Third Sunday Cycle C - January 25, 2004
   
Around the year 51 the Apostle Paul came to Corinth, a seaport city on the coast of Greece. Within 18 months, a small but thriving Christian community of some fifty to sixty members was established there. Five years later, however, Paul had to write a very strong letter because he was deeply pained by the cliques and divisions that had sprung up around various personalities in this community, each group thinking of itself as more important than the others. Some were spellbound by Apollos, an expert on Scripture who hypnotized his hearers. Some gravitated toward Peter, the prince of the Apostles, others sided with Paul, the founder of the community, while others felt they were closer to Christ than any one else outside their little group. This factional spirit was tearing apart this little community that Paul so dearly loved.

So Paul told them what he tells us today. "You are the Body of Christ, and individually members of it," [1Cor. 12, 27]. All of you together are like the human body. Your body is an incredible work of art, the creation of an incredibly imaginative God, precisely because its many different parts are designed to work together. "In a well-ordered body, different parts perform different functions: each has its own contribution to make" [Walter Burghardt, in Lovely in Eyes Not His, p. 82].

Paul then uses his reflections on the human body as a springboard to fashion a theology of the Church as the Body of Christ. Through the grace of Baptism, we are so intimately linked to the risen Christ that not only can we call ourselves his body, but Christ claims us as his very own.

Like the human body, the Body of Christ is made up of different members. Not all are apostles. Not all are teachers. Not all work miracles. Not all have the gift of healing. "Our gifts are different, our service varies, our activities move in different directions" [Walter Burghardt, in Lovely In Eyes Not His, p, 81]. But for all our differences, we form a single body. God has gifted each of us in different ways. However little you may think of yourself, you are wonderfully gifted. "Whatever God has given you. He has given you "for the common good," for your brothers and sisters" [Ibid, pp. 82-83]. If you squander your gifts by not using them, or by not using them rightly, the whole body suffers.

The Holy Spirit has so artfully blended all of us that each of us is indispensable. No one can say to another, "I have no need of you." A little over a century ago, "some cynic asked Cardinal Newman what good the laity were for?" "Well," the Cardinal answered with devastating simplicity, "the Church would surely look strange without them" [Walter Burghardt, in Dare To Be Christ, p. 67].

Jesus did not belong to the Jewish priesthood. He was a lay person. Much of Jewish religious life was centered, not around the temple but the synagogue. When Jesus read from and commented on the scriptures in the synagogue at Nazareth, he did so as a lay person.

Lay people are not temporary substitutes for diminishing numbers of clergy. You have a task for which ordination does not qualify me for. "A lay person can have a vision of the gospel that is just as good as mine. You can take that vision into places where I, as a priest cannot go, such as your work place" [Archbishop Anthony Meagher, "Kingston’s Pastoral vision calls for living out of faith," in Catholic Register, January 8, 2004, p, 8].

Only you can penetrate this very secular world with the spirit of the Gospel. A huge task, yes, but it should not paralyze you. "Rather, it should summon you back to St. Paul to recognize who you are and to what you are called: a single body, the Body of Christ, variously gifted by the Holy Spirit for the common good, aware that what the Lord Jesus proclaimed in a synagogue in Nazareth long ago is true of each of you" [Walter Burghardt, in Lovely in His Eyes, P. 84]. The Spirit of the Lord is upon you. The Spirit has anointed you. He has sent you to preach good news to the poor, to open the eyes of so many walk around blind, to set free those who are enslaved in body or spirit.

What it all boils down to is using God’s gifts, not to promote ourselves as some in the community were doing, but in the service of love. As the Apostle reminds us: "If I have all the eloquence of men or angels, but speak without love I am simply a gong booming or a cymbal clashing. If I have the gift of prophecy understanding all the mysteries there are, and knowing everything and if I have faith in all its fullness, to move mountains, but am without love, then I am nothing at all."

As always, the enemy is time. "What we don’t have is time" [Walter Burghardt, in Dare To Be Christ, p. 69]. That is true not only of those who are afflicted with AIDS or terminal cancer. It was true for those ten people who went to their deaths in the icy waters of Lake Erie last week and for those 30,000 women, men and children who perished in a single moment in a devastating earthquake in Iran just a few weeks ago. It is true for all of us. What I cannot promise myself is time. Neither can you, no matter how young, how strong you many be.

Yesterday now is but a memory. Tomorrow can only be imagined. But today! Today alone can you live. What is supremely important this present moment in which we now live and the opportunity it gives us to live the Gospel of love.

To be aware that what we don’t have is time is to realize that each new day is an new opportunity to be Christ-like; each precious moment is a new chance to become a better person and make this world a better place for all.

A well known singer and bandleader wrote in his autobiography: "Women, horses, cars, clothes. I did it all. And do you what that is called Ladies and Gentlemen? It’s called living" Good friends, would it not be more satisfying if someday you could say about yourself: "People- those I liked and those I didn’t- all people, but especially the homeless and the hopeless, the naked and the hungry, the lonely and unloved,… the drug-addicted and AIDS afflicted. I did not do it all, but I did what I could. And do you what that is called, ladies and gentlemen? It is called…. loving" [Ibid, pp. 69-70].
  
  
Father Neil