definitely encourage you to explore them after mass today.  You do talk about the homily after mass, right? 
I sent my high school sophomores out last month to interview five different people in their community, including family and friends, a child, an elder, and a teacher. Some were believers, others nonbelievers. They posed these two questions.  Two of the most frequent responses were: the Church is a building or a place, and the church is the religious authorities, usually the bishops or pope in Catholicism.  These answers aren’t wrong, but there are some real weaknesses to them. 

Three years ago, I was in Edinburgh, Scotland for a wedding.  Like many places in Europe, it was full of gorgeous churches … and most of them had no one in them.  Many of these churches were boarded up. Some were crumbling.  Others had been converted to shopping malls, condos, or restaurants.  Looking at our beautiful almost-hundred-year-old church, which is full of life and love, it is hard to imagine that happening here.  Yet it absolutely could happen to St. Agnes.  Jesus did not promise to preserve gorgeous sanctuaries and he built none himself.  Church is not a building. 

In the same way, the Church is not the institution and not the hierarchy.  You often hear people say, “The Church teaches…” or “The Church says…” referring to the Magisterium, the teacher and authorities of our faith.  But this is not the Church—or perhaps these things are not the most important model of what the Church is.  Without the faithful, there is no Church.  A caveat here: in a church of 1 billion people, structure is necessary.  Leaders are necessary.  So are dedicated worship spaces. 

But here is the point: we are the Church. We, the people of God, are the community that Christ called together out of all the nations of the earth to be His presence, His witness to all peoples and places.  To be a nation of priests and the light of the world. 

We see this today in the story of the leper.  His community had cast him out of town and synagogue, fearing that he might physically and spiritually pollute them.  Yet Jesus has come to him on the outskirts of Capernaum, a deserted place on the margins of society.
There is a paradox here.  The word for Church, ecclesia in Greek, means “called out,” as in the people that Jesus has called out of the world.  This former leper had been cast out of the world of human society until Christ healed him and called him out to be a part of a new nation, the Church, and then sent him back into society as his disciple. 

This former leper becomes the first evangelist in the Gospel of Mark, much to Jesus’ actual chagrin.  He really wants to preach in his own words, but his miraculous actions keep preceding him. 

The healing of the leper teaches us that Church is more about being than “going to,” or “doing,” or “giving.”  If we see ourselves as what we are—the Church out in the world, then then the doing and giving will flow out of us. 

I want you to consider that this month as you receive your annual form from the Stewardship Committee:  how can I be the Church this year?  How can I participate in sharing our faith, with hope for the future and with love each other. 

As concrete examples of “being Church,” the Stewardship Committee asked for me and another parishioner (Elizabeth / Emily) to share about ways that we are participating in the life of this parish.  I would like to invite her to come up to the cantor’s ambo now.

[My part again:] My family and I have been parishioners at St. Agnes for about 7 months now.  I am both a parishioner and a “professional minister.”  I work as a theology teacher and campus minister at Mercy Academy.  I am an ordained clergy member, serving visibly at St. Agnes at mass here and in other liturgies.  I have taught RCIA classes in the last few months.  I serve on our new racial justice committee, which is a ministry that I am passionate about, and have been working on several of its initiatives.  I am also the dad of four future Aggies. 

In addition, my wife and I tithe to the parish using the online direct withdraw payment system.  Since I have joined St. Agnes, I have been overwhelmed with how vibrant this parish is: how many ministries there are and how varied, how deeply involved so many people are.  How passionate and deeply faithful.  It is a tribute to the truth of what I preached at the beginning about “being Church.”

A the head of the stewardship committee told me, “there is a place and a role for everyone in the parish’s stewardship efforts [and in the Church, the people of God] and to remind our adults to teach and model stewardship with our younger parishioners.”