Sunday, August 9, 2009AD
19th Sunday in Greentime
What Does God Want of Us?
The Christian community at Ephesus (to whom St Paul addresses the second reading today) was like our Catholic community in New York in many ways. We want to be good neighbors and live in harmony with others. However, Catholic ethics and values frequently differ from the ethics and values of conventional wisdom. We face the dilemma A) by caving in to convention or B) by daring to be different in Christ Jesus.
Today, St Paul tells us to do the best we can to edify others as “audio-visual communities” in the midst of a world that needs the alternative vision, the worldview that we call life in Christ Jesus.
St Paul tries to balance two good things. 1) Catholics should be good neighbors. 2) However, Catholics should never compromise our values caught from the vibrational field known as the Christ Quantum.( If we think the same way as “they” (whoever they are??) do, we might be “sheeple”.) We are effected by and we effect every person with whom we have contact. Christ Jesus (our Bread of Life) has effected us in our meetings with Him in community, in Word and in Sacrament, particularly the Eucharist. (In addition, there are myriad other ways in which Christ Jesus has met us in ways that we will never know!) In essence, Christ Jesus has rubbed off on us. This month, Jesus Self-refers as the Bread of Life. As Charley Brown said famously, “We are what we eat.” (He borrowed the line from St Augustine 1600 years ago!) Is this clear in us?
St Paul urges us to be imitators of God. There are six pathologies that he warns us to avoid in the dysfunctional world in which we live. All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting and reviling must be removed (which only God can do for us and has done already if we accept the Spirit) from you, along with all malice. God knows how much all people need to be liberated from the hostilities that fester in the minds and hearts of so much in Western culture! “Hate-triots” do this; hopefully, the Jesus Movement does not!!
What St Paul offers as an alternative lifestyle is certainly something that would not make the newspapers or talk shows or entertainment shows. St Paul tells the Ephesians (and us), “Be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.” There are those who use the traditional seven deadly sins as causes of the violence and greed that infests our world today. Think about how somehow, the temptation to anger, envy, sloth, lust, gluttony, avarice (aka the obsessive desire for more and arrogance (aka pride) have caused in so many ways the sad state of much of the world. (The Sufi tradition of Islam add two more deadly sins, viz., self-deceit and fear.)
Imagining the immediate world that I inhabit daily, St Paul might seem to be talking through his turban. But, just considering the possibility that God does enable me to try to make an effort at a time in imitating God seriously, is a great place to begin. (Today, our Jesus Movement salutes Bl Franz Jager, who died on August 9, 1943 because he publicly said that a good Catholic could not fight in Hitler’s Army. He literally had his head handed to him.)
Enough of the Christian community in Ephesus must have done what St Paul asked of them because that community survived until the present day. They did become the vibrant Christian audio-visual community that tried to be good neighbors but walked to the drumbeat of the Christ Quantum. St Paul and an imploding world challenges New York Catholics to try, with God’s help, to be the audio-visual community that God needs in the capital of the world. Will we go along with conventional wisdom, when “they” tell us what we are thinking or should be thinking, as so many sadly do, or will we try to live in love as Christ loved us? 080909AD jfq