Thursday (Proper 4 Year 1)
Today’s Assigned Readings:
Deuteronomy 16:18-20, 17:14-20, 2 Corinthians 8:1-16, Luke 18:1-8
I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance. As it is written, “The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.”
2 Corinthians 8:13-15
Look at those Christians, how they love one another! Or, dare I say it? From each according to his ability to each according to his need.
Two things come to my mind reading this: when I needed an apartment in San Francisco - having been given notice that I had to leave my fine, second storey Victorian flat in the Mission, I picked up a phone. I called a member of my parish and had a place to live that night. Rick’s hospitality was amazing. When I needed a place to live, he gave me a home.
The second thing (things, actually) that comes to my mind is riding to Saturday Night services at my now-defunct Orthodox mission parish, here in North Carolina. I would ride down after work, which would give me about 30 or 40 mins sitting on the church porch until Fr J showed up. One night his daughter came running over from the rectory with a fine bowl of beef stew. I felt suddenly at home. To keep me from having to ride home and come back for services the next morning, the Deacon and his family took me in on Saturday nights. Many a night when I would sit with the Deacon and his wife talking about things in the basement or on their deck. Their kids even called me “uncle”. When I was new in town, they gave me connection and family.
I can think of more such instances going back in my history, but the best was nearly 30 years ago when my Mom and Dad moved to upstate NY in the middle of my Sophomore year of High School. In order that I might not have to change schools in the middle of the year Jeannette Dantice, my Sunday School Teacher, and her husband, David, took me in as one of their own children.
Look at those Christians! See how they love one another?
Today, Thursday, is, on some calendars, the Feast of Corpus Christi. Father Rob has posted a good explanation and history of the feast (which came into being in 1264). He also offers an explanation of the feasts import to him.
I happen to love this feast also but knowing something of the liturgical history of that period I also recognise that this feast represents an odd sort of mediaeval piety that, while important, is sometimes at odds with the simple sense of the Feast of Friends (Chavurah) instituted by Jesus and celebrated through the early centuries of the church. As I have previously blogged, once I asked my priest about distributing the sacrament. “When I hold up the bread and say, ‘the Body of Christ’, am I saying ‘This bread is the body of Christ’ or am I naming the communicant to be the Body of Christ?” The answer was “Yes”.
The Roman Church has a tradition of defining things to the Nth degree. So they have defined the Eucharist down to the point that saying “the Body of Christ” without qualifiers can rarely be taken to mean “the person standing in front of me.” Yet, long before the the Church got “spooky” about the Eucharist (wondering about crumbs and should a man with a beard drink the chalice), it was precisely this person in font of me that was the Body of Christ. St Benedict tells us to greet the stranger with a prostration exactly because it that stranger is Christ him/herself, come to us - not for enclosing in a glass box and being venerated, but to be served.
In 1923, Bishop Frank Weston - a staunch defender of veneration of the Blessed Sacrament - put the practice into context this way:
You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slums. . . It is folly — it is madness — to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children… You have got to come out from before your Tabernacle and walk, with Christ mystically present in you, out into the streets of this country, and find the same Jesus in the people of your cities and your villages.
I would like to see the feast of Corpus Christi be repurposed to the veneration of the living Christ sitting in the pew next to us, and on the street corner as we go home from work. Deuteronomy says to us, “Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue.” And the Gospel, Jesus tells us “Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them.”
Sunday was Trinity Sunday and, once again, the lessons are pointing us towards the way in which Christians-in-community are to be the Earthly Incarnation of the kind of love shown within the Holy Trinity. As I wrote on Saturday, “It would not do for us to imagine any member of the Trinity to have “needs” that can be filled by the other two. But it is for us to see love flowing from one to the other, from two to the third, from each to each in a fullness beyond our imagining.” For the Trinity, also, it is from each according to his ability to each according to his need. That is what we are called to incarnate here. As Rick and Jeanette and the Deacon did, showing hospitality and love… I’m not good at yet. Maybe one day - by your prayers - I’ll get there. But their hospitality is a sign, a sacrament of which all could partake.
As Weston says, “We are to make such a surrender of self to Christ over the whole area of our life that were he to choose to come on earth to reign in his own person, neither you nor I would find it necessary to alter the principles upon which we conduct our work, our prayer, our worship. That is the point. Were he to come, our principles would not require to be altered… Brethren, if you ask me, your Chairman, what is your present duty I tell you that first. Get back into your parish, get back into your rural deanery, get back into your own diocese, and work out what Christian fellowship means. Make for yourselves such fellowship as shall not make you ashamed in the sight of Jesus.”
From each and to each… let us incarnate the Trinity here.