23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.

            Three weeks ago we heard Jesus’ exchange with the disciples at Caesarea Philippi where Jesus gave to Simon the name “Peter”, which means “The Rock,” and then declare to him that, “upon this rock I will build my church.”  Jesus provides for the Church’s future by laying a foundation for its growth and expansion as it carries on Jesus’ message.  

            Of course, this passage plays an important role in the life of the Catholic Church.  It is closely associated with the office of the papacy and the Church’s insistence that in elevating Simon to the status of “the Rock,” Christ established an office that was given the divine guarantee of infallibility.  This doctrine of the Church is a stumbling block for many, of course, but perhaps it can be understood in light of the pressing need it addresses.  Christ is the Word made flesh, and over the course of his life, he makes himself known as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”  After his earthly life comes to a close the possibility arises that this Word of Truth, having been spoken clearly and fully in one brief moment in one remote corner of the world, would fall away, be forgotten, or fall into hopeless confusion.  Christ, in laying a solid foundation for his Church, guarantees the purity and precision of its teaching.  He gives to the Church the means by which to carry out its vocation to ensure that his Word will be known and proclaimed to every generation, so that the passage of time will not see the diminishment of what Jesus’ first disciples saw and understood. 
            Christ himself constitutes his disciples in a hierarchical structure, a characteristic of all institutions.  In today’s Gospel he warns us that problems will arise, and he provides some advice regarding how to deal with it.  He equips the Church with more institutional features: procedures and protocols.  When someone causes a problem, that person should be approached in person and in charity.  Hopefully it is the result of a misunderstanding, and if no one overreacts and allows the process of dealing with it, the problem may be taken care of quickly.  If that does not work, bring a few others to settle the matter so the facts can be fully investigated.  If that doesn’t yield a result and the problem remains, a separation may be required. 

            At one point in his letters St. Paul addresses a difficult situation where someone must be excluded from the Church, what we would call today “excommunication.”  He makes it clear that the person is being excluded from the communion of the Church for the person’s good, so that he can be helped to acknowledge a rupture with Christ that the person is not able to see.  The hope is that sending the person away will alert the person to the fact that he has alienated himself from the source of authentic fellowship and will then seek to be reconciled.  It may seem ironic, but the Church’s recourse to exclusion is an essential tool by which it carries out its ministry of reconciliation.  At another point in his letters, St. Paul refers to the Church as “the household of God.”  Like any household, the Church must be managed and ordered, and as will happen in households closer to home, this sometimes requires “tough love.” 

            Christ addresses the need to manage and order the inner life of the Church, to develop protocols and procedures for dealing with problems.  In other words, he makes clear the need for the Church to function as an institution.  It is easy to be cynical about the Church’s institutional aspect.  I myself joke with the couples that I prepare for marriage that nothing combines God and paperwork quite like the Catholic Church.  The heretical French bishop Alfred Loisy once remarked, “Christ came proclaiming the kingdom, and what arrived was the Church.”  But the institutional aspect of the Church is fundamental to the accomplishment of its historical mission. 

            I have in mind an example first pointed out to me by a professor of theology from a university in Australia.  On one occasion he described to me a brief and bloody episode of history that occurred in his part of the world and which he researched extensively.  It had to do with a genocide that occurred in a place called East Timor, a tiny island in Indonesia that used to be a Portuguese colony and so has a sizable Catholic population that now constitutes most of the island’s population.  In the mid 1970s Indonesia invaded East Timor and began to wage a war of extermination that included vicious attacks on the Church.  A few days before Indonesia invaded East Timor, the American president, Gerald Ford, visited Indonesia on an official visit it is widely thought gave at least tacit approval to the invasion.  The American press had no interest in the matter, and the invasion and its atrocities went completely unreported.  The whole matter, including America’s involvement, is still largely unknown by Americans.

            During the course of the genocide, East Timorese Catholic bishops asked for the help of American bishops who lobbied their governmental authorities in the United States to intervene and to stop the genocide.  This occurred, and the genocide was stopped.  The Church could work effectively to provide a solution in this case precisely because it is what people so often complain about: precisely because the Catholic Church is a global institution it could promote global solidarity and bring the reconciling power of Christ to bear on an international crisis.  Because the Church is a global institution it can bring the Gospel to bear to every aspect of human culture at every level of human civilization, at the level of the individual and the family, and at the level of superpowers. 

            The Church can promote solidarity on an international level because individual Christians do it at the level of neighbor and community.  Each of us must take up this work of promoting fellowship by finding ways to reach out to one another.  We are to come together to worship as we do now, and to find other ways to seek out each other and to strengthen one another’s faith.  Christ encourages us with an emphatic promise: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”  We have to be present to one another.  We have to seek each other out in order to draw strength from the faith of each other, as well as from the presence of Christ who promises to be with us when we are with each other.  We are told that there is strength in numbers.  For Christians there is the strength of Christ in numbers.

            And the world resists this.  One of my favorite spiritual writers is a man named Josef Pieper, who lived and wrote in Germany during the Nazi period.  He commented that it is the characteristic of totalitarian regimes to keep persons apart in order to preserve the power and prestige of the regime and its leadership.  In the totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century, the force of the all-powerful state was used to accomplish this: free speech was stifled by law and dissent meant imprisonment.  We do not face this sort of oppression, but our culture has its own ways of stifling the faithful from coming together and supporting one another.  Public expressions of faith are met with condescending looks, and Christians are made to feel out fashion and behind the times for their fidelity to the Gospel.  Many choose to remain hidden for the sake of avoiding scorn.  Christ’s words today tell us that we must not let ourselves be discouraged.  I recall one occasion when I was at Whole Foods eating lunch and saw a mother and her daughter make the sign of the cross and say grace before eating their food.  They made their gesture and prayed their prayer as if it was entirely natural for them to do so, and as though no one were watching.  But I was watching, and it was kind of thrilling to see it.  They never knew the encouragement they gave to me, and who knows who else saw it and drew strength from their expression of faith.  In that moment two or three were gathered, and Christ was there. 

            I recall also a story told to me by an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh who was in a class where the teacher spontaneously launched into a diatribe directed against the Church.  Priests came in for particular scorn.  Finally, this student I describe raised his hand and asked the simple question, “Do you know any priests?”  The answer, of course, was “no.”  The student proceeded to insist that he knew many priests, and that none of them are as she describes.  The teacher changed the subject and got on with her lecture.  After the class, several of his classmates approached him and thanked him for speaking up.  If he hadn’t said something – and what he said was actually quite simple – those people might have imagined themselves to be alone, to be the only one among the 200 persons in the class to think differently.  Because someone took a risk and spoke up, even if just to register a modest bit of dissent, those believers could find each other and encourage one another.  A small risk yielded a great result.  Those who would have remained in isolation could gather strength from each other and share with one another the presence of Christ. 

            We are not all called to witness in the same way.  But we are called to the virtue of courage, and we must, even if only in small ways, find ways to witness our faith to our generation.  Not in order to provoke confrontations with those who disagree, but to reach out to those who share the faith so that Christ may be present among us.