The Church Needs Welcoming and Inclusive Communities
23rd Sunday of the Year
I lived in Bogota, Colombia for six months back in 2017. The city is enormous, holding some eight million people and sprawling across a high-altitude savannah in what used to be an ancient lake; you can stand up on the mountains that surround the city at night and see lights radiating out miles into the distance.
Those eight million people live in many different neighborhoods, several of which were independent towns and villages in decades past that were swallowed whole by the city as it expanded outward. Many of these neighborhoods (or former towns) are very wealthy but became surrounded by shantytowns filled with homes constructed of cheap corrugated steel panels. I learned before long that the people of Bogota use a system of social stratification to categorize neighborhoods. A poor neighborhood is ranked with a 1, and a rich neighborhood is ranked with a 5. In between these extremes you will find the middle class and the working poor and everyone who is doing well enough with money to avoid abject poverty but are nowhere near the top of the social hierarchy.
To my surprise (and to my dismay), I also learned that the people of Bogota identify themselves with their neighborhood ranking. Many times, I would offer to visit the home of a parish family, only to be told that someone like me who belongs in a 4 or a 5 has no business visiting a neighborhood ranked 1 or 2. It didn’t matter that the family home was in good order, clean, safe, the children having whatever they needed for a decent life—what mattered most was the neighborhood, the community because (apparently) certain kinds of people just don’t belong in certain kinds of communities.
We no longer rank our neighborhoods in the United States the way people do in Bogota, but that does not mean we do much better when it comes to forming real community. Here at the Basilica, we have many homeless who live in the streets around us, and for the past two years people have asked me many times how we plan to remove the homeless from the neighborhood. A few months ago, I was explaining our new Café of Hospitality to someone and told them about seed money for the project coming from the Institute for Evangelization because a real goal of ours is evangelizing the neighborhood. But then I talked for several moments about bringing the homeless into the café because we want the homeless to belong to our community as well.
My interlocutor then asked me a question: Well, if I may ask, what does outreach to the homeless have to do with evangelization? You received funding for evangelization, but you are talking about homeless outreach, how does that work?
I took a moment to recall my years of study during seminary before responding: Well, so far as I know, homeless people also have souls, and we would love to have more of the homeless at Mass with us; not only can you evangelize the homeless, but we are also obliged to bring Christ to the poor.
The second reading today gives us an image of what ought to serve as the foundation for the Christian community: a concept of salvation that is grounded in conversion, baptism, forgiveness of sin, and expectation of judgment. For the ancient Jewish-Christian communities who received the Letter of James (maybe within a few decades of the death and resurrection of Christ) the future—salvation—gives shape and form and orientation to the present. Our common destination in Christ Jesus makes a claim on the shape and form and orientation of our common life right now. There is no longer a distinction that matters between rich and poor within a community that wants salvation through Christ. Those dressed in rags belong right next to those with gold rings and expensive clothes because the desire for future salvation matters more than present forms of social distinction and rank.
I do not want to present myself as a heroic advocate for the poor. Like most people, I enjoy the comforts and security that come from privilege, and like some people, I spend enough time racked with guilt about whether I am doing enough to live a good Christian life that reveals a genuine love to those in poverty. So maybe I struggle with what to do about poverty more than some people, but my struggles have not yet led me to become (or want to become) the next Dorothy Day or Theresa of Calcutta. You will presently find me living in a well-appointed 19th century mansion down on Charles Street.
But I do want to present myself as someone who cares a lot about the foundation for community life in the Christian church. The kind of community that is described in the Letter of James today makes no distinction between social rank or class—rich and poor alike belong to the same community. Now, the truth of the matter is that most parish communities in the church today lack the demographic variety necessary to constitute a congregation made up of members rich and poor: our parishes are usually found in wealthy neighborhoods or poor neighborhoods, and poor people usually go to poor parishes and people with money usually belong to parishes in neighborhoods with money. There are some parishes in Baltimore City that capture a little of the reality that James describes in today’s second reading, but on average parishes today are not guilty of excluding the poor from the community because there are either no poor to exclude or most of the congregation suffers itself from some amount of poverty.
The kind of community exclusion that James worried about had to do with money. He worried about the rich not wanting to belong to the same community as the poor. What I am trying to say is that the kind of community exclusion that James talks about is not much of a concern for us today because most of our parishes are not demographically mixed between poverty and wealth. But that does not mean that forms of community exclusion are not a threat to the life of the Church today.
Today, what often serves as the foundation for community life is a shared ideology, parishes becoming places where like-minded people come together to share in like-minded practices, and in which the like-mindedness is not usually a concept of salvation that is grounded in conversion, baptism, forgiveness of sins, and expectation of judgment. You know what I am talking about: parish life becomes grounded in a worship style, or in forms of social justice outreach, or in forms of exclusionary conservative moralism, or in form of progressive non-moralism that usually becomes just as moralistic and exclusionary as the conservative moralism it cannot tolerate.
These ideologies become identity forming, and we find ourselves belonging to parishes that we could categorize on a social scale of 1 to 5 moving from left to right or right to left with the facility and ease with which the citizens of Bogota categorize communities of wealth and poverty. I want to say very clearly that forming communities grounded in shared ideology makes complete and total sense: like-minded people by instinct want to share a common life grounded in like-minded practices with those who think and believe like them. Forming parishes grounded in shared ideology makes sense; the problem is that it makes exactly as much sense as forming communities grounded on conditions of material wealth and poverty, and that vision of community life is explicitly condemned by the words of scripture.
The Letter of James gives us a least common denominator for community life in the church: each member of the community is baptized, each member of the community sins, each member of the community possesses the potential to live more like Christ, and each member of the community will be judged. Here is the right foundation for common life in the church: a shared privilege that is found through baptism and sacramental grace and a shared poverty that is experienced through sin and moral weakness. These are the real bonds that hold together a community that is grounded in Christ—a shared desire for salvation that becomes identity forming and ideologically overriding because the most important thing about you is what Christ has done and is doing and will do for those who want eternal life.
But our instinct is to push back against these social bonds and settle for forms of common life that are more natural than supernatural; we settle for lesser, more impoverished, forms of like-mindedness. To these kinds of communities, the words of Christ in the Gospel today are very clear: Ephphatha!— that is, be opened!
Homily preached on Sunday, September 8th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and at Corpus Christi parish