Sermon within the Octave of the Holy Apostles
July 1,
2007
…The foundation of the Apostles and
Prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief Cornerstone….
+ In the Name of God
the holy and Undivided Trinity
Apostles and prophets: They are much
the same, both alike messengers of God. In the Creed,
we say we believe in the Holy Spirit, Who spoke through the Prophets.
They are God’s mouthpiece, as are the apostles. The difference is that prophets
come before Christ, and Apostles come after. The Prophets point ahead to his coming, the
Apostles link us back to His earthly life. In the last week of June, the Church
remembers the greatest of the Prophets and then the greatest of the Apostles.
John
the Forerunner said:
The One Who comes after me is greater than I….
I am not
worthy to undo His sandal-strap…
I baptize
you with water, but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire….
He must
increase and I must decrease.
And, sure enough the days get shorter
after
Apostles and Prophets: the foundation
of which Jesus Christ Himself is the chief Cornerstone. Christ is the meeting
point, the fulcrum, the capstone. The Prophets point to Him in visions of
glorious future Kingship ~ the Messiah of the House of David, who would
establish justice and peace over the whole world. The Apostles, sent by Him to
proclaim this messianic Reign, link us to Him in a visible, unbroken chain. He
commissioned the first Apostles, and they passed on the commission to
successors by the laying-on-of-hands. In this visible chain of the Apostolic
succession, each link is different from every other, specific to its own age,
but the chain is one thing: a sacrament, the outward and visible sign of an
inward and spiritual grace, a sign that effects what it signifies; the
transfiguring judgment and merciful authority of His Reign, on earth as in
heaven.
Without that chain, we would not know
Christ, the Living Word and Messianic King. Without that flesh-and-blood
succession, we would have only the text, as patient as many and wildly
different interpretations as there are people to read it, and we would soon
find ourselves playing with vipers in the mountains of Alabama or in plural
marriages in Utah, or crowding around the punchbowl in Jonestown. Or maybe not,
because without the authority of the apostolic succession we wouldn’t have a
text at all, since it was the Apostles who transmitted the stories that went
into the gospels and who authorized their writing, and it was the Apostles’
successors who decided which writings authentically represented the teaching of
the Apostles. So, without the Apostolic succession,
there is no New Testament, to begin with. If one accepts the authority of the
New Testament, one must accept the authority of the Apostles’; successors.
This is not to say that these
successors –even the successor of the chief of Apostles – are infallible or
even morally exemplary. It is to say that the chain will hold in spite of the
defects of its links. Here the chain analogy breaks down, because the apostolic
chain is much stronger than its weakest link. The authority of the Apostolic
succession does not depend on the righteousness ~ or even the orthodoxy ~ of the
individual successors. The Holy Spirit, Who inspired the Prophets and the
Gospel writers, and those who later would decide which of the ancient writings would
be listed as authentic scripture, this same Spirit guides the Church throughout
history. And if we didn’t think so, we might just as well go home now. This
doesn’t mean that the Church can’t make mistakes; it means that the Church
cannot utterly defect from its mission to proclaim the Reign of God, and
to make it visible in the Sacraments. The Gospel will always be preached; the
Eucharist will always be celebrated ~ until He comes again. Anglicans like to
say that the Church may not be infallible in its governance, but it is indefectible
in its purpose.
In a sense, all of us who proclaim
His reign and celebrate it in the sacraments are the successors of the
Apostles. But the Catholic tradition insists on an even more concrete sign. As
the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us in a particular Man, so the Apostolic
succession is incarnate in particular men ~ and now, in our branch of the
Catholic Church, in particular women ~ bishops, who are ordained in an unbroken
succession from the hands of the Apostles themselves. That is the sign of our
connection with Christ, and the connection itself. The individual successors
may be unworthy (just look at Peter!) But the chain they form permits us to
call the Church the extension in time of the Incarnation, of the earthly life
of Jesus Christ. The Church is His Body, living on in history.
Apostles and Prophets. Peter and Paul.
Let me close with one observation (intriguing to me, at least), along the lines
of my constant theme that we know where the Church is, but we do not know where
the Church is not. Nobody ever laid any hands on the Holy Apostle Paul. He was
not one of the twelve, upon whom Christ breathed in the locked room, and none
of them ever ordained him. He just showed up, announced that he had seen Jesus,
called himself an “apostle”, and started founding Christian communities. He
caused a fair amount of trouble, and he had some nasty things to say about
Peter, whom he called “Cephas”. (We heard about that
a couple of weeks ago.) Still, everybody eventually accepted the authenticity
of his apostolate, and the Church as it came to be is largely his doing. The
Holy Spirit, Who spoke through the Prophets, is not the possession of the
Apostles or their successors. It is the other way ‘round. The Holy Spirit
inspires whomever it pleases the Holy Spirit to inspire. The visible,
sacramental chain is there for our comfort, and we know that we are linked to
Christ by the
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME,
LORD JESUS!