In Easter Light

For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and
this is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Can you feel the lightness of the air around us? It is as if we are lifted along in our steps, and our footfalls land lightly upon the earth. Do you see the new light that is filtering in? The light of Heaven gently bathing each and every thing? These are the first days of the new life. For those who have waited long months and now are baptized Christians, they can feel the fullness of their Heavenly birthright. They can feel the Holy Spirit hovering over them, Who will teach them and guide them with greater force and clarity! They can feel their Guardian Angels giving thanks for this fully discipled, accepted, approved, sealed, marked soul.

What of people who are not baptized: Do they not receive guidance from the Holy Spirit? Do they not have Guardian Angels? We reply that this is what the Lord requires: to believe, to commit ourselves to a new kind of life, His kind of life, and to be baptized. Good Christian, leave off from endless debate, do not offend God. Bow your head in reverence and give thanks to the God Who has brought us this new life. For the "dogged pursuit of more," more than He has given us, more than what He has purposed and planned was the sin that separated us from Him in Eden and which has nearly destroyed our Garden planet. The dogged pursuit of more which characterizes the moral life, or should I say "immoral life," we see all around us today: "Well, this is fine, but I want that too!" What is that line from Shakespeare's tragedy, Macbeth" "Your all of your wives and your daughters [and your sisters and mothers and grandmothers] could not fill the cisterns of my lust." The dogged pursuit of more. "Not just my wife in our sanctified relationship, but also her and her and her and her." I grieve to say that is our world.

Turn away from all that! See the morning light flooding valleys and setting halos of light upon the hilltops. Go in that direction, never looking back. Soon you will meet with others who also seek goodness and purity and the unsullied love of God. This is what He has planned for us, He has prepared. There is mirth in Heaven for it. We feel a fullness, a completeness. We feel no need for anything else. Indeed, anything else is repugnant.

Now, what comes next? This morning, we have read a very great passage in the Gospel According to St. John, that most holy book. In very few words: the Church is born; the Bishops are gathered; the Holy Spirit is given; the Sacraments are bestowed; and the Church is sent into the world, which will become the Body of Christ, where we will fit in to the new Creation, following the Eighth Day:

.... the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again,
"Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you." And when He
had said this, He breathed on them, and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit.
If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any,
they are retained."

Around Him we find the Disciples; ten are present, we believe. They are gathered in "peace." Three times that is said. They were glad to see the Lord. They are, therefore, "in accord" and meeting with God face-to-face. Here is a moment, inevitably, of a certain high energy and drama as the Presence of God must always be, and they are joined as one, in peace. Breathing on them, they receive the Holy Spirit. The sacrament, which reconciles all people to God, which we call Confession or Reconciliation, is planted deep within their persons, indelibly inscribed on their imperishable souls. Which is to say, now is established a foundation forever. As the Sacred Scriptures have revealed, these men will be called επισκοποι (episkopoi), or bishops. Deeply implanted within each of them will be another Holy Sacrament (indeed, all the sacraments), but also Holy Orders, which will enable them to consecrate other bishops. Reading the Acts of the Apostles, we know that they will use this power to create Deacons also, ordained men who will be servants to the Church, Christ's own hands and heart. Bishop and Deacons. The Conventual Sisters of the Hermitage are very well aware that I insist on the high dignity of a deacon. One of the inaugural instances of Holy Orders. I do not find priests in the New Testament, but that is another sermon.

May I add a side-thought? Going from English cathedral to English cathedral, Bishop Keith Ackerman, SSC commented to me, pointing to the stone effigies of the bishops lying atop their tombs, "See, the bishop is wearing his miter and cope? But just below that we see his chasuble and dalmatic. He will always be a deacon. Forever a deacon."

These bishops the Lord then sends into the world. They will forever after be known as Apostolates, the work of the Apostles among us. Today, these Apostolates are carried out by the successors to the Disciples-cum-Apostles-cum-Bishops, Whom Christ has sent today in our very hearing.

Why do I say that all the sacraments have been given when only Reconciliation is given explicitly and Holy Orders implicitly? First, we find the other Sacraments being bestowed throughout the pages of the Gospels. They're all around us, and especially in this season of our readings. Who would doubt that Baptism or Holy Eucharist have moved to the center of attention during the Octave of Easter, to name but two of the Seven Sacraments? How many times did we hear the phrase the "breaking of the bread" this morning in our readings? And we can imagine that this phrase had a poignant sound in the ears of those who watched Him being broken. Not a bone was broken, but He was crushed for our betrayal. The breaking of the bread. And at the Mass we say, "He took the bread, and when He had given thanks, He brake it and gave it to His Disciples ...." He was broken.

Beside that we know that one is all that is necessary to imply the others, for one of the tools of formal writing during this period, called synecdoche, enables the part to stand for the whole, which we find repeatedly in the New Testament. Then why should Reconciliation be mentioned in this context? Because this is the moment that the Church is born and sent. And just as the Rite of Baptism marks one's initiation into the Church, the Rite of Reconciliation marks one's re-baptism, one's readmission into the Church. For when we sin we are separated from the Body of Christ, from the Church. Receiving the Blessed Sacrament before you have received Absolution from sin is a very grave offense, indeed .... graver than any of the sins you might have committed before committing that one. Taking the spotless and most holy Body of Christ into a sinful vessel!

