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"Catholic"
"Parthians, residents of Mesopotamia, Cappadocia, Libya, Rome, Cretans, Arabs..." That list of exotic places from the story of Pentecost always fascinated me when I was growing up. How diverse God's church is! From the beginning that was so. My church wasn't diverse, and I wondered then how it was possible. That phrase in the Apostles’ Creed about the "holy, catholic church" was not one Mississippi helped me to understand.
Today the diversity of voices and languages and cultures gathered around the table are so much greater than our text or I ever imagined. The diversity is breath-taking. And yet the unity is so profound. We share in common the triune God, Jesus, the bread and the wine, the world. How marvelous is God's diverse grace and how catholic! God is creating a world in which people from every nation and tribe with their cultural gifts are gathering around the gracious God, a world in which every tear will be wiped away and pain will be no more. God's church is multi-cultural. When I was growing up we didn't live in a multi-cultural world. We didn't have such enriching experiences. Our basic multi-cultural experience was with an exotic figure called a missionary who introduced us to strange lands. But this was always in the safe environment of our own culture by one of us who went over there. It is different for our children and grandchildren who are world travelers. I first went abroad when I was 47 in 1988. Elizabeth and Sarah went to Costa Rica when they were 16. Now the people of other cultures live next door to us and are encountered every day, though rarely do we engage in dialogue with them. But living and let live while trying to stay one-dimensional in our cultural experience is not what we are called as Christians to be and to do. Grace creates a space in us to receive others. The Spirit unlocks the door to our hearts and says, "You are a part of others and others are a part of you so that all of you may be enriched." As the gospel has been preached to many nations, the church has taken root in many cultures, changing them as well as being profoundly changed by them. Yet we are bound together as one, just as the triune God is one God.[1] We are catholic. In a world of multi-national corporations always looking for additional resources and cheap labor in the light of their own economic interests, the church is multi-cultural and committed to a unified view of the world. The church knows something that the multi-nationals do not know: the earth is the God's and the fullness thereof. The world was created by God and its diverse cultures are the good gifts of God's amazing, diverse grace. It is for all God's world that Jesus died and was raised. The church searches for the common ground and lives out of a vision of the kinship of all peoples. We affirm that when we gather in this church this day. We are catholic. In a world torn by ethnic conflict, we ask the same question the bystanders did on that first day of Pentecost when all those languages were heard: "What does this mean?" It means we are one in the gospel affirming our diverse cultures. It means we are called to be multi-cultural always making room for one another. Otherwise we will repeat the terror of the 20th century, the bloodiest of them all. On Sundays when we repeat the Apostles’ Creed we confess that we believe in the catholic church. Working, living and being together in mutual trust and affirmation is our God-given goal here and now in this world. We are formed for God and each other, and God has continually expanded what is meant by that term "each other." "We" now means human beings on the other side of the world. One of the goals of God's catholic church is the visible joining together of the people who follow Christ's way. We are not complete selves without each other. We humans are made for each other. We are made for relationship. We are catholic. Every Sunday as we gather here, God whispers in our hearts: "This is my world. You must consider each other. You must embrace the diversity of my world." We do not learn much about either ourselves or the world unless we abandon our exclusiveness and seek multi-cultural experiences. We need to see both the world and ourselves in new and different ways. We Americans are slow to acknowledge wisdom and enrichment from beyond our borders. Geopolitically, we think we are the center of today's world civilization. But we need to remember that God often does odd things, not following human opinions, customs, or values. Do you remember the irony of that old statement "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" and its arrogant parochialness? We are deprived and diminished when we cannot receive the gifts that a person of another culture can give to us. We are called by this table to be catholic: open to the range and depth of cultures in our world which are the gifts of God's diverse grace. The community of Jesus' friends gathered in his church is driven to enlarge and open itself. When I was privileged to visit Greece for three days in 1988, I had a most vivid experience in Athens. Seeing the Parthenon was marvelous for an old Greek major. It was a part of me, though I had never seen it. But when our guide, a native Greek, shared with us what the Parthenon meant to a Greek she gave me something I had never known before. I came to realize that it was hers before it was ever mine. And yet she shared it with me so powerfully and enriched my understanding that it became mine in a new way. Jesus loved this world. Because of him the enterprise of finding and giving meaning to the world is not defeated by death, or human power and arrogance. We cannot just come to Pentecost, this day without vowing to become citizens of God's world. We need to listen, and learn, and appreciate, and not compare others adversely with our standard of living. There are many gifts that we can receive if we are open and keep on expanding the frontiers of our knowledge and experience. We are called to be multi-cultural. Our catholic sense needs to be deepened. There is no room for us and them, there is room only for all of us. Today we celebrate that we-ness. But we must do more. What the ethnic world we live in needs is a convincing sign of love in the face of the most brutal exaggeration of the evolutionary principle of selection applied by human beings to each other. The health and survival of our planet lies in our hands. We are responsible for seeing that cultural diversity continues and that the earth remains habitable. Humankind needs more love for humanity, more readiness to put itself in the place of others, more mercy toward those in need, more solidarity for the weak, more responsibility from each individual for the whole. That needs no commentary. It is what Christ asks of us all. Catholic! _________________ |
F.
Harry Daniel