Pentecost...It's All There!

Gerber baby, Ann Cook Turner at 91
https://wgntv.com/2017/11/21/the-original-gerber-baby-turns-91-years-old-today/

Pentecost is often spoken of as the "birth" of the Church. It's an apt metaphor: The Church, which had been growing en utero you could say, in the persons of Mary, the Twelve, and the small community of disciples, now emerges into the world. And when she does, we can already glimpse all of the distinguishing features by which she will be known as an adult.

The Church’s most obvious feature is that she is Charismatic – she has received the Gift, the Holy Spirit, and the manifold gifts He bestows, as evidenced by the charisms of tongues and preaching. Receiving the Holy Spirit as the common Gift of the Father and the Son (Acts 2:33-36) also immediately distinguishes her as Trinitarian. She is not a political body or social service but a living Tabernacle, making pilgrimage to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.

The Church that the Spirit rushed upon in tongues of fire is also Marian, Apostolic, and Petrine. We find her gathered in prayer with the Mother of Jesus – the Church's strong, silent backbone. Just as the Spirit overshadowed Mary and formed Christ within her womb, so He overshadowed the nascent community. birthing them as the Body of Christ into the world.

She is built upon the Twelve. The apostolic "office" left vacant by Judas' defection and death had to be filled before she began her mission to the world (Acts 1:15-26). And it was Peter, designated first among Christ’s apostles (Mt 10:2; 16:17-20), who lead the Church in this first act of apostolic succession. It was Peter who stood up “with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and address[ed]” the crowd (2:14).

And the sermon that Peter preached that first day, identifying how Jesus fulfilled the words of the Psalms and Prophets, established the Church as Scriptural – she constantly reflects upon and proclaims God’s written word. She is also Christocentric in her reading of Scripture; it all speaks of the Lord Jesus. But Peter’s preaching was not an end in itself. It led the crowd to cry out, “What shall we do?”; and Peter’s response that they must “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (2:37-39). The Church is not just Scriptural but Sacramental.

Even though all who received baptism that day were Jews, the fact that they had traveled to Jerusalem “from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5), intimated the acceptance of the Gentiles. It was a Catholic Church.

After almost two thousand years, the Church has grown and matured; Even though all who received baptism that day were Jews, the fact that they had traveled to Jerusalem “from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5), intimated the acceptance of the Gentiles. It was a Catholic Church.

After almost two thousand years, the Church has grown and matured. Her doctrine, liturgy, and works have continued to develop, to deepen; but for anyone who gazes closely at her “baby picture” –the Pentecost narrative – she is easy to recognize. The Catholic Church of today remains the Mystical Body of Christ, gestated throughout the earthly life of Mary and Jesus and born into the world on Pentecost.

Jesus Had Me Surrounded

I just returned from a Saturday evening Mass, on the eve of a snowstorm in St. Louis ... if you think Christmas Eve is crowded, you have no idea!  (Personally, I found it pretty darn awesome.)  Shoulder-to-shoulder with my brothers and sisters after Communion, I had the simple thought, "Jesus has me surrounded."  And it was absolutely true. 

I found myself in the middle of a visible manifestation of that tremendous mystery written of by St. Paul: "we who are many are one Body, for we all partake of the one Bread" (1 Cor. 10:17).  Our communion in Jesus' sacrifice (made present in the Eucharist) creates the Church and deepens its unity.  As St. Augustine taught, "“If you have received worthily, you are what you have received [the Body of Christ]." There I sat, visibly surrounded by other cells of Jesus' Mystical Body!  It is a constant spiritual reality - for each of us - and tonight's experience made it visible.  Pretty cool that it happened as we celebrate Epiphany, Jesus' "manifestation" to the Gentiles (represented in the Magi).

Let me leave you with one last thought:  The next time you and your brothers and sisters are walking to your cars after Mass, remember these words of St. John Chrysostom, "Let us return from that Table like lions breathing out fire, terrifying to the devil!"  (Yeah, they didn't call St. John "the golden-tongued" (chrysostom) for nothing.)

Loving the Stones

I prayed Psalm 102 today during the Liturgy of the Hours, and finally recognized its beautiful application:

You will arise and have mercy on Zion: for this is the time to have mercy,
yes, the time appointed has come
for your servants love her very stones, are moved with pity even for her dust ...
Let this be written for ages to come that a people yet unborn may praise the Lord ... (Ps. 102: 13-14, 18)

Today we Christians pray this Psalm as members of Christ's Body, the New Temple (Jn 2:21).  As St. Peter wrote, "like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house [a temple], to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ" (1 Pet 2:5; see also Eph 2:21).

The stones we love are our brothers and sisters in Christ - the Church triumphant in heaven, undergoing purification in purgatory, and still slugging it out on earth!  We are the very stones of the New Jerusalem which will descend from heaven when our Lord returns!  (See 1 Thess 4:15-5:2 and Rev  21:9-11)  This is our love for the Communion of Saints, the cells of Christ's Mystical Body.

The "Perspicuity" of Scripture ... Is It Scriptural?

