For the week of Sunday, January 9, 2022

Dear Friends,

One of the great challenges that any Christian person confronts along the way is the need to distinguish between those elements of our faith that must never change and those elements that are required to change.  God doesn't change in his own being, but included in that being is the Holy Spirit, who allows us constantly to re-imagine our presumptions, our institutions, and our ways of being church as we move through time.  One wise teacher of mine pointed out that a community that still behaves and believes in exactly the same way today as it did 500 years ago has, by that fact, changed in its relationship to people and culture.  Time and events and knowledge do not stand still.

Historically, one of the most enduring challenges in our tradition has been the matter of inclusion and welcome in the community of believers.  We heard about it again last weekend in the scriptures.  St. Paul insisted that the Christian church is intended to draw in all people, including the gentiles (non-Jews).  The magi from the east who came to Bethlehem with their gifts were not Jews.  One of the first big internal conflicts in the early church was over the question of whether gentiles first needed to become Jews before entering the Jesus community, and whether they needed to observe traditional Jewish law.

For centuries it had been presumed by many that when the Jewish people were called "the Chosen Ones of God" it meant that they were the "Only Ones of God."  It came as quite a surprise, and undoubtedly a disappointment to some, to learn that this had been a faulty understanding—even though there are several Old Testament accounts of "pagans" assisting with the Lord's work for the sake of the Israelites.  Again, it wasn't that God changed.  It was that we needed to be stretched to think more inclusively about who and how this God actually is.  The earliest Christians were confronted with the very same challenge.  And much later, particularly after the Protestant Reformation in the 16th Century, we Catholics fell into the same trap:  we taught that to be the True Church of Christ must mean to be the Only Church of Christ.

The challenge is no different today, although the circumstances are.  It's often harder to let go and invite in than it is to grasp tightly to what we think our self-identity has to look like.  All of the surveys today reveal that when young people are asked what is the biggest reason for their walking away from the church it is because of a perceived lack of welcome and inclusion.  That is particularly with respect to LGBTQ people and to those who are excluded from Eucharist but not limited to those (these are matters for another time here.)  They are new issues for us, but not new kinds of tensions to be confronted.

Fr. Mike

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