You to whom shall
we go? “ (Jn. 6:68)
Why We Don’t Leave
August 26, 2012, 21st
Sunday in Ordinary Time
John 6:51-53; 60-61; 66-69
Joshua gathered together all the tribes of Israel at Shechem,
summoning their elders, their leaders, their judges, and their officers. When
they stood in ranks before God, Joshua addressed all the people: “If it does
not please you to serve the LORD, decide today whom you will serve, the gods
your fathers served beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose
country you are now dwelling. As for me and my household, we will serve the
LORD.” But the people answered, “Far be it from us to leave the LORD for the service of other gods. For it was the LORD, our
God, who brought us and our fathers up out of the land of Egypt, out of a state
of slavery. He performed those great miracles before our very eyes and
protected us along our entire journey and among the peoples through whom we
passed. Therefore we also will serve the LORD, for he is our God.” (Joshua 24:1-2, 15-18)
The word of the Lord
Thanks be to God
Alleluia,
alleluia.
A reading
from the holy Gospel according to John
Glory to you, Lord.
Jesus said to the crowds: “I am the living
bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats this bread he will live
forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the
world.”At this the crowds began to argue fiercely among themselves, “How can He
give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus said to them: “I tell you the truth: if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man
and drink his blood you will not have life in yourselves.”
After hearing his
words many of Jesus’ disciples remarked among themselves, “This sort of
talk is hard to take. How can anyone take it seriously?” Jesus well aware of the
disciples’ grumbling asked them, “Does this scandalize you?”
From
that time on, many of his followers left Jesus and returned to their former way
of life. Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” Simon
Peter answered, “Master, if we leave You to whom shall we go? You have the
words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that You
are the Holy One from God.”
The
Gospel of the Lord.
Praise
to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
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Introduction
Like autumn leaves
Here we are at the end of August; this
coming Saturday will be the 1st of September. Autumn 2012 begins on
the 22nd of September. The pages are falling off the calendar
like autumn leaves.
No better place to go
My
dog Simeon was a typical canine; when he heard the car keys clanging, he would
be up and at it, and ready to go. I always had to take him with me, because it
was so much easier than having to get down on my knees and try to explain to
his sad drooping face why he couldn’t come along. He simply wouldn’t
understand. So when I’d go grocery shopping on a hot summer day, I always had
to take him with me, then find a shady spot to park the car, and leave the car
windows wide-open. One day a lady passing asked, “Aren’t you afraid your dog is
going to jump out of the window and run away?” The words of Simon Peter in
today’s gospel to Jesus (Jn. 6: 68) came to mind, and I said to her, “If my dog
leaves me, to whom shall he go?” My dog Simeon, you see, knew he had it made; he
knew he had no better place to go. For I always prepared three square meals a
day for him, even though he never lifted a finger to help me cut the lawn in
the summer, or shovel the snow in the winter.
Many of
Jesus’ followers left Him.
Jesus makes the incredible claim
that He is bread from heaven and that whoever eats his flesh and drinks his
blood will live forever. That stirs unbelief among the crowds, and they start
grumbling. Hearing their grumbling Jesus asks, “Does this scandalize you?”
(It’s a literal translation of the Greek `scandalidsei.’)
The
common understanding of `scandal’ is `that which makes us raise our eyebrows.’ The
scriptural understanding of `scandal’ is different: it’s not about what causes us
to raise our eyebrows but about what causes us to stumble, or what shakes our faith.
Jesus’ incredible claim that He is
bread from heaven and that whoever eats his flesh and drinks his blood will
live forever
shakes the crowd’s faith; it causes them to stumble. Scripture says, “From that
time on, many of Jesus’ followers left Him and returned to their former way of
life.” (Jn. 6:66)
Sr. Joan chooses not to leave the Church.
Sister
Joan Chittister OSB, an internationally known theologian, sees her Church as a
scandal - a stumbling block. She says, “It
is riddled with inconsistencies, closed to discussion about those
inconsistencies, and is sympathetic only to invisible women.” Sr. Joan,
however, chooses not to leave the Church but to stay right where she is. One
day a woman asked her out-rightly: “Why doesn’t such an unhappy woman like you choose
to leave the Church?” In response she used the imagery of an oyster. The oyster defends itself
against the irritation of a grain of sand within itself by secreting layer upon
layer of gel over the grain, until it becomes `a pearl of great price.’ (Mt. 13: 44-45) Sr. Joan says if she would rid herself of the irritation by leaving the Church, the
process would be over, and at the end of the day there would be no pearl of
great price, neither in her nor in her Church. By staying and speaking out, she says we
perform a needed `ministry of irritation,’ like the grain of sand that
irritates the oyster, but in the process becomes a pearl of great price.
