"Be a Member of the Body"

The Third Sunday of Easter, April 18, 2021.

Years ago (more years than I care to. count), a colleague remarked that the liturgical Easter season is too long, that 50 days are just too many, to sustain interest, let alone a sense of celebration. Certainly, he had a point. In our fast-paced present of abridged attention spans, ritual minimalism, and diminished imaginations, who anymore has the time, the patience, or the interest for seven weeks of celebration? Haven't even the Easter lilies given up by now? (One reason I have never been all that fond of Easter lilies is in fact that they last such a short time!) 

As Americans, we are all addicted to anticipating everything, to celebrating everything in advance. Halloween candy is on display in the supermarket for at least two months, but by Halloween itself the shelves are already being restocked for Christmas. Then by Christmas for Valentine's Day. And so it goes, all year long. Our American lust for anticipating and commercializing everything is ill-suited to the timing and rhythm of the liturgical year.

But the Church – in her providentially counter-cultural wisdom – does the opposite. The liturgy holds off on celebrating until the day itself (or, somewhat problematically in the case of Christmas and Easter, the day before). Then we are expected to keep on celebrating for days and even weeks – weeks that to some may seem to drag on and on, apparently with no end in sight.

Part of the problem, of course, can be just figuring out what exactly we are celebrating for seven long weeks. Even the most symbolically challenged modern observer probably gets it eventually that there is something special about the number seven. Those in the know can elaborate endlessly on the season’s symbolic significance, historical antecedents, Jewish parallels, and so much more. At the end of the day, however, the question always remains. So what?

It probably happened naturally enough - once the Jewish Passover had been reimagined as the Christian Easter - that the 7-week period from Passover to Pentecost reappeared as the Easter season. And, as the modern Church has reorganized its initiation rituals, this has acquired the eminently practical purpose of providing the newest members – those baptized at Easter – time to understand their experience and better appreciate what it meant for the rest of their lives. In the early Church, that time was in fact one week, the one week my onetime colleague would have liked us to revert to. In effect, the modern extended Easter season seems to exist precisely to answer the question, So what now?

That is why the Church reads every day during this season from the New Testament book called the Acts of the Apostles, the sequel to the Gospels’ story of Jesus’ life, and thus the ongoing story of the Risen Christ’s continued life and work in the world, as experienced in his presence and action in his Church. Who better to answer our So what? Question than the first Christian generation, whose exciting experience the Acts of the Apostles recalls for us?

Today’s 1st reading [Acts 3:13-15, 17-19] is an excerpt from Saint Peter’s second sermon recorded in Acts. Peter may have been new at his job, but (at least as he is portrayed in Acts) he was already quite good at it. He got right to the point of what had happened and why it mattered. He outlined and summarized the central tenets of Christian faith – the significance of Jesus’ life and mission, how his death has revealed him to be God’s suffering servant, how his resurrection confirms him as the anointed one, the Messiah, the Christ, promised by all the prophets, all of which challenges his hearers - which is to say, us - to repent and be converted.

Precisely how to do this is what John elaborates in our second reading [1 John 2:1-51], another standard Easter season staple. Jesus Christ the righteous one is our Advocate with the Father and expiation for our sins and for those of the whole world. And the way we may be sure that we know him is to keep his commandments – being transformed, truly perfected in him by conforming ourselves to the truth of his words.

Obviously, all this transformation of ordinary people leading otherwise ordinary lives in a routine world may be easier said than done! Like the disciples in the Gospel [Luke 24:35-48], we may all be more than a bit startled and terrified by the intrusion of the extraordinary into that ordinary routine, by the realty of the Risen Christ and the challenge this resurrection requires us to experience in our no longer quite so ordinary lives.

And that is why we must meet - as the disciples did, as the early Christians did, as Christians of every time and place have done – every first day of the week, to re-encounter our Risen Lord, listening together with one another, learning together with one another, at the very altar where the still wounded but forever living Lord promises us his peace as he feeds us with his own Body and Blood.

Many of us, of course, have been away from one another and from that altar for far too long, as a result of this destructive pandemic which has so damaged our world and diminished our lives. The disciples' Easter experience and the early Church's Easter-Pentecost experience remind us, as Pope Francis also reminded us a few years back, in his Apostolic Exhortation "On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World," that Growth in holiness is a journey in community. Side by side with others.

It has often been remarked that the change in Jesus’ original disciples – from self-absorbed individuals, confused, scared, and hiding from the world, into a community of convinced and confident disciples, who would become a world-wide Church – was surely one of the most visible effects of the resurrection, dramatically transforming individuals, society, and history.

So that is why we have to come back - now that we again can - Sunday after Sunday, to be filled in on what happens next, to learn how to make our own the experience of those first disciples and those who responded to their appeal and became those we call the first Christians. In North Africa in the early 5th century, Saint Augustine famously told the newly baptized members of his congregation: When you were baptized, it is as though you were mixed into dough. When you received the fire of the Holy Spirit, it is as though you were baked. Be what you can see and receive what you are. Be a member of the Body of Christ in order to make your Amen true. [Sermon 272].

Be a member of the Body! Ultimately, that is the task of a life lived with others in the Church. It is the slow transformation of our lives, individually and together, into the offering the Risen Christ makes to God on our altar today. These seven weeks are barely long enough just to begin – just to begin to make our own the story of those first Christians and so discover the real difference the Risen Christ can actually make in our lives, in our society, in our history, beginning right here and right now.