Revisited some of my roots this morning at a local non-denominational church.  Praise and worship was a blast.  Even though I hadn't sung these particular songs before, they were very easy to learn; and I felt a great peace praising God along with everyone.  What made it especially good was being able to pray alongside a good friend and his family - first time, after years of talking about our faith, that I had the chance to join him in prayer.

I had seen podcasts from the lead pastor and was looking forward to hearing him talk about how to read Scripture this morning.  I was curious - would he share elements of lectio divina?  Maybe talk about the four "senses" of Scripture?  Well, he didn't really get into much of the how; but he did a tremendous job of stressing our need for God's word in Scripture.  He made a great analogy, complete with the visual image of his hand in a crockpot, of how when a Christian who owns a Bible complains that God won't speak to them, it is as humorous as a guy walking around with his hand stuck in a crockpot whining, "I'm starving!  Does anybody know where I can get some food?!" We were just chuggin' along for a good half an hour when ... the train suddenly veered  off the tracks - at least for me.  That was a couple of hours ago, and I'm still in a bit of a funk.  So what happened?

Ninety percent of what he shared was fantastic - Scripture is God-breathed (inspired), it is utterly trustworthy (inerrant), it dispels the darkness in our lives, speaks directly to the deepest needs of our hearts, and we shouldn't stay away from it because we think it's too difficult to understand.  But then he got to that final 10% where he said that what he was sharing went right back to the Reformation: the Catholic Church inserted itself between believers and the Bible, claiming that it couldn't be understood unless she taught it to them.  Martin Luther put Scripture back where it belonged - in the hands of the people. (Quite a mis-characterization.)  He then expounded the "perspicuity" of Scripture, meaning that Scripture is clear in its meaning and a person does not need anything outside of Scripture - like a church - to understand it.

Now, this pastor was quick to offer qualifications:  Yes, there are very difficult passages, passages that made his "head hurt."  He explained how we often need to consider this verse in relation to that verse in another book, etc.   And yes, there are denominational differences as to what various passages mean.  But, Scripture was perspicuous in the sense that "all orthodox Christians agree on the essentials."  (With those qualifications, I would think that "perspicuity" has lost its meaning.)  Things aren't exactly as smooth as he made it out to be in that last point either: yes we all believe in Jesus, but most denominations began precisely over disagreements as to what is, or is not, essential!  For instance:  What is Baptism?  Is it just a symbol, or does it actually wash away our sins and make us Christians?

It also seems to me that the work this gentleman engages in Sunday after Sunday argues against his claim:  What need would there be for him to lead people through different books of the Bible, drawing their attention to certain passages and explaining what it means? Not to put too fine of a point on it, but if Scripture really is perspicuous, then he should be out of a job.

There are other problems with the "perspicuity of Scripture" (like the fact that everyone I know reads the Bible not in the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek in which God inspired it, but in English - making us dependent upon other human beings [the Church?] to interpret it for us), but what is probably most disastrous for the pastor's claim is how the Bible actually denies its perspicuity!  Where, you ask?  Lets start in the Book of Acts. 

The Holy Spirit had Philip run up alongside the chariot of an Ethiopian eunuch who had just been in Jerusalem worshiping:

Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked. 

“How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

This is the passage of Scripture the eunuch was reading:

“He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,

and as a lamb before its shearer is silent,

so he did not open his mouth.

In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.

Who can speak of his descendants?

For his life was taken from the earth.”

The eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?”  Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.  (Acts 8:30-35)

It obviously wasn't clear to this visitor to Jerusalem that Isaiah was referring to the recently executed rabbi, Jesus.  It was the Holy Spirit's intention that Philip, ordained by the Apostles (Acts 6:5-7), explain it to him!

A person who holds to the perspicuity of Scripture would surely object, "But Shane, that Ethiopian eunuch had not yet received the gift of the Holy Spirit.  We have, and so when we read Scripture, the Holy Spirit gives us understanding."  If that is true, then explain this passage written by St. Peter regarding other Christians' misunderstanding of Scripture:

Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.

Therefore, dear friends, since you have been forewarned, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure position.” (2 Peter 3:15-17)

Peter is talking about things in Paul's "letters" - our New Testament - that Christians, people who have received the Holy Spirit, find hard to understand and can distort to their own destruction!  The "perspicuity" of Scripture doesn't sound scriptural to me.  And to circle back around to this morning's pastor and his mention of Luther and the Reformation:  Luther launched his "theological revolution" on his interpretation of Paul's Epistle to the Romans - the very part of the New Testament that Peter warned us can be "hard to understand" and open to distortion!  Eerie, no?

What this morning's pastor also failed to mention was how the Reformers removed seven books from the Old Testament and how Luther considered the New Testament's Hebrews, James, Jude, and The Book of Revelation inferior to the other books of the NT, and placed them in an appendix.  In Luther's 1522 German translation he described The Epistle of James as “an epistle of straw.” “It is flatly against St. Paul and all the rest of Scripture in ascribing justification to works [2:24]…this epistle is not the work of any apostle.”[1] Of The Book of Revelation he wrote, “I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it…let everyone think of it as his own spirit leads him. My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book…I stick to the books which present Christ to me clearly and purely.”[2] Thanks be to God that the thought of the other Reformers prevailed and these books were retained on an equal footing with the rest of the New Testament.

