I spent the first part of this week attending a conference at the University of Notre Dame called "Polarization in the US Catholic Church." (You can watch the initial panel, featuring Bishop Daniel Flores, Fr. John Jenkins (president of Notre Dame), and others here: http://csrs.nd.edu/events/polarization/).At the conference, we spent a great deal of time discussing what divides us. For example: discussions of  homosexuality and abortion, differences between the Millennial generation and the Baby Boomers, that we use the political language of US politics to describe our brothers and sisters in Christ, questions about the place and role of women in the church, and so on. We expressed our concerns about this polarization including that most of us attending might say that polarization is especially troubling for Christians - or it should be!

 

Today's first scripture speaks to just this kind of division in the Church.  The first scripture (Acts 13:26-33) describes the divisions between Jew/Gentile and Old Covenant/New Covenant.  If you read yesterday’s passage, you know that Paul is on one of his famous missionary trips and is in Pisidia trying to convince Jews (for the most part) to become Christian.  They are balking for a couple reasons; one is that it isn’t clear to them that the Christian God is the same God that Jews are instructed to worship; second, Paul hangs around with a lot of non-Jewish Gentiles. 

 

The first part of Paul’s sermon to the Jews was read yesterday; today Paul continues it today.  Note first, that today’s passage begins with Paul addressing “My brothers, children of the family of Abraham, and those others among you who are God-fearing.”  In the Greek, it is clear that “those others among you” are Gentiles, and the “children of the family of Abraham” are Jewish.  So Paul seeks to find unity between these two groups in part by addressing them together.  But also, he seeks to find unity by explicitly linking Jesus’ life and ministry to passages from the Old Testament and the Old Covenant God made with the Jews, and he specifically mentions part of the Psalm that is also one of our readings today: “You are My Son, this day I have begotten you.” (Psalm 2:7)   Jesus brings in the New Covenant; God is doing a new thing in Jesus, but God is not thereby rejecting the Old Covenant and the Old Testament.  What Jesus does, and what Paul is doing, is connecting the two.   The God of the Old Testament is the same loving God who sends Jesus.

The overall emphasis of the first passage is that Jesus unifies.  This unity resounds in today’s gospel passage (John 14:1-6), where Jesus speaks of there being many rooms in one mansion.  We Christians may see ourselves as divided, but Jesus does not: what we see as separate things are joined together by Jesus in one house.  Moreover, Jesus is the way, because he is the one who unifies. Without him, we do indeed see ourselves as opposed to each other, as utter opposites who cannot get along.

At the Notre Dame conference, we (who all represented many different and polarized aspects of the Church) sought this same kind of unity. We sought it in our conversations together, in our mutual love of God and beliefs about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit - and most physically, in our sharing in the Eucharist together. 

Today, let us pray and seek out the true unity that Jesus brings.

- Jana M. Bennett