Second Talk

What we are called to believe?

Last week we talked about the Creed the Apostles Creed. The first thing the Creed deals with is of course the person of Jesus Christ. We affirm first that we believe in Jesus Christ God's only Son and we talked about how the Christian Community came over the course of about 350 years to recognize the divinity of Jesus and to find language in which to talk about Jesus as a person. We went through the councils of Nicea that proclaims Jesus' divinity; Constantinople which proclaimed the divinity of the Holy Spirit; Ephesus which found and held that Mary was the Mother of God just not the Mother of Jesus and finally the Great Council of Chalcedon that found that Jesus Christ was both God and Man possessing 2 natures in one person. The second part of the series is going to concern itself with the Church. In the Creed we say “we believe in the Holy Catholic Church. Very simple in both Creeds both in the Apostles Creed and Nicene-Constantinople Creed we say “we believe in the Holy Catholic Church. That's all that is said no long dictations. One simple little sentence what is the Church? What is this mystery we call the Church? The Church is not defined by the Creed and the Church has really hardly ever been defined by and council at all. However the last council did do something about that. We remember as children who went to Catholic School and too Catechism. We were taught that the Church possessed four marks it was one it was Holy, it was Catholic, it was Apostolic, and what that meant was very simply, had Jesus did not find several Churches or 5 or 6 he founded one Church and it was his intentions that his followers should be united into one Church. The second mark was that it was Holy; Holy means single heartedly it was possessed to the Grace that God gave to his Son which he gave to humanity and the Church possessed this in great abundance. It was Catholic which means universal. Universal means that it was not just for one people not just the Irish not just the Germans or other people it was for and finally it was Apostolic, which meant two things one it taught the doctrine that the Apostles spread throughout the world and there was a link a direct physical link between the Apostles and the present leadership of the Church at any one given time; which is called the Apostolic succession. That's what we were taught what did we see the Church as? We saw it as a monumental one monolith, one organization. Inside in the Piazza of St. Peter's the plaza they had the big Oblast that came out into the center of it and in there they had little circles. We kind of figured we were in the back of that and in the front was a tiny fellow you could see barley making him out looking out the window of course that was the Pope and they had these other people you could tell that these were priests and nuns. That was the image that most of us had of the Church that's the model of the Church. It was a large group of people under the Pope and it was a building was the model. However, since then the Church has had a revolution, and we call that revolution Vatican II. In Vatican II in November of 1964 proclaimed by his Holiness Pope Paul the XI, was the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church called in Latin Lumen Gentium , anyone know what that means “light of the people or light of a nation the nations when the Hebrews and the Israelites talked about themselves they said there's Israel and the nations. The Latin word for nation is Gens. We get the word genealogy from it, generation and all of those words come from that. Lumen Gentium is the Councils Fathers document on what the Church is, it is a foundation upon which we are going to base what the modern theologians called models or images or visions of the Church. What is the Catholic Church and how do we describe it? The first thing you must always remember when we are speaking about the Church or about anything that I am talking about and it's that word called mystery. What does the word mystery come from? It comes from a Greek word Mowain which means to be silent before. In other words the word mystery means something that we know, it's not mysterious we know the Church it's not mysterious in that sense. It's something that we know and we see it but words escape it, it's a mystery you cannot describe it in words. The Church is one of these things it's a mystery. It is something that resides outside of our ability to discuss it totally we can talk about it we just cannot grasp it. So when we are talking about the Church we are talking about a mystery and in fact the Council Fathers the first chapter right out of the book chapter one the Mystery of the Church. The mystery of the Church is based on the mystery of its founder Jesus Christ. It's based on the mystery of the Trinity and his relationship to the father. Christ is the light of humanity, and it is accordingly the heartfelt desire of this sacred council being gathered together by the Holy Spirit that by proclaiming this gospel to every creature it may bring to all men the light of Christ which is visible from the Church. There is an intimate connection between God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit and the Church a metaphor like a prison. It is the thing threw which the light of God shines on the world. So that's the first thing it is rooted in the mystery of God himself. Jesus didn't intend on building a Church he wanted to renew Israel; which would be the light to the nations. But as a result of Israel's rejection God had to do something else and so he instituted the Church and it is the Church that is now according to the council fathers the light of the world. But there were many ways that the council fathers described the Church. The first one is, he says likewise in sacrament of the bread the unity of the believers who from one body in Christ who is both expressed and brought about. The Eucharist is the center of the Church. Hence the fathers go on to say the universal Church is seemed to be a people brought from the unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They are to serve and to give its life for the ransom the many. So there is an identity between