Fr. Küng chooses not to leave
the Church.
Swiss-German
theologian Fr. Hans Küng (b. 1928) also sees his Church
as a scandal - a stumbling block - for a litany of theological
reasons. In a little volume entitled Why I am still
a Christian,
he writes that he cannot believe
1. that Jesus who warned the Pharisees
against laying intolerable burdens on people’s shoulders would today declare
all artificial contraception to be mortal sin;
2. that He who particularly invited
failures to his table would forbid all remarried divorced people to approach
the Eucharistic table;
3. that He who was constantly accompanied
by women (who provided for his keep), and whose apostles, except for Paul, were
all married and remained so, would today forbid marriage to all ordained men, or
ordination to all women;
4. that Jesus who said “I have compassion
on the crowd,” would have increasingly deprived
congregations of their pastors and allowed a system of pastoral care
built up over a period of a thousand years to collapse;
5. that He who defended the adulteress and
sinners would pass such harsh verdicts in delicate questions requiring
discriminating and critical judgment, like pre-marital sex, homosexuality and
abortion.
First of all, despite all my criticisms and
concerns, I can nevertheless feel fundamentally positive about a tradition in
which I live side by side with so many others, past and present. I would not
dream of confusing the great Christian tradition with the present structures of
the church, nor [would I dream of] leaving the definition of true Christian
values to its present administrators. In
that great Christian tradition, I find a spiritual home on which I do not want
to turn my back.[1]
Andrea
chooses to return to the Church she left.
Andrea Palpant
Dilley grew up in Kenya, the daughter of Quaker missionaries. She is a summa cum laude graduate, and the author
of Faith and Other Flat Tires - a
memoir about faith, doubt, and the search for truth. One Sunday Andrea’s Presbyterian
pastor was preaching on Psalm 91, and in so many words said that a
person just needed to pray and have faith in order to be protected from
suffering. At that, Andrea suddenly found herself standing up, leaning over to
her father and saying, “This is BS!” With that, she made her way to the end of
the pew and marched out of the church, and left the Church. She was 23 at the
time. It wasn’t just that sermon which ticked her off; many spiritual questions
were also plaguing her: Why does the Church seem so culturally insulated and
dysfunctional? Why does God seem so distant and uninvolved? And most of all,
why does God allow suffering?
Those questions didn’t come from nowhere. In high
school she had spent time volunteering in refugee camps in Kenya. In college
she worked with families on welfare in central Washington. She saw hungry
babies. She walked into homes that were piled with garbage and dirty laundry.
In an orphanage in the slums of Nairobi, she held AIDS babies and worked with
disabled kids who had been left at the front gate of an orphanage by parents
who couldn’t afford to feed them. She saw things that didn’t make sense to a
Christian. Walking out of church that day and leaving the Church was her way of
saying “To hell with it all! I’m done!” For two years, she skipped church. Her
Bible gathered dust on the shelf. The local bars became her temples. She
indulged in the cliché rebellions of a Christian girl: smoking cigarettes and
drinking hard alcohol. She got involved with men twice her age without thinking
twice about it. She wanted a break from being `good.’
And then, strangely, she woke up one morning at age
25, climbed into her car, and drove downtown to attend a 10 a.m. church service.
She had decided to return to the Church! Simon Peter said to Jesus, “Master, if we
leave You, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. At the
end of the day Andrea like Simon Peter discovered that she had no better place
to go. So she returned to the
Church, because (despite all its faults) she saw the Church “as a place to ask
unanswerable questions, and a place to search for God.”
Conclusion
No better
place to go
Despite the clergy sex abuse, despite the
refusal of the Church to deal meaningfully with the shortage of priests;
despite her macho approach to the ordination of women, despite the Church’s
pretense that gays do not exist or that the faithful don’t practice birth
control--despite all that, we choose not to leave the Church. We choose to stay
and, like Sr. Joan, engage in `a ministry of
irritation’ which turns a grain of sand into a pearl of great price. We choose to
stay in the Church, because like Fr. Küng we find in the Church
“a spiritual home” on which we, like him, don’t want to turn our backs. Or we
choose to return to the Church, as Andrea
did, when she finally came to realize that the Church indeed is the place to “ask unanswerable
questions, and the place to search for God.” Despite everything, we choose to stay in
the Church with Sr. Chittister and Fr. Küng, or we choose
to return with Andrea, because, like my
dog Simeon who wouldn’t jump out of the open windows of my car on a hot summer
day, we’ve come to realize we have no better place to go. 
