Hosea 6:1-11
Romans 11:13-24
Luke 9:57-10:10
"He who does not have the Church as
his mother, does not have God as his father."
St. Augustine of Hippo
Many of you have probably heard of the so-called
“nuclear option” in the US Congress. The
“nuclear option” is defined as the most
drastic or extreme response possible to a particular situation. In WWII it was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the Congress it is a parliamentary
procedure that can be invoked when all other options seem unworkable. Of course, the need to be so drastic is
subjective according to whichever political party happens to hold the
majority. It is a way to stick it to the
other guy.
The Benedict Option is the same idea but without the
vindictive nature. It is “an extreme
response to a particular situation”, but what makes it seem so “extreme” is not
the actual practice itself. Rather, we
would only see it as “extreme” because it demands complete obedience and humility before The Lord in His Church. It requires that all else in our lives be
placed secondary to our primary being and purpose, and it adheres to the
biblical reality that we “cannot serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24).
“The
primary purpose of Christian community life [whether in a
monastery setting or in the Church] is to
form Christians. The
Benedict Option can teach us to make every other goal in our lives secondary to
serving The Lord. Christianity is not
simply a “worldview” or an add-on to our lives, [as it has come to be taught
by the Church and practiced by church members].
Christianity must be our lives, or it is something less than
Christianity.” Rod Dreher, “The
Benedict Option”, The American
Conservative
In a manner of speaking, then, the Benedict Option is
the “nuclear option” of the Western Church.
The more we understand it, the more we may come to realize just how far
from our faithful witness we have drifted; that the primary purpose of our
being – to form Christians - has been relegated to secondary or even incidental
status, and our baptismal vows rendered void.
It is as when those who expressed a desire to follow Jesus but first
wanted to take care of other things, and our Lord’s simple answer was: nope.
That’s not how this works.
Jesus
was clearly unwilling to compromise, and yet somehow compromise has become the
natural order of the Church.
St. Paul had very strong words for the Gentile
believers in Rome when he wrote of the boundaries of The Lord’s patience. That is, we can quite possibly drift so far
off the holy grid that we may soon be “cut off” (Romans 11:22), assuming we are not already cut off, as in much of
Church practice and practical living by which we claim to “know God” but we do not
really “honor Him” (Romans 1:21).
This state of being leads us to a point at which we
are given up “to a debased mind and to things that should not be done” (Romans 1:28). Though St. Paul’s inference seems to be
directed toward “that issue” which keeps haunting the Church, we must be
willing to acknowledge there is much more we can do, have done, and still do to
dishonor our God and Father; things that have come to be quite normal to us. This is when we can honestly say we are CINO
(Christian In Name Only); when we “honor The Lord with our lips while our
hearts are far from Him” (Isaiah
29:13; Matthew 15:8).
So the Benedict Option seeks to radically change the
course of our thinking and doing and being.
And the first order of our reorientation must be toward the “order of
the Church”, but this “order” has nothing to do with the weekly bulletin or
committee meetings or budgets. Rather it
speaks of how we order the very life of the Church itself to reorient ourselves
to the Church’s primary purpose: “to form Christians”, to make disciples who
are equipped to make disciples themselves.
The Church does not and must never exist to entertain nor to comfort
those of us who are already a little too comfortable for our own good.
Jesus said, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and
looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62). That is, if we
set ourselves on the work of the Kingdom and yet try to somehow make secular Christianity work for us, we are
not “fit” for the Kingdom. We are not
ready; we are unprepared. This can mean
one of two things: we have either gone back to our old life, whatever it was;
or we can acknowledge we still have a lot of work to do before we are “fit” or actually
prepared for the Kingdom itself.
Jesus is defining a critical crossroads every believer
faces at one time or another, and yet this passage has been taken so lightly by
the contemporary Church to have been stripped of any real transformative
meaning and power. Think about what is
happening in the Church today.
Fornicators, adulterers, gamblers, gossips, slanderers, homosexuals,
drunks, addicts, and hoarders and lovers of money all claim to “know
God”, all claim to have been “saved”; but few have a notion
or even a concern about what it takes to truly “honor God”. They testify of their salvation, almost
proudly boasting of being a “sinner
saved by grace”, but they never even try to “put their hand to the plow” for
The Kingdom, having been convinced it is unnecessary and, consequently, missing
the entire purpose of the Christian faith and the Church.
Now we can easily dismiss any of these by saying “they
are not really saved”, and there may
be some merit to this, but it is not for us to say. Such a dismissive and
shallow statement fails to look more deeply into the life and the order of the
Church – the Christian community - that has made such a narrow mindset and
state of being possible. “Don’t judge
me” has become the favored defense of these who refuse to repent, and the
Church has turned a blind eye to that “leaven” which threatens – and has
largely already infected – the entire Body.
What does this mean to us who can clearly see “others”
so narrowly engaged but cannot – or will not – see the complicity in
ourselves?
The first thing we must do is to acknowledge the
reality of The Lord. Not to simply say
He exists (which is intellect, not faith), but to fully understand His Holy Nature revealed in His Law, His
prophets, AND His Messiah. Looking to
the prophet Hosea – as the other prophets – we see a God whose arms are always
open to the truly repentant; but we also encounter that same God who offers no excuses even to His own
chosen people, and certainly not to those who try to live on both sides of the
fence, working diligently to prove we CAN “serve two masters” in spite of
Jesus’ direct words to the contrary.
The Lord’s judgment is harsh and yet just – and is
coming. Those who will find favor with
The Lord fully repent; that is, they
do not merely apologize for their mistakes and hope for the best. They make a complete determination to radically
change their behavior and the trajectory of their lives. They not only pray for mercy; they actively
engage in acts of contrition and mercy, “bearing fruit worthy of repentance”
as The Baptizer insisted upon, making right their many wrongs especially in the
lives of those whom they have deliberately harmed.
Truly penitent persons do not try to justify their
sins nor does our Holy Father justify us in
our sins. We must not take salvation to
be so extremely personal that we fail to understand our place in the greater
Christian community, to recognize, embrace, and then use our particular
spiritual gifts for the sake of the Church’s whole and holy purpose. It is how we learn to “love The Lord our God with
everything we have and with every fiber of who we are” so we are then enabled
to “love
our neighbors as ourselves”.
The Spirit of the Living God is our Teacher and our
Guide. It is only in this Reality we are able to live fully into the ordered
life of the Church toward its primary purpose of making, teaching, and then
training disciples as we grow in discipleship ourselves; according to our
fullest desire to truly transform
ourselves into that Divine Image in which we are created.
There is a lot of angst and anxiety, fear and anger
about the direction of this nation; but if we truly desire to transform this
nation, we must first transform the Church to be the community we are called to
be. Not a “club” in which we get to make
up our own rules and do as we please, but a living, breathing, disciple-making
organism alive in the Spirit of our Holy Father to do His Will. The Benedict Option drives us to it because
St. Benedict knew our God requires it.
And in Benedict’s time, the Church was falling apart much like today.
We are nothing without the fullness and the wholeness
of the Church, but the Church cannot be the true Body of Christ without devoted
disciples of Christ, diligent and active
members dedicated to Christian excellence in service to our God and to one
another. Anything less is something less
than Christianity, unfit for the Kingdom of God. Amen.
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