First Communion Representatives

Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year C ~ 

St. Francis Xavier, Mt. Washington KY & 

All Saints, Taylorsville KY

May 5, 2013

         We have entered into the season of sacraments, so to speak. We have a brand new deacon, we’ll soon have a couple of brand new priests, there are countless confirmations and weddings both here, at our sister parish, and throughout the diocese. I addition to these sacraments there are of course first communions. First communions are great aren’t they? The faith of a child growing up, no longer having to come up with arms crossed but now with arms wide open! (SFX – ask those who received first communion last week to come to the front, All Saints – ask the three girls receiving their first communion to come up front.) 

In the first reading we hear that the early Church in Antioch needed good representatives. They had received bad representative already, representatives who gave them news that was more than a little disheartening and their message proved to be a stumbling block between them and their new lives as Christians. The fact that they were born and raised as non-Jews was being held against them as they tried to live a life of conversion in the Body of Christ. It could be said that the heart of the argument from these bad representatives was that these gentiles were not mature enough to be good Christians, they were too young in their faith to make a real commitment, and they needed to go through the adolescence of living as perfect Jews before they could be considered counted among the true followers of Christ.     

Like these early Christians we need good representatives as well. We need representatives to counteract those of the world that tell us we need to have this certain product and then we will be with the in crowd, or we have to make a certain amount of money and then we’ll be considered successful, or we need to have certain kinds of jobs and then we can be considered as living a full life. These worldly representatives feed us this kind of falsehood all the time and do so in more and more inventive ways. These representatives try and complicate our lives by adding to the list of things we need to do in order to fit, in order to have a place. The temptations of the world have as their end making us believe that there is too much between us and true happiness which is union with God. The world also wants us to believe that it is all on us, on the individual person to make it happen. The world says that if you really want salvation then you will have to do it yourself, make it happen for yourself.     

Oh but sisters and brothers there is truly good news here!

We hear in today’s readings that good representatives were in fact chosen: we have the two that Acts names – Judas and Silas, the Twelve Apostles mentioned in the second reading, the Holy Spirit, our advocate promised to us in the Gospel, and then we have Christ himself. We have Christ as a representative who has not left us and headed up to a heaven in the clouds, remaining distant until the second coming. Rather he returns to us time and time again, especially in the Eucharist. The people who caused all the worry and turmoil in Acts were working on their own agenda, but the men that the Church sends were chosen – they were working on the mission of the Church. In a similar way Christ chose his apostles, they did not decide their mission, Christ did; and even Christ and the Holy Spirit are not working on their own strategy but that of the Father. The message of these chosen ones is not complicated, it is not a stumbling block but rather it is a freeing opportunity to journey with God. These representatives do just that – they re-present God; those other representatives well they were not really representing anyone but themselves and their own ideas of how living a life of faith should look.  

Just like that early Christian community we have similar representatives. We still have the words of Judas and Silas, we have the example of the Apostles, and we certainly still have Christ and the Holy Spirit. In this season of sacraments we also have representatives in these children. Christ often talked about a childlike faith and we get to see it in these children who Sunday after Sunday will come forward from now on and be offered the Body and Blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and they will say Yes, Amen! These young people have certainly undergone some instruction but nothing as painful as those false representatives wanted to see those early Christians put through. The mentality of those false representatives would have the Church insisting on years and years of instruction and the wisdom that comes with age before one can truly understand what they are saying yes to by saying amen to the Eucharist. The fact is that none of us truly understands completely how the Eucharist is what it is, and that goes for these children as well, but the Church gives voice to God’s desire for them to come forward and receive him nonetheless. The First Communion of these children (was/is) not just for them, and their communion with God, but rather their First Communion (made/makes) them a representation of the Christian life for all of us.