2nd Sunday of Easter – April 7, 2024

This Sunday I must begin by disclosing a particular agenda behind my reflections. I am a member of a little-known governance body within our parish, the Finance Council. Its role is to support the pastor in managing the temporal affairs of the parish: the finances, the buildings – that sort of thing. Its role parallels that of the Pastoral Council, which is concerned with the spiritual and liturgical aspects of the parish – “pastoral” matters.

My aim today is to connect the temporal and the pastoral matters in my reflections on the readings this Sunday, which go to the heart of our faith as Christians.

It is astonishing that, 2,000 years after Jesus died, hundreds of millions of people around the world still know about him and acknowledge what he preached during his life.

This is one of the greatest of miracles he worked. To endure through time.

And why has this happened?

In some sense, the explanation can be found in Thomas’s absence the first time Jesus appears in the locked house and then in his encounter a week later with Jesus in person.

Thomas roots his faith in seeing the risen Jesus and verifying the wounds Jesus endured. It provided a rock solid basis for his faith. But this basis was available to only a few of those who were alive at the time and is quite obviously beyond the reach of us now 2,000 years later.

We believe that Jesus was a real person who lived and died as the Gospels recount. His followers experienced his reality first-hand, but something more was needed to expand Jesus’s mission beyond those he physically met.

So, what sustains our faith, and the faith of all the generations before us from Jesus’s time?

In this age of instantaneous and ubiquitous communication, it is easy to take for granted the passage of Jesus’s history and message through 2,000 years.

But for most of this period, communication media were limited to word of mouth and, in rare instances, written documents that were inaccessible to all but a very limited class of literate clerics.

The reason we still know about Jesus and hear is Good News is because of the communities that developed to keep his Word alive. In other words, the Church, the community of people who have believed in Jesus and passed on their belief to future generations.

This explains the significance of Jesus’s response to Thomas when he says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” He is pronouncing a blessing on all those generations of believers who did not live in his time and had no personal encounters with him. He is blessing us gathered here today.

This also points to the significance of the first reading from Acts about “the whole group of those who believed [and] were of one heart and soul” to the point of not claiming “private ownership of any possessions”, but rather with everything they owned “held in common”.

This is a radical approach to community in our world where private ownership of property is the norm. This approach informs the structure of many religious communities whose members take a vow of poverty, but what does this model mean for the rest of us?

At the very least it underscores the need to consider the needs of others as well as our own. To support efforts aimed at ensuring the needs of all are met, including efforts to build and sustain communities with organizational structures and institutions for this purpose.

This Sunday, the reading from Acts as well as the Gospel underscore the fundamental importance of our own community structures here at St. Joes, structures dedicated to sustaining us both as a group united in our faith as well as in our efforts to meet the needs of others and support the larger community that surrounds us.

Our liturgies are at the core of our community and, as the Pastoral Council has reminded us, they depend on the volunteer efforts of many of us to support all we do as part of our liturgical and pastoral life.

But another aspect essential to that life is a worship space. This church building – the third one on this site – was very well-built and is now almost 100 years old. We are fortunate to have this space, but like the other elements that contribute to our liturgies, it too requires support, both in terms of ongoing expenses such as heating, utilities and insurance, as well as structural maintenance and renovation. The substantial size and nature of the church buildings produces substantial expenses.

Many, if not most, of the things needed to maintain the church cannot be done by volunteers, and so we depend on your volunteerism in the form of financial support. This explains why almost every week we hear expressions of thanks for this support and encouragement to continue it.

But there is much more to St Joe’s than our liturgies and worship space. In fact, far more frequent use of our physical spaces is made by non-liturgical activities.

The Women’s Centre and the Supper Table use facilities located in the Rectory on a daily basis, serving the needs of the many people in our neighbourhood who need support, including in terms of their most basic needs.

This space we are in and the church hall below it provide venues for a wide range of community activities and social functions: choirs for children and adults rehearse and perform here, community groups meet, and in some cases dance, here. These groups depend on our space to carry on their many worthwhile community functions.

These activities not only put our facilities to good use, they also generate some modest revenue for us in terms of rental fees, which in turn help defray the costs of maintaining our facilities.

So what should we think and do about all this? How about returning to the image of the early Christian community in the first reading. While we might not be ready to give up all our possessions for the common good, we can think about how to contribute to our parish community, both in terms of is pastoral life as well as its temporal needs.

We should reflect on how the very presence of St. Joe’s here in Ottawa, particularly Sandy Hill, is an evangelizing presence to all who enter this space, whether to pray, sing, dance, be nourished, to find a community of care.

JMK