Fifth Sunday of Easter B
Today,
more than 40 children of our four parishes received Holy Communion for the very
first time. I preached to them
without a text (and “tested” my homily during two Masses before that), so what
follows isn’t word-for-word, but some reflections based upon what I had to say.
What
I really wanted to share with the kids was a message about “putting
together”—in particular, how Jesus wanted to be put together with them in their receiving of the Eucharist. So I tried to come up with a few
examples…
The
first was blocks. (For the record,
these are not from the rectory; I borrowed them from some local toddlers…but
they’re fun and I might be slow to give them back.) Blocks can be put together very easily, and in countless
different ways. You can make
almost as many things out of blocks as your imagination will allow. But there’s one problem: blocks also
come apart rather easily. When
Jesus wants to be put together with us, I’m quite sure he wants us to stay
together.
So
I put away the blocks, and next considered bread. You see, the First Communion candidates and I spent some
time in the kitchen at their retreat yesterday and baked 40 loaves of
bread. The children’s faces were
beaming with pride as we pulled all that fresh bread from the ovens. Their parents’ faces all said, “Has
this guy lost his mind?” when they realized just what we were doing: mixing up
all that sticky dough with our bare hands. That’s where bread is better than
blocks: when the flour, water, and yeast are put together, there’s no way to
take them apart again. They become
something even better when put together then when they’re separate. But there’s still a problem. Most of the children had already tried
their bread, and many had shared it with their families. (One grandmother told me before Mass
that it was, in fact, pretty terrible.)
When you’ve eaten bread, it’s gone. It grew a bit as the yeast helped it to rise in the pan, but
it wouldn’t grow any more. When
Jesus wants to be put together with us, I’m quite sure he doesn’t only want us
to stay together, but that he also wants us to keep growing; the gift he’s
giving isn’t going to run out.
So
I put the bread away, and brought out two branches—one with dry, brown leaves
and one with fresh, bright green ones.
I asked the children the difference, to which they promptly responded
that one was dead while the other was alive. (Of course, the truth is that they were both dead since I’d
yanked that second one off the tree…but it simply wasn’t possible to bring the
whole thing into church.) One
branch I’d found on the ground; it would never grow again. But the other one, while firmly
attached to the tree, would keep on growing. If it were a branch on a grapevine or an apple tree, it
would soon enough not only have leaves but flowers, and in time those flowers
would become fruit. We could eat
all the grapes and apples we wanted, and that branch would keep right on
growing, producing more the next season.
Now we had a good example!
When Jesus wants to be put together with us, I’m quite sure he doesn’t
only want us to stay together and to keep growing, but to bear good fruit that
can be shared with many others—and which won’t run out.
It
was during the Last Supper that Jesus said to his friends, “I am the vine and
you are the branches.” It wasn’t
long after he broke bread and said, “This is my body,” and passed a cup of wine
saying, “This is my blood.” In the
great gift of the Eucharist, Jesus found a most wonderful way to be put
together with us. He desires to
not only live near or among us, but to dwell deep within us—to make a home in
our hearts. “Remain in me,” he
says, “as I remain in you.” We
keep returning to this sacrament again and again, because Christ wants us to
stay together always and to keep on growing. “Without me,” he warns, “you can do nothing.”
And
then I had a brief (and pointed, I guess,) reminder for the kids’ parents. Jesus said, “I am the true vine, and my
Father is the vine grower.”
Mothers and fathers share in God’s own work as the vine grower, protecting
and nurturing these tender branches.
Parents already had a responsibility for the their children’s’ growth in
body and mind; at Baptism, when these little ones were grafted onto Christ, they
accepted the additional responsibility to grow their children’s’ souls. We priests, when we talk among
ourselves about First Communion in our parishes, speak of the joy at seeing
these young parishioners at their finest.
But we also tend to find this a sad day, when we look around realizing
how many families we haven’t seen much of before, and how many we don’t expect
to see too much of again. Our
community was rocked during the past week as two teens took their own
lives. We all felt the hurt of
when young people feel disconnected, unable to see how truly precious, how deeply
loved they really are.
Shouldn’t we, then, seek out those times and places when our young
people can be put together with that Someone who makes the rest of life make
some sense? Jesus wants to be as
stuck to our children as the sticky bread dough that had to be scrubbed from
their small hands yesterday morning.
I urged their parents to come to Mass with their children, and to come
every Sunday, helping them to stay connected to the things that really matter.
Jesus
is the true vine, and we are the branches. By the Eucharist, he helps us to stay put together with him. Let us return often to this great
Sacrament, where we’re given what we most need to keep on growing and bear much
fruit.
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