WHO’S IN BACK
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
December 08, 2019
In every
church where I’ve ever served there has been something unique about the back
row of people at worship. In some parishes it’s where the ushers sit. In other parishes
it’s where the disabled people sit. In still other places it’s where those
parishioners who have always sat it the back row sit, and by God it’s where
they shall ever be.
But it also
often where the seekers sit—the people whom you may not have seen in church
before. The people who had to muster up every ounce of courage just to walk in
the door in order to check out what goes on in here. Sometimes they are the
ones who have been battered and bruised by experiences with another church.
Sometimes they are people who are in a time of crisis in life and don’t have
any place else to turn. Sometimes they are people who wandered away from their
Catholic practice a long time ago and are wondering if it might be time to come
back home. And sometimes they are people of no faith at all, but who have been
made fascinated and curious by the life witness of their neighbors.
In some
cases those seekers are profoundly grateful to encounter a warm and personal
welcome to the community. And in other cases they’d more prefer to be
invisible—at least for a while, until it starts to feel more comfortable as a
spiritual home.
Our sign out
front here at Pax Christi tells the world that “All are Welcome.” And they
are—at least we try very hard to make it so. Our regular members of the
community already know that. But the seekers need to test that claim. And in
some cases that can take a long time. Even a few years.
But there’s
a flip side to that dynamic, and our Advent Sacred Scripture—particularly the
gospel preaching of John the Baptist today—expresses what that is.
Specifically, while all seekers are welcome anytime, there comes a point at
which there needs to be a commitment to this Jesus and to this gospel and to
this community. It’s okay to be a seeker—but not forever, not as a permanent
disposition of life.
The kingdom
of God has a mission to accomplish on this earth. And the mission has a church
with which to accomplish that good work, and there’s an urgency about it.
That was the
message of John’s preaching in today’s gospel of Matthew. He taught (or maybe
better to say he screamed) as he baptized at the Jordan River for the crowds of
people who came out from Jerusalem to see and hear him. Many of you know that a
trip from the city to the river was not a casual stroll, not then and not now.
It’s 20 miles of travel through a hot, arid desert wasteland. Nobody would make
the trip who didn’t sense that something of importance was at stake in what
John was saying.
But the
people went to the river in large numbers, and they submitted themselves to the
demands of discipleship that John spoke about: repentance from sin and
conversion to God.
But there
were others who arrived there too—the scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees—the
leaders of Jewish religion at the time. They weren’t there to commit to
anything, but merely to look from a distance—to check out this religious
curiosity, this eccentric man. It was to those people that John the Baptist
spoke his words of condemnation: “You brood of vipers!” They weren’t seekers in
any real sense. They were there as the religion police, or maybe worse, as the
color commentators, disengaged from what was going on.
At some
point, the true seeker has to move out of the back row, to step forward and to
commit to the mission of personal conversion and world transformation. Again,
as Advent recalls for us, there’s an urgency about this task. Will it be
baptism? Or not? Will it be repentance and conversion? Or not?
The vast
majority of us gathered here today are baptized. It’s a sacrament that happens
only once in our lives, so we will never be more baptized that we now are.
John’s Advent preaching invites us all to consider with what kind of urgency
and passion we regard the responsibilities of baptism here and now.
In the
gospel he railed against those who felt it was sufficient to claim that they
were people of the Israelite race: “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We
have Abraham as our father.’”
In the same
way, it is not sufficient for us Christians to fall back on the claim that our
baptismal record is on file in a church somewhere, so that we are relieved of
the expectations that are required of us in the way that we live. Discipleship
is not a passive condition; it is an active and ongoing summons to live life in
a new way, converted from sin and committed to community.
And as John
reminds us, it needs to start now. Being a seeker is an honest and appropriate
condition for a very limited amount of time. By all means, let us honor that
sacred time for those who are in need of it—who need seats in the back row for
a little while. But only for a while. As is usual in church, there are open
seats in the front row. Welcome forward!
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