A Living Relationship

It is possible to live out our spirituality in a very superficial way, but God has something richer and far more wonderful intended than that. We can just walk through the motions and mechanics of faith, or we can encounter faith in a loving relationship with the Author of Life. Jesus came to offer himself that all who put their trust in him would be in an ongoing connection with the living God.

We live our lives on both real and symbolic levels. Reality and signs of reality overlap and weave in and out of each other. Here is an example. Think about friendship and the hug. In a friendship, the two people have a love for each other. The love is real and manifested in conversation, events shared, and in help given by each to the other. Love and history are significant elements of friendship. In greeting, saying hello, or saying goodbye, some friends hug. The hug loves and is a symbol of the feeling and esteem they have. It is both a sign of their friendship and a real experience of the friendship. The love is there with or without the hug, but for some friends, a hug comes naturally and fittingly symbolizes the whole of their relationship.

This brings up a principle of sacramental theology. When you receive the bread of the Eucharist, It is a symbol or sign of the presence of Christ which the Son of God has made possible for us. Christ is ever-present with you, and when taking the bread of Communion, Christ is made present to you in a special way. It is a symbol, charged with the reality to which it points. It has the meaning of “Christ-with-you” and it conveys Christ’s presence to you. You have a living relationship with Christ. It gets lived and experienced in all kinds of ways. In the Eucharist, the grace of that real presence is pointed to and is also actually delivered.

People, I suggest sadly, are prone to take something good and meaningful and squeeze the life out of it by forgetting the essence of the thing. In the days Jesus, with his disciples, offered ministry, they walked into the Temple of Jerusalem. The Temple was of course a significant building for him and all his fellow Jews. The building was a tool for experiencing a living relationship with God. People tend, however, to seize, possess and control things in their lives. A temple might be intended as a means to connect people with God, but we can make it, and the things that happen there become a replacement for divine connection. The happenings of the temple can take center-place, and leave God on the sidelines. The second chapter of John’s gospel shows Jesus distraught by how off-the-mark things are in the Temple, as the business of sacrificial offering has taken over space in the Temple. He turns the occasion into a way of introducing himself as the way to find union with God.

Jesus answered [the Jewish Temple leaders], “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” …He was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. —John 2:19, 21-22

Do you see how Jesus directs people away from the commerce of ritual practice and to himself as the very person in whom God and humanity join? He is fully human and fully divine, the Word made flesh, and in him, we discover union with God. It is as if he is saying, “You want to make yourself right with God in this place, the Temple; I am your Temple. Come to me, and I will make you right with God.” Jesus came not just to teach something about God, but to make God’s presence real and available to the human family.

Let’s make one more connection out of all of this. It is easy to think of a commitment campaign of the church as merely something we participate in because it is part of the drill of church membership. It is more than that. I assure you. Indicating a plan of giving for the year in the family of faith is a step of deep spiritual connection. To indicate your commitment, and to then give regular donations to the work and ministry of the parish, points to your connection to God through Christ, and is an experience of that connection. To give to God through the church is a means of giving yourself to the Almighty. Your gift is saying, “O God, Source of Love, take me, I want to be wholly yours.” I never think of regular church giving as a sideline of church affiliation. To me, it is always both a symbol and the reality we dwell in God and God dwells in us. I do not want my life in the church and my sense of God to be a loose affiliation; I want it to be a living relationship. I want it for us all.