Homily for Dedication of Lateran Basilica – November 9, 2016

 Flowing from a healed Church into a broken world

Introduction

Preaching about the dedication of St. John's Lateran Basilica is daunting enough on the day after any election, almost impossible after this election. That is why, I must say I have always considered Fr. Nile, our Director of Liturgy, a good friend, that is, until he assigned me to preach today.

How do you preach about some big old church building in Rome when the bigger elephant in the room is the just concluded one-of-a-kind election?

And yet perhaps the very mystery that we celebrate today, the mystery of the Church, can help us all refocus on who we are as the Body of Christ.

Scripture and Theology

Any time we dedicate a church, or like today celebrate the anniversary of its dedication, what we are really celebrating is us, the Church with the big "C."  As the Preface of today's Mass will proclaim, God sanctifies "the Church, the Bride of Christ, foreshadowed in visible buildings."  That is why St. Paul tells the Corinthians and us too: "You are God’s building . . . the [holy] temple of God." This building Paul is constructing, so that "the Spirit of God dwells in you."

The Spirit of God was doubtless absent from the Jerusalem temple, which had been turned into a marketplace for livestock and financial services.  Not that selling doves and sheep to be used for sacrifice was evil. Neither was it a sin to provide worshippers the service of exchanging their pagan coins for suitable temple money.  But for God's sake literally, Jesus is abhorred that these profane activities are taking place in his Father's House, the visible symbol of God's people, the place where they should focus on worshipping God.

That is why Ezekiel's vision has the water flowing out of the temple into the profane world, rather than from the profane world into the temple.

·        The water flowing from the temple made fresh the salt waters of the sea.

·        The water gave life to living creatures, providing an abundance of fish.

·        It even gave life to trees, to bear fresh fruit and leaves for medicine.

The temple was the source of life for the profane world and not vice versa.

Similarly, today's church buildings, because of the worship that takes place in them, must continue being symbols of God's positive influence on the world, an influence provided by the people of God that gather in them and then flow out, like the temple water, back into the world.  St. John Lateran, the Pope's Cathedral is that symbol for the universal Church,  St.  Louis Cathedral, for the Church of New Orleans, and our parish churches for our parochial communities.

Christian Life

The divisiveness, acrimony and frankly pagan ways of this election cycle are a clear message that even more life-giving water must flow from the Church, the Body of Christ, into society to bring life, fresh fruits and healing.

When Pope Francis was asked what advice he had for American Catholics during this election that placed them between a rock and a hard place, he gave a two-part answer.  First, he advised Americans to "study the issues, pray and decide in conscience" – pretty standard moral theology principles.  In the second part, however, he diagnosed the root causes of the situation.  He said:

When a country has two, three or four candidates who are unsatisfactory, it means that the political life of that country is perhaps overly politicized but lacking in a political culture. . . . People belong to one party or another party or even a third, but for emotional reasons, without thinking clearly about the fundamentals, the proposals.

And then he concluded: "One of the tasks of the Church . . . is to teach people to develop a political culture."

Conclusion

These words of Pope Francis should be for us a summons to action.  We, God's Temple, must, by our word and by our example, provide the nourishment that can create a truly Christian political culture in the world today. 

But to do that, we must first cleanse inside our own temple and only then hope to cleanse the outside world.  I offer three suggestions.

1.    Let civility in discourse ring in the Body of Christ and so be the fresh water flowing into salty sea of acrimony, vitriol and ad hominem attacks.

2.    Let unity in diversity ring in the Body of Christ and so be the water that provides life to a people divided on racial, social and religious grounds.

3.    Let fidelity to Christ ring in the Body of Christ, so that in the words of one Cardinal Bergolio, we may live more fully by the criteria that the Lord commands rather than by the criteria of the world and so bring his life-giving message in its fullness to a world of darkness and death.

And finally, we must remember that we cannot this do at all, without praying to and getting the grace of Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords.