Weekly HOMILY for May 27, 2007: How the Church and We Survive

The Solemnity of Pentecost, Cycle C
Our Lady of Grace
May 27, 2007

How the Church and We Survive
By (Rev. Msgr.) Nicholas P. Amato


TV Survivors

It was this month in the year 2000 that a new TV show first aired. Anybody guess what it was? Yes, Survivor! It has been around a while and has become a very popular show.

Each series has a very varied group of individuals who are sent to a remote area of the world where their skills at surviving the elements are tested.

We viewers witness amazing challenges where the individuals must prove their physical, mental, and emotional strengths and endurance.

As each competition progresses, the daily frictions that are an inevitable aspect of day-to-day living arise and are exacerbated by the rigors of living in the wild. The difficulties are compounded by the ambition to triumph over others at all costs.

Gradually, the viewer begins to see certain personality and character traits revealed in the contestants, not all of which are admirable.

Because the prize to be awarded in the end is a considerable sum of money and because there will be only one winner, contestants do whatever is necessary to survive. In the end, the sole survivor is declared the winner.


The Church As Survivor

Today, as the Church, we celebrate not just one of us, but all of us, who have survived together as a community in this world from the time of Jesus himself.

Despite the challenges, the failures and all the tests of endurance that living in this world as Jesus’ disciples may bring into our lives, the Church survives, and at different times even thrives.

But unlike the survivors of TV show, whose desire to outlast, outwit, and outdo one another is their sole motivation, the continued survival of the Church is due to another force, another presence.


The Spirit in the Church

This “Other” assures the Church’s continued presence in the world as a witness to the person and mission of Jesus.

This “Other” does not permit the Church to be relegated to distant memory or closed away in a history book.

This “Other” empowers the Church to be pertinent, relevant, and ever attentive to the changing circumstances that call forth its best efforts at making known the Good News, at service, at speaking truth to governments and the world.

And because of our link, our connection, our presence as part of that Church, this “Other” endows believers with unique gifts and inspires each with real survival skills, survival skills like faith, hope, love, and trust.

For all these reasons, every celebration of the Church is also, in truth, a celebration of the “Other,” without whom the Church would not be the Church; that Other – you may have guessed by now – is of course who?

Yes, the Holy Spirit!


The Spirit in Us

(As the Power to Welcome) What I’d like to suggest is this: if the Spirit could move the earliest believers in Jesus to overcome their reluctance to welcome Gentiles freely and fully into the community, cannot the same Spirit move us also to see beyond our fears and prejudices to welcome all others in Christ?

To welcome the sinner, the outcast, the unpopular, the one whose talked about?

(As the Power to Overcome Controversy) If the Spirit could continue to move and preserve the Church through heresies, controversies, dual papacies, so called “Holy Wars,” and schisms, cannot the same Spirit move us to try to understand and negotiate rather than to alienate and condemn?

To understand the person at work, whom no one seems to understand? Negotiate with the neighbor no one likes?

(As the Power to Center Ourselves) There is a final area of energy that is ours.

If the Spirit could move the Church through the work of more than two dozen councils over 2,000 years toward a renewal and recentering of itself in Christ, cannot the same Spirit move us to remember and regain our rootedness in those virtues by which we, as Church, were first recognized and identified by the world.

Couldn’t people know or recognize us as Catholics:
By the quality of our love?
By the optimism of our hope?
By the assuredness of our believing?
By the generosity of our service?
And by our communion with one another?


Conclusion

I leave you with an image. We may be similar to a group that gathers around an important personage say a club committed to George Washington or an Albert Einstein or Jackie Robinson.

And if our personage were Jesus Christ alone, we would be no more powerful, no more able to survive than either of those three groups I’ve just mentioned.

However the group called the Church – because Jesus breathes into it the Holy Spirit and that Holy Spirit continues to live, and breathe and animate the Church – as a group, it takes on the quality of being able to survive.

And so it has for 2,000 years and so it will until the end of time.

And we – as long as we are connected and bound to this community called the Catholic Church – we draw our life from that Spirit-filled connection.

And it is that relationship that empowers us to (1) Welcome, (2) Overcome Controversy, and (3) Center Ourselves. It is that Spirit that assures us our survival.