Archive for Christian Discipleship

Of Martyrs and Mission: An (unofficial) Franciscan Feast

Posted in Franciscan Spirituality, Uncategorized with tags , , , , , on September 26, 2012 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

So, with all due respect to Saints Comas and Damian, the early Christian martyrs whose feast day we commemorate today, I couldn’t help but see something of a moment to pause and reflect on the Franciscan tradition this morning. There are two reasons that this is an important day, at least liturgically, for the Franciscan family. First, it was at the small chapel dedicated to the memory of St. Damian outside of Assisi where Francis first received his explicit “call” from the Lord to transform his life and follow the Gospel in a particular way. Second, the readings for today, especially the Gospel, relate directly to the mission of the Franciscan Orders and provide for all Christians a lens through which to view Jesus’s “missionary discourse.”

Many people familiar with the Franciscan tradition will recall the San Damiano (St. Damian) Cross. It was while praying in front of this cross that Francis is reported to have heard Jesus say to him: “Francis, rebuild my church.”  The young Francis interpreted this command from Christ to be the task of literally rebuilding the chapel of St. Damian, which has fallen into ruin. But over time he came to realize that this was a call to be, like those sent by the Lord in today’s Gospel, one who proclaims the Kingdom of God in word and deed.

Today’s First Reading and Gospel happen to rather coincidentally fall on this memorial, but they are the readings for this regular Wednesday in Ordinary Time. The first reading, from Proverbs of the Wisdom tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures, reflects our need to be aware of our dependence on God. The call is that we not take what we have received in this life for granted. It is a prayer for the Lord to give us just what we need: no more, no less! The reason being that with more than we need, we become self-satisfied and forget that we are always already dependent on God from whom we receive life and everything else. If we have less, or if anyone has less, they might be forced into stealing or something else (think Les Miserables and bread) in order to survive.

The Gospel is Luke’s account of the “Missionary Discourse,” where Jesus sends the disciples out into the world to proclaim the Kingdom of God and heal the sick. His instructions form the foundation of Francis’s vision for the life of the Lesser Brothers (Friars Minor):

“Take nothing for the journey,
neither walking stick, nor sack, nor food, nor money,
and let no one take a second tunic.
Whatever house you enter, stay there and leave from there.
And as for those who do not welcome you,
when you leave that town,
shake the dust from your feet in testimony against them.” (Luke 9:1-6)

The early legends have it that Francis heard this Gospel proclaimed at Mass and immediately realized that “This is what I want, this is what I desire!” He then spent the rest of his life trying to follow Christ in accord with his instructions found here.

What this says to us today is that we, as Christian women and men, are not to succumb to the popular cultural and political narrative that says we are each “self-made” women and men, that we “did ourselves,” and that “each for his or her own.” We are always to recall that we are a community of interdependent people who, as the Body of Christ, support and care for one another. Everything we have received is ultimately from God (the wisdom of Proverbs) and we should live in the world in such a way as to gratefully recall our mutual dependence on one another (the Gospel discourse).

Photo: File

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Who Do You Serve?

Posted in Homilies with tags , , , , , , , , on August 26, 2012 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

Who do you serve? This question is at the heart of both the first reading and the Gospel this weekend. In our first reading from the Book of Joshua and in our Gospel from John, a challenge is raised and we are confronted by the question rather starkly, albeit in two different contexts, with the question: who or what do you serve? God? or Someone or something else?

In the case of Joshua, we have a leader within the community of Israel — a community, by the way, which has a history of occupation and exile — that is faced with an ostensible conflict of cultures, values, religions, and practices. The people, Joshua exclaims, have been lax when it comes to practicing the true faith, of living up to the covenant with the Lord. There has been a blurring of the line between the cultures, values, religion, and practices of the People of God with that of the so-called pagan societies that surround the Israelites.

Joshua is calling the people to remember who they are, what their identity is, and to recall that this identity has always been defined by their relationship to the One God (YHWH)! What he’s doing in this reading is essentially saying: “Wake up folks, be aware of what you’re doing, and take your faith seriously!  Either you worship The Lord or you worship these false gods, but you can’t keep living life going through the motions, unthinkingly and unreflectively doing whatever you want. Live the Covenant or don’t, but stop kidding yourselves and be honest!”

In the Gospel, Jesus likewise brings his disciples back to reality and tells them also, in so many words, to stop kidding around. Living the Gospel is hard! That is, when we actually take it seriously and not just blur the lines between our Christian discipleship and professed faith and many of the competing “religions” of our day. And there are many, here are three of the most popular contemporary “Religions”:

  1. The Religion of Consumerism — it takes many forms, whether the “prosperity Gospel” or the some form of elevation of wealth, accumulation, and material possessions beyond what is necessary for human flourishing. It is a religion that is practiced in our shopping malls, online, and in every part of our society. It offers its hymns of television ads and highway billboards, presents its liturgical presiders in the form of celebrities who promote this or that product that you “must have,” and gives people the false sense of salvation won through things and money.
  2. The Religion of Nationalism — This is the belief that one’s country, in this case the United States of America, is the most important thing in life and ultimately treated like an end in itself instead of the arbitrary, if important, historical construction that should really be intended to provide for the welfare and safety of its citizens. Tied to this religion is the novenas that are said in the ardent defense of partisan views and political positions that nowadays makes no room for discussion, civility, or compromise. The person of different political and economic worldview is not simply a person with a different political or economic worldview, but a heretic and a traitor, someone deserving banishment and excommunication! This religion, in subtle and at-times overt ways, teaches its adherents that being faithful means being willing to kill for one’s country, but not die for one’s faith.
  3. The Religion of Individualism — There are many denominations in this contemporary religious tradition, but each comes down to a basic worship of oneself. My god might not be money or country, but it certainly isn’t the God of Jesus Christ (although I might trick myself into thinking it is), but rather the god of “me.” I come first no matter what and selfishness is masked as responsibility, hoarding money and things is disguised as self-suffiency and planning, and my benefit at the expense of others is heralded as virtuous. It is a religion that worships the truly atheistic “god” of someone like the novelist Ayn Rand, whose credo begins, not with “I believe in one God,” but with the aphoristic “God helps those who help themselves, and if you are poor, unemployed, struggling in life — it’s obviously your fault and I have no obligation to help you!”

