To Make the Kingdom Come: 25th Week of the Liturgical Year, September 18-24, 2011

Ezra chapters 1-9; Haggai chs. 1-2; Zechariah ch. 2; Luke, chs. 8-9.

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I am on the island of Guam, where I was invited to give the keynote at the Archdiocesan Catechetical and Liturgical Conference, and then spend a week speaking of Immersed in Christ in the schools. I am looking out from the hotel’s sixteenth floor at a beach where, for all I know, Americans and Japanese died in the recapture of Guam in World War II. Now, I am told, the Japanese make up ninety percent of the tourism Guam lives on. And I ask, as I look at the dozen high-rise hotels in sight of mine, what does Jesus want us to think of all this?

From the readings this week, I think he wants us to be conscious that he is going to come again to gather together everything I see — and don’t see — under his headship, making all of redeemed humanity one in the peace and love of the “wedding banquet of the Lamb.” Whatever I see from my balcony; whatever I don’t see but can guess at; whatever went on here during the horrors of war; whatever is yet to come — he has already brought it to fulfillment in the time-frame of God. And, in the words of Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

The readings encourage us to make it so.

But he wants us to make it so by being now what we are trying to bring about: a community united in love, working together as one body now “under his headship,” a Church filled with love, joy and peace, radiating the “fruit of the Spirit.” We must dedicate ourselves to being now what we will be when we actually see realized “the blessed hope and manifestation of the great glory of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Yes, inescapably this requires us to live out and experience all five mysteries of Baptism — the new identity we have “in Christ”; the divine enlightenment offered us as disciples; the empowerment to bear witness as prophets by lifestyles that cannot be explained without the “gift of the Spirit”; the repeated surrender to Christ living and wanting to express himself in us and through us in ministry to all we encounter; and the total abandonment of ourselves in persevering, inexplicable hope to the work of transforming Church and world as stewards of his kingship. Yes, all of these. But this week the focus is on the last: exercising leadership in union with authorities in the Church.

All of us are called to be leaders. Leadership is not the same as authority. Only a few people are invested with authority. We follow them out of commitment. Leaders are people we follow freely, because we believe they are pointing us in the right direction.

The job of authorities is to hold the Church together. The task of leaders is to move it forward. These are two different functions. Both are essential. Each depends on the other.

The Church is not a “democracy.” But when we say that, we have to ask, “What, then, is it?” It is not a monarchy; not a dictatorship. What, precisely, is our form of government in the Church?

The Church is a community meant to be guided by communal discussion, prayer and discernment. There is no model for this kind of government in civil society. In important matters, by the time an authority makes a decision, everybody should have had a hand in it. In this way, all are called to exercise leadership. For this, leadership and authority must work together.

God’s ways are not our ways, but as stewards of his kingship we are committed to trying to adapt human life to his ways. The Church is being renewed, and we are called to renew it. And through the Church the world will be renewed

To believe this is to work for it. To work for it is to take initiatives. To take initiatives is to be a leader, a steward of the kingship of Christ. This is our baptismal commitment.

I think Jesus is saying this to all of us as we look out from all of our windows.

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