Christ and his Church. They go on to describe images for the Church. One of the first is that the Church is a seed, the seed in the beginning of the kingdom it is not the kingdom, the kingdom is to come. The Church is the light of the kingdom it is not the kingdom. But in the same time as the Church grows it tries to bring the kingdom about. The Church is described as a Sheepfold or flock; it is described as a cultivated field; the tillage of God or the ancient olive tree. Olive trees last for 100's of years and that was one of my first images of the Church when I first started thinking about this the Church is a great tree, upon which all these vines grew, and fruits and leaves and I remembered in my Church History book when I was in 6th grade. The great tree of the Church had limbs had been chopped off, leaves were laying on the ground fruit was laying on the ground and that the Church had been battered but that the Church had still been there, and that was the image of the Church that I had. It has been an image that has stuck with me for a long time of a great tree that gives fruit and shade and life to the world but is at sometimes in need of pruning and sometimes things happen to it sometimes it gets rotten and things have to be cut away from it. But that's what the great mystery of the Church is to me like a great olive tree or fruit tree. Church is described sometimes as Mother Church that was the big thing, Holy Mother Church but run by men. It is sometimes called the vine or the branches which Christ is the center it is sometimes called a building. It is sometimes called a temple or simply people moving about, it is called servant it is called body it is such a rich mystery that it defies any one metaphor and sometimes in the Epistle to the Ephesians Paul refers to the mystery of Christ relationship with his Church to the love that exist between a husband and a wife. Church is called the bride of Christ which reminds us of the biblical the Old Testament prophet Hosea had a wife and she was not a very good person he deeply loved her but she played the whorled she ran around with men and all the time Hosea took her back; and in this relationship he saw with the wife of his he saw Gods relationship with Israel that was constantly leaving God and going off and cavorting with strange gods and always God taking her back; the Church looking upon itself as constantly in need of reformation. The Church is a Church of sinful people it is the bride of Christ but yet it needs to be reformed and pruned of bad practices and of evil ways of times. The great metaphor that comes out of the council is that of the people of God and it is strictly biblical and it comes from the book of Exodus God's people were who, the Israelites. From the teaching of Pius XII, who was merely teaching what other people had taught since the reformation. But what Pius said was not that at all what Pius said he said that the only “True Church that had the fullness of Christ Church was the Holy Roman Catholic Church, he never really did say that outside that Church there was no salvation, but that's where people got that idea from. The Council Father's however have changed that in Lumen Gentium. They said yes, the Church we belong to the Holy Roman Catholic Church which is united in common belief which is united in the same Eucharistic table and is united with his Holiness the Pope and the Bishops of the world has the fullness of Christ Church, but that doesn't mean that other Churches and Ecclesial Communities that what they are called do not also have some of the elements of the true Church. Lets face it, the Church is broken and has been broken for almost over 1000 years if we go back talking about our Orthodox Brothers. We have not had union with them since 1054 and we are fighting over something that no one understands any longer and we are very close to these people in liturgy and belief, except for a few little tinny things that keeps them in schism from us. The Anglican community considers itself in the Catholic tradition and the main line Protestant groups the Presbyterian the Baptist and the Methodist they all believe the same things that we believe about Jesus Christ, so the Church recognized that these other Churches have elements and that God works threw them as he works threw us. I want to tell you about the crazy people upstairs in the Church they're crazy people in the Catholic Church lets face it there are ghosts and skeletons in our closets, there is this thing called the Inquisition, which was over exaggerated maybe 10 or 12 people were killed by Spain, but still in all it was a horror. Everyone has skeletons in there closets. The big metaphor to come out the council “the people of God model of the Church it actually as Cardinal Dulles calls it the pilgrim people of God is the chief metaphor. Let's look at some of those models we have for the Church. There are two scientific guys a fellow by the name of Pop and Warner they revolutionized scientific thinking in the 1960's. Scientist thought they could know the absolute truth about the universe. Pop and Warner though had some doubts about that and they began to analyze linguistically what these professors were saying, hey look you are creating a model or a image of what you or we think reality is and you are using the model that best explains the facts that you are talking about and this is called Paradigm Theory or the model theory and is a very important concept in science and Cardinal Dullas revolutionized the thought about the Church and he talked about models, and about paradigms about how the Church looks and how it functions and the first one he talks about is the political societal model this model was put by the great Jesuit Theologian Robert Bellarmino 1588 as follows “the one true Church is the community of men brought together by the profession of the same Christian faith and participation in the same sacrament under the authority of legitimate pastors especially the one Vicar of Christ on Earth the Roman Pontiff, the one true Church is as visible and palpable as the Kingdom of France or the Republic of Venice. This is the model that modeled the Church thought from 1588 to 1950. This