These are not the religion of Jesus Christ, these are false religions that are popular and insidiously ubiquitous in our time. Like the people of Israel in our first reading, we are too often tempted, usually without realizing it, to blur the line between Christianity and these false religions, choosing to practice what we like instead of what we are called to believe.

We justify the tenets of these false faiths b telling ourselves that “Christianity supports this” and that “the way that I see the world is the way that God does.”  In fact, that is often not the case at all. In truth, Christianity is harder, more complicated, and nearly as black-and-white as these false religions of our day would have us believe.

I recently read an interesting novel titled, What Happened to Sophie Wilder (Tin House Books), by Christopher Beha. It’s a book about young writers, friendship, love, faith, and the different decisions we have to make everyday in small and big ways.

The two main characters discover, again and again it seems, that the easy answers they want — one is entirely disinterested in organized religion, while the other is something of a zealous convert to Catholicism — don’t arrive. Instead, they are, each in their own way, confronted with Jesus’s challenge in today’s Gospel: this is not easy, do you still want to follow me? Can you still follow me?

In the process of life and figuring these things out, the characters in the book, like you and I, have to grapple with the reality that what following the Gospel means, at times, is that we have to act not in our own personal interest, but place others first. We have to strive to do what might seem impossible, as Jesus laid the mission out before us: love the unlovable, forgive the unforgivable, and work to heal the brokenness and broken-heartedness of humanity in our world.

So the question of today’s readings remains a question for us today: In the end, who do you serve?

Photo: Stock

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The Complicated Relationship Between Discipleship and Patriotism

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , on April 10, 2012 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

Ok, you can tell what I nerd I am: last night I was reading my copy of the latest issue of the journal Modern Theology in which a review symposium was published on Stanley Hauerwas’s “theological memoir,” Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir (2010), and I was struck by the contribution of R. R. Reno, of First Things fame. Those familiar with Hauerwas’s history and background know that he was once on the editorial board of First Things, but resigned in the early 2000s over a disagreement in the publication’s editorial policy to support and defend the U.S. government’s handling of Afghanistan and Iraq. Hauerwas, a leading proponent of the centrality of nonviolence in Christian ethics, could not in good conscience continue to be so closely associated with a board that stood for something about which he so significantly disagreed. This, I believe, has a lot to do with shaping Reno’s decision to end his piece in Modern Theology.

Concluding with some musings about his own intellectual development and worldview, ostensibly inspired to introspection by Hauerwas’s memoir, Reno writes:

In fact one could say that he [Hauerwas] has been the great theorist of our need to be formed by a real community of faith. But as a consequence I have been less and less engaged by the rhetoric of separation and critique that runs through so much of Hauerwas’s commentary on the moral challenges facing contemporary Christians in America, a rhetoric moreover that far more than theological doctrines of denominational loyalties make his followers identifiable as Hauerwasians. I see myself as a sinner, not an outsider. I am an American Christian whose natural love for his country can certainly become perverted. But I need not push away my patriotic emotions, for that same love can be a fitting way to serve my neighbor, and the transcendence of self encouraged by patriotism can prepare my heart for the higher love of God. Bourgeois upper-middle-class life? Capitalism? Again, these features of modern life are occasions for many dangerous temptations but they are also fully capable of Christian habitation (326).

I disagree, so call me a Hauerwasian. What Reno seemingly desires is to have his proverbial cake and eat it too. He wants to bear the name Christian for apparently genuine and faithful reasons, but he also wants to rally to support his “patriotic emotions” in ways that he feels exist in symbiotic relationship with, if not even in positively formative ways to, his Christian faith.

What Hauerwas does so well in his writing is call to mind precisely why such a relationship is not tenable. Reno claims that Hauerwas’s position forces like-minded adherents to the margins of Christianity. But in fact, what Hauerwas and others keenly note is that to be Christian is to necessarily stand at the margins of popular culture and society.

This is why it is absurd to claim that a Christian can support war, violence, unbridled capitalism, and the like. Jesus was executed precisely because he was scarily at the margins of his culture — religious and civil. A threat to both the religious establishment of his first-century Palestinian Judaism and eventually viewed by the Roman government as an insurrectionist, Christ could not walk the line for which Reno advocates, because it is simply not what the Good News (Gospel) is about.

Forgiveness for the unforgivable, love for the unlovable, freedom for captives, sight to the blind, relief for the poor, healing for the broken and broken hearted — these are the indicators of God’s Reign. They are, when we are most honest, precisely the opposite of the “Bourgeois upper-middle-class life” and “capitalism” and violence for which Reno claims the possibility of “Christian habitation.”

Reno claims that, although he appreciates Hauerwas’s friendship over the years, “for the most part Hauerwas has not shaped [Reno's] moral judgments.” This much is very, very clear. But even without Stanley Hauerwas’s unique and provocative efforts to awaken the truth of Christian discipleship in the hearts of so many, Reno would be wise to revisit the Scripture to see what it is that Jesus demands of those who wish to follow him. It’s certainly not capitulating with self-righteous justification to the prescripts of popular American culture. It has a lot more to do with denying one’s self, taking up crosses and following in the footprints of the one who not only laid down his life for a friend, but surrendered his will for all.

Photo: Stock

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