Happy birthday!
Today the Church throughout the world celebrates that day that the Holy Spirit came to the Disciples and the Blessed Mother gathered in the Upper Room for fear of their persecutors. What a momentous occasion as a band of frightened fishermen are transformed into ardent and zeal filled evangelizers! For Our Blessed Mother it was a moment of reunion with her Divine Spouse, the person of God she had first encountered intimately at the Annunciation. For the Disciples it was a moment of radical transformation- a change in their very being.
They took to the streets, and with Peter leading the way, he professed the powerful truth of Christ crucified and risen from the dead: and the Church grew by 3,000 that day (Acts 2:41). That’s quite a start! It was only the beginning though, for it says that then “they devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers” (Acts 2:42) and that each day the Lord would add to their number.
Fellowship
So what was the secret to their success? Without a doubt the answer is found the same place as where we try and find it so often in Churches today: fellowship. What does fellowship really mean?
As a recovering alcoholic when someone says “fellowship” I think of the recovery community’s understanding of fellowship: the bond and community that is found in Alcoholics Anonymous. This fellowship is defined by our common problem of alcoholism, and our life long work of staying sober. It is a bond that unites us not only for the hour we meet, but it also unites our values, the way we look at the world, the way we treat others, and our daily striving to life live a certain way.
In the life of the Church when we talk about “fellowship”, we think of coffee hour after Mass, and the social experience of building friendships, and cultivating that reality that we often call “the Parish Family.”
Was the early Church united in coffee and donuts, or something more like the AA community would understand as fellowship? In the passage from Acts, the Greek word used for fellowship in the original text is koinonia, which means, “communion.” In the contemporary Church experience we often separate Eucharist and fellowship: that which we separate, the early Christians took together as one. For them, “communion” and “fellowship” is the same thing.
The early Church, even its most primitive form, held a basic belief about the nature of the Church from the very beginning. Saint Paul articulates it succinctly when writing to the Church of Corinth, “Now you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it” (1 Corinthians 12:27). By a common Baptism, all believers become the Body of Christ together. That Baptism is handed down to us from the Apostles, uniting us. We continue to be united in the Breaking of the Bread and in prayer (worship). What about in that fellowship, that communion?
Communion
What is communion exactly? It’s more than unity, it is a mutual abiding, first and foremost in Christ, and through him, an abiding in one another. If by our Baptism we are made part of the one Body of Christ, we cannot abide in Christ, without abiding too in those who belong to him. We are together all one body, and this has been the understanding of the Church from its first moments.
However that mutual abiding was expressed and lived not only in worship, but also in their living in one accord: in one spirit. It was living in that common koinonia that the Church grew! It did not grow by clever advertising campaigns, or with the help of marketing professionals. It grew simply by being who she is: communion. This communion between the Lord and his body continues to be the driving force behind everything the Church is and does, and reconstructs our entire lives around the relational reality of our God. How can fellowship make the Church grow in 2018? The same way it did in 33AD: by attraction.
In his book, “Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith”, Cardinal Ratzinger (now the former Bishop of Rome Benedict XVI) says the following:
“The Eucharist is never an event involving just two, a dialogue between Christ and me. Eucharistic Communion is aimed at a complete reshaping of my own life. It breaks up man’s entire self and creates a new “we.” Communication with Christ is necessarily also a communication with all who belong to him: therein, I myself become part of the new bread that he is creating by the resubstantiation of the whole of earthly reality”
This quote provides an incredible amount of things to consider during this Year of the Eucharist. First, in no way is the Eucharist an end unto itself. We often think when the numbers of people in our pews increase that the Church has found success. Of course, we will find the fullness of our success only on that day when the trumpets of the angels announce the return of our king, but the road to that moment is laid not by numbers, but by change. It is paved not by statistics but by the work of rebirth that the Church influences throughout the world.
Our Shared Moment of Redemption
If you were to look around your Parish on any given Sunday after the reception of Holy Communion, you would likely see fellow Parishioners with their faces buried in their hands, clearly deep in prayer. Perhaps this is how you yourself make use of this time. I think for all of us this moment has become understood as “my time with Jesus.” In that moment we pour out our hearts to him, and invite him to move more deeply into ours. However, that is not at all what that moment is all about.
When the Church speaks of communion, she assumes that there already exists a relationship between that person and Jesus, and that this relationship is growing each day – sometimes quickly, and sometimes slowly- toward a beautiful reality of intimacy. When we enter into communion with Christ however we never do so alone: it’s not a one on one experience. To enter into union with him is also to enter into union with those who belong to him. When we receive him in the Eucharist we arrive together at the heart of the complete mystery of the Lord’s Cross and glorious resurrection.
We enter into communion with all who receive, for there is only one Eucharist throughout all of time and history. So that communion includes the Apostles and those first Christians. It includes our Blessed Mother who received the Eucharist in those first days of the Church. It includes those who have gone before us, and those who will come after us. It points to that final moment of history, when Christ the King will come again in his glory. Receiving communion is not about “me and Jesus”…it’s about the reality of our entire existence, and a taste of the glory that is to come, when God will be all in all, and we will all live in perfect love and unity.