The Ecclesia is gathered. The Bishops are consecrated. The Holy Spirit is received. The Church is born and sent. But where are the certificates? Where is the silver shovel that Jesus must use to "break ground" on this vast construction project? Where is the cornerstone, founded 33 A.D. (as I read in social media)? How long will it take to build the Church? The Temple took forty-six years to build! The Temple Jesus is building, though, is not a Temple of mortar and stone. It is an imperishable Temple, which can never be torn down and reduced to rubble as the Temple on Mount Zion would be thirty-seven years after this meeting though no one present could know it .... except One, Who predicted it. "Not one stone will lie upon another," He said. This is not a material temple but a spiritual one (1 Cor. 3:16). Its members are "living stones built unto a spiritual house" (1 Peter 2:5). For those who seek a first deed or a royal grant or a divine patent, I ask them, "Why seek ye the living among the dead?" Why do you insist on debate and division at the moment of highest unity? "That they all may be one," He prayed. For God has founded His Church on the only building material in the Creation that is permanent and the only material which was made to be holy, — His precious human creatures, formed in His Own Image.

How long did it take for Him to build this Church? Well, if we leaned over to whisper to someone during the Gospel reading, you missed it. I am always amazed when I read this passage from John at how much has happened in so few words. Everything has happened. Just a few words. For it required little more than the passing of God's Sacred Hand: He gave them His peace; He commissioned them; He breathed the Holy Spirit upon them. As the Holy Spirit was within the Christ, the Agency of Creation, proceeding from the Father, so the Holy Church is within the Bishops. Within them. For all the Lord needed to do is to emplant the sacraments within the Bishops, and the Church is constituted. As St. John's disciple, St. Ignatius of Antioch, would write: "Where the Bishop is, there is the Church."

If in my sins, I should ever have a fantasy that I will become a wandering priest, in no way connected to a valid, Catholic bishop, then I have become a raving lunatic, a heretic, an ego-maniac. Where the Bishop is, there is the Church.

And, now, after all of this what comes next? Do we hear choirs of angels descending? Do find a peaceable kingdom where the holiest creatures, the angels, are joined in accord to the least holy creatures, the shepherds, as we saw in Bethlehem? Is there rejoicing and exultation that our earthly struggle is over? That with the Church permanent union with God has been bestowed? Restored is our immortal life in Eden. We might fall to our knees and in our deep love of God give thanks for what He has done for us. But that is not what happens as St. John recounts the unfolding narrative. What comes next, true to our own day and time, is unbelief and by that fact, rebellion and insolence:

Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came.
So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them,
"Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark
of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe."

The tone here is unmistakable. You don't need my caricature. Its swagger and taunting language are thick. Please recall that Thomas was present to see the mighty signs and wonders that Jesus had worked in his very presence for three years. Recall that at Jesus' Baptism the Holy Trinity was revealed and the Father's voice was heard. Jesus was Transfigured, returning for a time to His Divine form. He shattered the tomb of death soon after that and then appeared to many. And now, at the birth of His Church, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the sending of the Apostles, what does He receive in return? The vain, proud strutting of a self-important man, and by synecdoche, all proud and self-important men and women.

Is this so strange? The fact that it is common today makes it no less strange. Look about you and see a whole world that hurls insults into God's face and, the U.S., which has fashioned a culture that seems bent on repudiating God, desecrating His holy ways. And in its celebration of itself and its own excesses, at the foot of Sinai we might say, what must inevitably come next? Why, to proclaim that "anything goes" .... and its inevitable follow-on, that there is no Hell, no penalty for a life that is plainly offensive to Heaven. As Our Lady of Fatima warned, "Offend the Lord no further. He is already too much offended."

For all of that, faithful Christians, take heart! God has not forgotten those who love Him. There is the Church, the hearts of those who are loyal to the bishops, and Who love Him with all of their heart, soul, and mind, and who love others, that is, seeking others to join them in this sacred and empyreal love He numbers the hairs on their heads, and His Holy Spirit guides their very paths. Each of them. He awaits you with your vocation and with a fullness of life that .... well, I can only say that we at the Hermitage are fulfilled beyond our furthest expectations. I have wandered in many, many different directions, at Ivy League universities, teaching theology, and computer science, and literature ... became a research scientist and taught at one of the first rank universities in science and technology ... and I was empty and lost and sad. So many of my former friends might say, "Here is the man who lost everything." Oh, no! Here is the man who found a treasure buried in a field and sold all that he had that he might obtain it! For God's Easter Light filters into the meadows and valleys; it crowns the hilltops and mountains; it enlivens the hearts that love Him with a power this world cannot imagine. And the souls of the righteous He holds firmly in His hands (Proverbs 3:1). Successors to His Apostles continue to work humbly and faithfully in His vineyards, though they now are few in number. Nonetheless, they are there! And pastures where sheep may safely graze have not vanished from the earth.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.