Claims about the perspicuity of Scripture and the claim that the Holy Spirit has promised to guide each person's private readings of the Bible do not stand up - not even in the day-to-day practice of those who make them.  Later in life, Luther lamented those who believed themselves to "understand the [Gospel] better than I or St. Paul; they are now wise and think themselves more learned than all the ministers ... there is no smearer but whenever he has heard a sermon or can read a chapter in German, makes a doctor of himself ... and convinces himself that he knows everything better than all who teach him."[3]  

How do we know if our interpretation is wrong?  If it contradicts the teaching of the Church, who the Bible calls the "pillar and foundation of truth" (1 Tim 3:15), then our interpretation is off the mark. There is no tension between the Bible and the Church.  

• Her popes and bishops were the ones who proclaimed which 27 books had to be recognized as forming the New Testament.  
• Up until Luther's day, and far beyond, when the vast majority of the world was illiterate, people's only way to learn God's written word was through the Church's preaching. 
• When the Reformers removed books from the Bible, the Church reaffirmed her faith in them. 
• The Catholic Church has four Scripture readings at every Mass.
• Through her popes and councils, she has begged her children to read it privately. 

But what the Church also proclaims is exactly what the Bible itself says (much more here): that it was written by members of the Church, is in complete agreement with the teachings of the Church, and will only be fully understood when read in full communion with the Church.  (Jesus set it up this way; He wants His word read within the Family.)  The perspicuity of Scripture? It is, ironically, unscriptural, and was not believed for the first 1500 years of Christianity.

It excites me when I hear a young, dynamic preacher, full of love for God's written word; but saddens me to hear him mix truth with potentially damaging error.  (It's like listening to a personal trainer psych people up to become runners, yet slip in a plug for smoking.  It will keep them from being the best runners they can be ... and possibly seriously harm them.)

I am thrilled that God is making use of this gentleman to get people started in reading His word.  I know he is sincere.  Please join me in praying that God allows him and his church's members to see all that He has placed in the pages of the Bible:  

• the Church's role in explaining Scripture and safe-guarding against misunderstanding
• the Sacraments - especially the Eucharist
• Our Mother Mary and the Communion of Saints
• the interior life   

These are treasures that God wants to give all His children.  Pray that the Holy Spirit sows questions in their hearts:  

• How did God get this Book to me?  
• Who did He use to write its "Table of Contents" (the canon of Scripture)?  
• He wouldn't have given us this Book without providing a way to guarantee that we understand it correctly - so what is that way?

Going back to my non-denominational days was good, and praying with my friend beyond excellent.  And, as sad as I may have been at the end of the pastor's sermon, he reminded me of all the scriptural and historical truths and spiritual treasures the Lord allowed me to discover ... and how those convinced me to hop the train back home to the Catholic Church.

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[1] Luther, Martin, Luther’s Works, Volume 35 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1965), p.396.

[2] Ibid, p. 398-399.

[3] Vost, Kevin, Memorize the Reasons: Defending the Faith with the Catholic Art of Memory (San Deigo: Catholic Answers, 2013), p. 195

Paul's Conversion - My Favorite Part

Had a conversation with a really good friend this morning about the conversion of Paul.  He had just come from an early morning Bible study where they had read the account and his enthusiasm was totally contagious - we were swapping thoughts fast and furious.  I was still thinking about it an hour later when I realized that I completely forgot to share my favorite part of Paul's conversion - Jesus' first words, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?" (Acts 9:5) 

Paul had to be confused; a heavenly voice was accusing him of persecution.  "Who are you, Lord?"  And the voice answered, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting."  During His earthly ministry Jesus had told the Apostles, "as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to Me" "(Mt 25:40); and He manifested that truth to Paul in the first moment of his conversion, "Why do you persecute Me?" It was a truth that cut Paul to the heart and shaped his whole theology - the Church is the Body of Christ, a mystical extension of His very Person!

Look at what Paul wrote later in life:

“Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ.  For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.  Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many … If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.” (1 Cor 12: -14,26).

"The gifts [Christ] gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

... speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love." (Eph 4:11-16) 

That first truth that Jesus impressed upon Paul moved him to write things that, were it anyone but the great Apostle Paul saying them, many a Christian would say bordered on the heretical!

“[God] has put all things under Christ’s feet and has made him, thus exalted, head of the church, which is his body: the fullness of him who fills the universe in all its parts” (Eph 1:22)

"If we are unfaithful, [Christ] will still remain faithful, for he cannot deny himself" (2 Tim 2:13)

That is how incredible the union is between Jesus and His Church - you cannot have One without the other!  Mind. Blown.

Hey, so long as I'm at it, I'll throw out one more (one I did a whole post on last week): Paul even identified the Church as "the pillar and foundation of truth" (1 Tim 3:15)!  That's a mighty big claim ... but if she is the very Body of Christ, the One Who is "the truth" (Jn 14:6), then it makes perfect sense.