Homily for April 20, 2008 Fifth Sunday of Easter

We use the Gospel I just recited at many funerals, I think the reason is obvious. It helps people frame the loss that they're experiencing in the picture of a bigger hope that Jesus has gone to prepare a place for us and will come take us with him.
I want to use it in a different way today, and I've thought a lot in the last week about how to use it. On my way down the aisle, I threw out everything I had been thinking of all week, because it was too much intellectual stuff. And I thought back to one memory and one question I want to leave you with to ponder. I'll suggest what the answer is, but first I want you to feel the question.
Years ago a young man came to me. I was sitting in my office surrounded by books, and he said, "Father, I want to know Jesus. Can you help me know Jesus?"
I said, "Oh, yeah." And I went over and I grabbed a book, and I handed it to him.
And he said, "No, I don't want to know about Jesus. I want to know Jesus. Can you help me?"
You know, at that moment that was a scary question. I mean, first of all, who am I to say I can help you know Jesus? And second there's the question, how do we know Jesus? I'm going to do what I do frequently, throw this open to you. Maybe you can help me. How do you know Jesus?
Through others. Good.
How else do we know Jesus? Through the Bible, and through what people write.
How else? In your own faith and your own spirituality.
You talk and you listen.
In the sacraments, especially in the Eucharist.
A sense inside of you.
One of the spiritual writers I love says some things about prayer, and he says if you pray, pray, do the best you can, be still and listen. If you don't pray, do the best you can, be still and listen. If you can't pray, do the best you can, be still and listen. And if prayer happens, pay attention to who it is that's praying. Sometimes it will seem like you, and sometimes it will seem like somebody else in you praying.
Can you relate to that?
So faith can be like a virus.
I was reading something recently about churches, and it said every church has an angel or a spirit, and you don't have to read about it, you kind of download it when you come in. And so, maybe we could say we download faith when we come through the doors.
Most of us got it from our parents.
I want to suggest an answer I gave after fumbling around a lot, and I don't know if I really gave this to him or if it's the answer I wish I would have given to him years later. I want to suggest that in the context of the church, the answer to the question, "How can I know Jesus?" is come, spend time with us, hang out with us. Listen to the Scriptures we read, pray with us, and celebrate the Eucharist with us. And if you do, you will know Jesus, because Jesus is alive and lives in our midst.
What do you think of that answer? Is it scary? Well, I can speak as your pastor, it scares the bejeebers out of me to say it. The minute I try to say it, I think of all the things that are wrong with me. I think of all the things that are wrong with our church, all the improvements that need to be made. I think of all the things wrong with the bigger church, and I say, "Can I really say that?"
Well, the answer of faith is yes, you can. That's what it means to be church. Peter said at the end of the second reading, "You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people." Jesus said in the Gospel, "If you have seen me, you've seen the Father." Can we say that? If you've seen us, you've seen Jesus? If you know us, you know Jesus? That's a real challenge, but that's what we're called to be by the way we celebrate, by the way that we live and by the way that we share our own knowledge.
I can read books and they can help me know things about Jesus, but they won't help me know Jesus. I can read the Bible and read a lot of things about Jesus, and if I read it prayerfully, especially in the midst of the community, Jesus is there speaking to us.
I hope I don't lose you with this switch, but I read a commentary on this Gospel, and I just felt like I want to say this and I hope it fits. When Jesus says, "No one comes to the Father but through me," today I think we're afraid to really assert that we and the Church are the way to know God and to know Jesus, because it sounds a little arrogant, doesn't it? Do you know what I mean? You might say, "What about Muslims, and what about Buddhists? What about all those other people?" And especially if you hear those words as being said by the largest religion in the world and a very powerful institution, they sound arrogant. But I want to invite you to hear them in the context in which John spoke them, a very small minority who had come to know God in a unique way through Jesus and who were paying dearly for it, because they were being kicked out of the synagogue, their spiritual home, and they were suffering severe persecution. But they were filled with confidence and trust in what they had come to know.
I thought of that, and I thought, yes, our church is big. It's the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world, the largest church in Christianity. It used to be the largest religion in the world, but I hear that Islam has overtaken us. But you know, for me the church is right here. I do my best as your pastor to keep us on the same page with that other church, that big one, and I know sometimes some of us have some tension about that, but it's part of the mystery of particularity. I experience the living Jesus here, Sunday after Sunday, with you, and around this altar, and that feeds everything else. So the answer to me, for me, to how did I come to know Jesus is, through being with you. And I hope we can all say and feel that as we pray.