In retirement, there are two major things consuming my attention these days. They are connected.
First, as some of you know by now, I am involved in a new project down in my home parish, founded in 1818, named Saint Theresa Church. It’s in Rhodelia, about an hour down-river from here. I am trying to turn the grade school that I attended, closed for 28 years now, into a new Saint Theresa Family Life Center. Behind the physical renovation of the building is a desire to stop more and more young adults and young families in the community from drifting away from the church while re-energizing the faith life of our older members who are struggling to keep our 203 year old parish going.
As I research our parish history, I am realizing some of what our ancestors had to endure to pass the Catholic faith on to us. In his lifetime our first pastor, Father Elisha Durbin, rode 500,000 miles through the wilderness of Kentucky on horseback establishing and ministering to small frontier parishes like Saint Theresa in western Kentucky, north Tennessee and eastern Illinois. Under his guidance, our Saint Theresa ancestors built two log cabin churches in the early 1800s and a later pastor inspired them to build the present brick church between 1855-1856. At the end of the Civil War, they opened a three-story Saint Theresa Academy in 1868 for boarders and day students and operated an attached farm to support it. I went to the first and second grade in that old Academy building before it was torn down, as well as the much smaller 1952 school that I am trying to reopen as a family life center. They had very little money, but they did it with faith and determination, as well as their blood, sweat and tears. The Sisters of Charity served my home parish heroically and unselfishly for 123 years from 1870 – 1993. They even used an outhouse and had no running water for 82 of those 123 years!
The second thing that is consuming my attention these days is this. After all the sacrifices that our ancestors made in passing on the Catholic faith to us, I am running into their descendants, some of them family members, who have come to believe that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence and are deciding to leave the Roman Catholic Church for those greener pastures. I am being asked all the time to meet with people who are trying to decide whether to stay with us or leave with them and go after the latest best offer in one of those new churches that are springing up. I know for a fact that some of you here in the city are struggling with the same question – should we stay or should we go - and some of you are sitting here looking at me right now.
Today’s readings give me a chance to talk about what’s consuming my attention these days - the question of whether to stay or whether to leave!
In our first reading, Joshua succeeded Moses is leading the people of God into the Promised Land after a long arduous journey through the desert from Egypt. After all they had been through, he notices them looking around at all the new religions around them. Many were tempted to give up their old-time religion and embrace one of those new religions they see around them. Joshua tells them that they need to make a decision and tells them of his own decision.
Decide today whom you will serve,
the god of your fathers or the gods of the country you are now dwelling.
As for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”
Joshua 24
In the second reading, Paul also challenges the believers of Ephesus to choose – to choose fidelity to their marriage partners over the latest best offer. He asks them to be faithful to their partners, through thick and thin, just as Christ was faithful to his bride, the church!
In the gospel, Jesus also asks his disciples to choose – to choose between staying and leaving. He had just taught them that he himself was the Bread of Life that they were invited to “feed on.” The crowds started to murmur because his teaching on that subject was hard to accept. Here is what it says:
As a result of his teaching about being the Bread of Life,
many of his disciples returned to their former way of life
and no longer accompanied him. Jesus then asks the Twelve, “Do you want to leave too?”
John 6
My brothers and sisters, Jesus asks us the same question today that he asked his apostles: “Will you stay or will you leave?” So many of our fellow Catholics “no longer accompany us.” Some just drifted away all together and went nowhere. Others have walked away to join some other church.
I do not condemn them. They are still our brothers and sisters in the faith. They have much to offer. In fact, I got the job of being pastor of the parish because I was a graduate of a Presbyterian Seminary Doctor of Ministry degree program in parish revitalization. I even preached for the United Church of Christ one summer in Crater Lake National Park in Oregon when I was a seminarian at Saint Meinrad. In fact, I believe that when people leave us, their leaving is sometimes partly our fault. Many have told me that, while they were with us, they felt that they were not being fed spiritually. Their biggest gripe was our poor preaching and our depressing and uninspiring music – whether it be painfully archaic or tediously trivial.
It may shock you, but I mostly agree with them. There have been times, when I have had the opportunity to sit on your side of the pulpit, that I have found myself wanting to scream over the music and the preaching and run to my car!
So why do I stay? I stay because of the Eucharist – the very thing that divided the followers of Jesus in today’s gospel. I am not about to go off and leave that, no matter how boring the homily or how tedious the music! I know there are churches with highly paid preachers, big orchestras and huge choirs, but they don’t have the Eucharist! As boring and tedious as our services can be on occasion, Christ, the Bread of Life, is still being made present on our altars at our celebrations of the Eucharist! For that reason, I won’t leave for the latest best offer!
I am not about to leave a church that assembled the New Testament as we know it – whether that New Testament be a Catholic or Protestant translation! I am not about to leave a church with a mile-long list of martyrs like the 26 Japanese Catholics who were crucified in 1587 or Father Stanley Rother of Oklahoma who was assassinated in 1981, saints like Saint Francis of Italy, Saint John Paul II of Poland and Mother Theresa of India. I am not about to leave a church that is gathering in every part of the world this morning for one that started up somewhere in the US a few years ago, no matter how popular their services might be for some people! I am not going to leave a church that my mother went to as a girl, wrapped in a blanket with her sisters and brothers, bouncing around in the back of a horse drawn farm wagon for 10 miles each way, to get to Mass while fasting from midnight! I cannot leave our church once I became aware of eight of my hometown pastors buried in Saint Louis Cemetery here in Louisville behind my condo – priests who said Mass for my ancestors, huddled together with their parishioners in freezing log cabins and who went out to anoint and pray with the sick and dying after riding on horseback through snow, sleet and rain for 100 plus miles at a pop! I am not going to leave a church connected through St. Mark to the 20 young men who had their throats slit, all at the same time, on a beach in Libya in 2018, rather than renounce their faith. I am not going to leave a church where priests and bishops in Hitler’s prison camps risked their lives to clandestinely say Mass with a precious pinch of bread and a secret thimble of wine! I am not going to leave a church that is world-wide, made up of people who are very poor and very rich, well-educated and illiterate, people who are black, yellow. red, white people and every shade in-between, people from every nation on earth. With all that variety under our tent, surely I can forgive our church for being a mess sometime!
Yes, we can be messy, boring and tedious sometimes. Yes, we might fight, argue over silly differences and find ourselves disappointed with our cowardly leadership sometimes, but I choose to stay in spite of all that! I stay, not because we are “relevant,” “trendy” and “popular,” but because I believe that we are part of that messy “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church” that has been handed down to us in an unbroken line across generations of believers!
And so, I leave you with the same challenge that Joshua and Jesus gave us in today’s readings.
“Do you want to leave too?”
“Decide today whom you will serve.”
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