The Word of God is not Chained

The Word of God is not chained
I spent a good bit of time last week pondering today’s readings. This passage from Second Timothy stood out for me, especially in light of the feast yesterday of my patron, St. Denis. The letters to Timothy are pastoral letters in the truest sense, they speak to the hearts of pastors. They speak the Truth in the boldest way and so, there it is, a central tenant of our faith
The Word of God is not chained
I have been devoted to St. Denis for many years, even before I was given his name in religious life when I made my temporary profession in 1997. I have prayed many times at his tomb in the abbey Church that bears his name just north of Paris.
Who was Saint Denis? He was the first bishop of Paris, he was a missionary and he was a martyr. According to the story, after he was beheaded in the place known today as Montmartre, “the hill of the martyr” in Paris, he picked up his head and walked several miles to the location where his tomb is located until this day. In his body, St. Denis expressed this central tenant of our faith
The Word of God is not chained
Denis’ witness to the Gospel could not be stifled, even by death
I am devoted to my patron even though I know next to nothing about him as a man. I do not know his appearance, his origins, or his personality. I know nothing about his particular characteristics as a priest, a bishop. I do know one thing however, and that is enough. I know he was devoted to an ideal, that ideal spoken of in the Second Letter to Timothy, the ideal of the priest, the pastor, indeed, the disciple.
The ideal that the Word of God is not, cannot be chained.
The Christians of the early Church needed to know that. The Jews were for centuries a people for whom God was a veiled God, a God chained to the reality of the Law. And the Gentiles, they too were a chained people, chained to the daily reminder of political enslavement to a distant imperical deity. They needed an ideal to live for and it is preached in the message of Christ
The Word of God is not chained
Brothers and sisters, like our fathers and mothers of old, we need ideals. In our postmodern, post epistemological mélange of intergenerational, globalizational, hyperbolical reality, we need to remind ourselves that there is something that lasts, something unfettered that stands in the midst of life’s many storms
The Word of God is not chained
That ideal shelters us in a time when the deconstruction all around us begins to take its toll, when we begin to believe the lies that people tell us, that our social order tells us, that even our fellow Christians sometimes tell us.
Lies of hate, lies of segregation, lies of false witness
That ideal upholds us as we faint in the heat of ever-pressing fictions about ourselves, our value as persons whether that value is outside in attitudes and beliefs, or within in our secret sin, in cloaked feelings of worthlessness, in pains yet unnamed, perhaps unknown
That ideal liberates us when we feel chained, when we feel unable to overcome our personal demons, our heaviness of spirit, our delusions of grandeur.
We have all been there, are there
We have known alienation
We have known separation
We have known slavery in one form or another but the words to Timothy ring true:
The Word of God is not chained
And we are not chained
We are not bound on journeys alien and alone
We are not wandering the earth like men healed of our existential leprosy without the sense to thank our liberator, our physician.
In Jesus Christ, in his blood, in his sacrifice, in his passion, in his selflessness, in his gift, in his redemption, in his salvation, in his grace, we have been healed and set free.
Caught in the chains of our own desires, our communal self-direction, our personal satans,
He found us, he raised us up, he enkindled new life in us, he brought us to the crest of Calvary and proclaimed to a dying, gasping world from his cruciform throne. Watch. Watch and see true love, true devotion, true sacrifice. It is still possible, probable, palpable
And he gave us this example casting his gaze down from the wood of that cross. IF you want to live, trust in me, cast your cares on me, and watch me become an outcast for you so that you can live with integrity and the dignity of the children of God
In the shadow of the cross the veil tears in two, the chains of repression fall away
The Word of God is not chained
Because this saying is trustworthy
If we have died with him, if we persevere, we shall also reign with him.
So what must we do?
Nothing so heroic as the sacrifice of the Lord, and more heroic
We must give thanks
Thanksgiving is that ideal which augments the sacrifice of Christ and draws us full round into his paschal mystery
Thanksgiving is at the heart of who we are as Christian men and women. It completes us, it acknowledges our healing, it sets us free from the isolation that contaminates our souls like the sores of leprosy
Thanksgiving is the ability to give God the glory, give him the honor, give him the supremacy in our lives and in our world
Thanksgiving is the only way we can authentically authentically be
WE have been healed and we have returned to give him thanks
Sometimes with trudging, grudging step, but we come
We come here to worship him, to acknowledge him as Lord and Giver of Life
We come here to bow down to his majesty, seated in glory on this altar, the glory of the simplicity of the bread and wine.
Bread and wine, no, Body and Blood shining out from this altar, bursting forth from the confines of accident to announce the good news to all:
The Word of God is not chained
How do we give thanks?
By acknowledging the unalterable truth that we are his, even as we stretch out hands in want of his latest gift, his daily gift, the sacrament of this altar.
Yesterday we also celebrated for the first time, the feast of Blessed John Henry Newman.
I know a great deal about Newman as a man. I have read thousands of pages about Newman’s life, thousands more of his writings. I have written, taught and preached about Newman. I know more about Newman than I know about my patron but it is all really superfluous. The fact of Blessed John Henry Newman’s first feast day tells us all we need to know. He was a man of ideals. Newman was, without a doubt one of the greatest minds in the history of the Church. He was a brilliant, philosopher, educator, preacher, historian and theologian. His ideas have forever changed the way we think about our faith. Yet every day of his adult life, he was a pastor of souls. His personal witness affected the lives of millions of converts, seekers and students, including a nervous new Catholic, a fourteen-year old boy who didn’t quite know where his life was going until a kind priest gave him a little book with these words of Newman in it:
How can I give thanks to God for all his gifts to me?
I shall do good. I shall do his work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth. … I will trust him. Whatever, wherever I am, I cannot be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve him, if perplexity, my perplexity may serve him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve him. He knows what he is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me – still he knows what he is about.
The Word of God is not chained
Praise God, neither are we.