Eucharist & Mission
When we speak of the Church it is often divided into two realities colloquially: worship & mission, as if they are two different things. Worship is seen as what we do on Sunday, and mission is seen as the aspect where “we live it”, and tend to the work of feeding the poor, and helping the helpless. Debates arise about whether growth in the Church will happen due to a pleasing style of worship, or by the work of the mission.
The answer is more complex than a simple one or the other. It is in the Liturgy of the Church that we find the inner power that plays an essential role in the spread of Christianity. As was said above, the Christian worship experience presupposes a Christian Faith. It is more powerful then catechesis or proselytizing. It is not designed to impress people with a pleasing sensory experience or entertainment. To the eyes of the world, that may seem to make it of no practical purpose: why invest so much time and resources into something that does not entertain or impress?
The Liturgy does not strive to “be” anything…other then simply “to be”: to be before God, and for God: to please him, not spectators. In fact, it is that very selflessness of standing before God and simply turning our gaze towards him that will allow God’s light to illuminate those who come to visit our Churches. Bonaventure Kloppenburg comments how if Christ is the light of the world, then the Church reflects that light: much like how the moon reflects the sun. The moon does not cast light of its own power or nature, but rather it reflects that of the sun, around which the entire galaxy maintains its place in creation.
Along the way the Church has made the dreadful mistake of making changes to the Liturgy due to personal preferences under the guise of “pastoral practice.” When this happens, or when our concern about the Liturgy become about a personal experience of enjoyment, the communal reality of the Church is broken down, rather than strengthened. The value of the Eucharist, and the experience of communion, becomes something subjective and superficial.
The horrifying news of a “Beyonce Mass” at the Episcopal Cathedral in California is a prime example of the misunderstanding about Christian Worship that paralyzes growth in our faith communities. In the news clip about this event, we hear talk of how this celebration was “empowering,” and how in it the Church “partners with the world” to prove to God’s people that “all are welcome.” The news story further boasted of how while Catholic Churches loose members, this event was expected to draw hundreds and hundreds of “worshipers.” How truly tragic.
The purpose of the Liturgy is not to “empower” in the secular sense, nor to bring about any pleasure that is to the satisfaction of our broken world.
If the Church seeks to inspire faith, she will accomplish it by doing her job: reflecting the light of the sun, the light of the world. Faith has to do necessarily with God, and so closeness to him must be felt to have a faith experience. When we try to get in the way, or to create that closeness by our own standards, we in fact most often get in the way. Closeness to God can only be found when our human needs take second place to our reverence before him, and our desire to join with him in communion. This submission of our wills – as a sign and symbol of the submission of our lives- gives credibility to our faith, and further inspires it among the people of God. Evangelization and growth will come not from gimmicks and advertising but from sincere devotion to the Eucharist.
The Eucharist, in and of itself, is not oriented toward the job of awakening people’s faith. Rather, it is the heart that beats at the core of the body: nourishing it, and giving it life. Its orientation is rather a gaze directed toward the Father, and towards eternity. When we enter into communion, we turn our heads and our attention in that same gaze. In this reality, we are drawn more deeply into the reality of our communion with the Risen and Ascended Jesus.
How can any advertising campaign or gimmick ever compare? How can a Beyonce Mass- a worship experience that has been polluted by pop culture, and centered on a person who has historically openly mocked the Christian tradition- ever draw us into deeper communion with Christ.
Resubstantiation
We call the change that takes place in the elements “transubstantiation”: the substance of the bread and wine changes to the very substance of Jesus Christ. The experience that takes place in us can be called “re-substantiation”. Our own substance is continually changed and transformed into what it was intended to be- the likeness of Jesus. On the day of our Baptism we are restored to perfect grace, and throughout the windfalls of life we strive each day to maintain it, to return to it, and to maintain it again. When we are drawn into that embrace of God, we are continually made new – in the experience of koinonia, true Christian fellowship, we are continually resubstantiated. How do we advertise this reality? By demonstrating the product to the world.
I would have us look again to the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. Each meeting begins with someone reading “How it works.” This reads, in part: “this is a program of attraction not promotion. If you want what we have, and are willing to go through any length to get it, then you are ready to take certain steps.” For us as Christians, those steps are plainly mapped out in the very Eucharist we share: blessed, broken, and shared. The question for us is no different than for the Alcoholic who seeks recovery: how bad do we want it? How bad to we want that communion? Are we willing to “go to any length to get it”? Three steps, and not twelve, yet the same result in the end: “a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps,” and the desire to carry this message to women and men everywhere.
So on this Pentecost Weekend we are drawn to the reality that the Church is going to grow in 2018 the same way as it did two millennia ago on that momentous day that we remember today: by living the koinonia that we profess every time we say “Amen” when we are presented with the consecrated host. It will grow by the work that the Eucharist is doing within each and every one of us- by the resubstantiation of the people of God into the Body of Christ, living, breathing, and very much alive in the world today.
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