May the eyes of your hearts be opened that you may see the value of
your hope, your inheritance and your power as believers.
Ephesians 1:18-21
Laura Young, a Texas antiques dealer, thought she had found a steal when she came across a stunning statue at a Goodwill store in 2018 for just under $35. And while she suspected she had come across something “very special,” little did she know the piece would turn out to be a priceless Roman bust dating back to 2,000 years.
When she first came across the bust, scouring for antique treasures in the Goodwill store, one of Young’s first thoughts was: “He looked Roman. He looked old.” Once she purchased the statue, she said “in the sunlight, it looked like something that could be very, very special.”
Special, indeed! A Sotheby’s consultant eventually determined that the $35 sculpture was in fact a priceless marble Roman bust.
It seems to be a human trait to misjudge the value of things, even very important things. This phenomenon is repeated regularly on “Antique Road Show.” What they think is worth something, turns out to be junk, while something they consider junk often turns out to be a priceless artifact!
Every Christmas, we read a story about some child somewhere getting a very expensive toy, only to throw it aside and focus on playing with the box that it came in!
St. Paul tells us that we do that to what Jesus left us – a great treasure handed to us in a humble earthenware crock. He tells us that people don’t seem to realize what a great treasure we have, but instead focus most of their attention on the crudeness of the crock. We undervalue the treasure of Christ saving message to us because it is handed to us in an imperfect Church.
We see this phenomenon played out every day on TV. Even though there are many good things going on in the world and in our country, we are constantly bombarded through our 24-hour-a-day news cycle with stories of how more and more people seem to be out of control: drug addiction, mass killings, infidelity and violence in marriages, child abuse and neglect of the elderly, grand theft, mean and nasty public behaviors --- you name it!
We are also bombarded daily with the sins of the Church and seldom hear about the great heroism of our many saints still doing heroic ministry among us. The famous baseball player Johnny Sain was so on target when he said, “People don’t want to hear about the labor pains, they just want to see the baby!” Can you imagine a proud mother standing in front of you with a beautiful baby in her arms, never mentioning the baby’s name or whether it is a girl or a boy, but instead rattles on about how much pain she was in during the delivery? Well, we all tend to do that sometime. Instead of focusing on the wonderful treasure we have, we go on and on about the limitations of the box that it came in! Instead of being optimists who can see the wonderful things the heroes of the church are doing, we end up being droning pessimists who can see nothing but problems, failures and limitations. John Lubbock was right on target when he said, “What we see depends mainly on what we look for.” When it comes to our faith, so often we don’t even know how to look! We need to a new way of seeing, what Jesus called in New Testament Greek, metanoia! We need to have the “eyes of our hearts opened,” not just the eyes in front of our heads! We need to be able to distinguish the priceless treasure we have been given from the humble crock that holds it.
May the eyes of your hearts be opened that you may see the value of
your hope, your inheritance and your power as believers.
I think that we have gotten lost spiritually because we have forgotten where the Church came from originally! In its beginning, many ordinary men and women answered the call of Jesus to radical inner conversion. They dropped everything they knew and let themselves be taught and guided by the teaching of Jesus. (Can you imagine what St. Peter’s wife said when he got home to tell her he had sold the boat and was going to follow, full-time, some preacher he had met on the beach?) From these initial conversions, a small community, infused with a new way of living, came into being. Christianity as an inner path was born.
Something, however, happened to Christianity as an inner path about 350 A.D. The horrible persecution of Christians officially ended in the Roman Empire with the conversion of the Emperor, Constantine. With Constantine, Christianity as a world religion takes form and decisively branches away from what might be called Christianity as an inner path. When that happened, Christianity was on its way to becoming a complicated world-wide religious organization. We need to remember the fundamental difference between Christianity as “a way of living” and Christianity as a “world-wide religious institution.” Today, we have more people making the external institution of Christianity more important than walking the inner path of Christianity. We need to remember this - the institution of Christianity serves the inner path of Christianity and can never ever be allowed to smother it. Sadly, for many believers, the weight of an overly complicated institutional Church is smothering its vital and needed message that is the basis for walking the inner path.
Something has happened, as well, to Christianity in our time. It has been reduced to a synonym for “being nice to people.” What martyrs died for, what countless saints lived for, has been “domesticated” into a mere synonym for civility, summed up in the popular idea that you can do anything you want “as long as you don't hurt anybody.” It has been cheapened to the point of boredom by people who claim the name, but don’t walk the talk. As the English Catholic writer, G. K. Chesterton famously said, "“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
Sadly, there are millions of people today who claim the name “Christian” without knowing “diddly squat” about what Jesus Christ taught and the power that comes from the daily living out his powerful message. They don't even know enough about Jesus to make an informed decision to reject him, much less make a decision to walk the inner path that he taught! For millions of “Christians,” the questions “Who was Jesus?” and “What did Jesus want from us?” have never been answered! That's why so many Christian churches, Roman Catholic included, are in crisis.
It is past time for us to be brutally honest about our situation. (1) Why is it that life-time Catholics, with years and years and years of religious formation, end up becoming members of the local 60 year old mega church after only a couple of visits? That church has many good things going for it, but personally, I don't believe that our loss is about their strength as much as it is about our weakness! (2) Why is it that so many of the graduates of our expensive Catholic Schools leave the church as soon as they graduate? Because of that good education, they end up getting fine jobs, yes, but end up knowing so little about the Catholic faith and about making a commitment to serious discipleship! (3) Good preaching in the Catholic Church is so rare that most Catholics are surprised when they experience it. One of the most interesting comments I have heard from at least three people since I started working here in these two parishes is this. "Father, it is so rare and yet we are so very lucky to have three good preachers to listen to each weekend! Three of them!" Fellow Catholics, we have got to quit using our pulpits mainly for fund raising, for expressing the pet peeves of the preacher, for pushing political agendas and for sharing stories about the preachers' last vacation trip. I believe that our people are leaving us because of what is not happening in our pulpits. All this talk about "reviving the Eucharist" will fail if we don't start by focusing on our pulpits. Because of what's not happening in our pulpits, people don't even know what's happening on our altars! Because of what is not happening in our pulpits, they have no problem with walking away from the Eucharist! They don't even understand what they are walking away from! Our people need to be seriously fed on the Word of God so they can live the inner path of Christianity and become passionate disciples of the Lord Jesus! If we don't start building a fire in our pulpits, we are going to lose even more of our people! By that, I mean a "fire" of affirmation, not a "fire" of condemnation!
May the eyes of your hearts be opened that you may see the value of your hope, your inheritance and your power as believers.