thought is that the Church is like a political entity, it has rulers it has subjects it has soldiers, estates and lands it's a palpable and visible as the Kingdom of France and the Republic of Venice. This is a very serviceable model because from 1588-1870 the Church was very much part of the political world in which it existed, the competing kingdom we had a thing called the Papal States. The Pope had an army fighting wars with other states. But this model served very well until 1870 or so when the Church lost it's land and was condensed later in 1922 into the tiny state what we call the Vatican State which is 22 acres on the left hand bank of the Tiber River. This model emphasized the visible institutional character of the Church and this is the model that most of us got as children. We emphasize Pope, Bishop, Priest and Nuns. This goes along pretty well everybody is happy with this kind of model until about 1930's or so and this is going to culminate with another model that comes out in 1943 when Pope Pius XII writes a very long and sickly call Mystici Corporis which means the mystical body and he goes back and he retrieves from the Epistles of Paul, Paul's metaphor of the Church is the Body of Christ. We all know Corinthians it gets read at every wedding, that Paul preaches that they were all trying to be number one. They had people with tongues, prophecies saying that they were number one, and Paul says no, the Church is the Body of Christ were every organ in the body that the eye can't say to the foot I'm not letting you walk and the foot cannot say eye thou shalt not see. Each part of the body in Paul's theology works together for the common good of the body that became a very hot topic in the 1940' and 1950's. It never really caught on, all that well it was starting to replace the political societal image of the Church but it didn't catch on really well but it still there and is still in Paul's Epistles and it has scriptural basis. Then there's the sacramental mode and this comes from the Dominican Order, it actually comes from Augustan and Aquinas they looked upon the Church as a sacrament, in fact Chilabeks calls the Church the sacraments of God in the world and what is a sacrament, a sacrament is an efficacious sign that means it's a sign that does what it symbolizes. The bread is the body of Christ, the water of baptism does initiate us into the Church. The Church is really in this thing the prime sacrament its where holiness and sanctification comes out. A sacrament is both sign and instrument; it describes in some sense the indescribable and inexpressible spiritual reality, this never caught on but people are still working on it and something really to think about is that the Church itself is a great sacrament. The word itself is a great sacrament. We have to think of the Church itself, us, and we as sacraments to the world. Now the Pilgrim People Model, this is the one Vatican II promoted. This Church this model of the Church sees the Church as God's favorite people, as a people who are on a journey, where does this come from? This comes from Exodus, we are the people in Egypt we are slaves but they are well fed and gripe Lord let us go back the flesh pots let us go back to Egypt at least we have our onions we can cook with our soup, why did you put us out in these deserts with scorpions and snakes and no water we are going back to Egypt but he doesn't let them do this he sets these people on the road he puts them out onto the dessert, the word desert is symbolic what does it mean first where you meet God, that's where Moses first meets him on the foothills of Mount Sinai. It is where the spirit of God is found and this is what the council fathers looked too they looked at the Book of Exodus and they looked Israel's Covenant with God and re-captured and brought back to the Church this image of us the pilgrim people, now we are on the road. We have no place of abode. We are a people on there way, exiles in the wilderness. The world we live in is not religious its not anti-religious it just doesn't care about it we are a very much cosmopolitan culture that looks to me like the culture of Rome right at the time when Christianity became the world religion that it became. We have a mass media that takes nothing into account about religion, look at what they have on T.V. at night, is there anything about faith or religion on T.V. Listen to the people on T.V. they don't talk about religion. The Pilgrim People of God is the primary metaphor to do that to realize that down deep our Church is not rooted in this world but is rooted in another. This is the downfall of all metaphors. The bad part of this or dark part shouldn't we have a root to this world, shouldn't we have something to connect us to it? We are not just walking through it this is our world this Church belongs to this world, God so loved the world that he sent his only Begotten Son. So that where we need a place and another model comes about. That one is a model of Church as Servant. This came out of Vatican II it was like an undercurrent didn't make the waves that were made in the Pilgrim People of God, underneath the subtext the servant model image of the Church and what is that, it comes the Prophet Isaiah, “if you find models not rooted in scripture don't' use them. The root of Political Societal comes from the Books of Kings and Samuel; this servant image being promoted as the suffering servant of Isaiah. What does this servant do, he gives his life for the many, and that's what this image of the Church sees, the Church is out there to save people it is out there to bring people into union with God. It is to bring food to the poor, shelter to the homeless, bury the dead it is what we called in our youth the Corporal Works of Mercy. Those are all deeply rooted in scripture and in the life of Jesus. We first find it in writing of the French Anthropologist Desjardin and the Luther pastor Boheffer and his letters and papers from prison. The Church is then a suffering servant of God bringing about God's kingdom and what do we have to do to enact this model you see what I am saying we enact these models in our own life. The first is to scrutinize the signs of the times