Experiencing God - "Opening the Doors" 63

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to."
Gospel of Matthew

In this part of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is singling out the teachers and lawyers with some rather strong words of rebuke.  The word "woe" can also be translated as "alas".  Alas is as much an expression of sorrowful pity as it is of anger.  So why is Jesus issuing such a strong rebuke?

The main reason for His anger with the religious leaders was because they failed to listen to God's word, and, as a result, misled the people they were suppose to be guiding in the ways of God.  The scribes devoted their lives to the study of the laws of the Old Testament and regarded themselves as legal experts.  They divided the ten commandments and precepts into thousands of tiny rules and regulations.  They were so exacting in their interpretations and in trying to live them out that they had little time for anything else.  In their misguided zeal for following burdensome rules with rigidity, they forgot the more important matters of faith, of loving God and neighbor.

We all need rules in our society and organizations.  They guarantee order and helps to eliminate the chaos and confusion we would otherwise experience.  Imagine driving on our highways without the rules of the road.  However, when our obsession with following rules out weighs the actions of love and charity in our relationships, then they kill the spirit that unites us as a human family.

Recently, I attended a workshop led by Tom Quinlan from Chicago.  This workshop was on the New Evangelization.  Tom first went into detail on the difficulty the church is having in attracting and retaining people in our under-age forty group.  He called this group the "post-moderns", while most of us who are older than forty fell into the pre-modern group. 

He explained, with a video presentation, that the "post-moderns", our young people, think differently than the pre-modern group.  The post-moderns have been influenced by an astronomical amount of information provided by the advances of technology.  They are the group who have grown up in a pluralistic society, a culture of diversity.  As a result, they base decisions more  on how they experience reality from within, and not so much based on institutional rules that do not speak to them personally.  The post- moderns are more concerned with relational equality, therefore their boundaries are more fluid and less defined than pre-moderns.

The purpose of this discussion was to emphasize that if the church wishes to attract and retain people in the under forty age group, then it must begin to meet them where they are.  To meet them where they are is to recognize their need to personally experience the truth we wish to convey.  In other words, we need to find new methods, new ways of expressing our faith that will speak to them.

I believe this is why our church leaders today are challenging us to begin to identify and encourage the living signs of the Gospel of Life in our communities.  We must learn to celebrate and bring alive those areas of our faith where we experience the gospel of life being lived out; where Christ's life is made visible.  We must become known for who we are and what we are for; not for what we are against.

Tom mentioned that to tell a post-modern person that he/she will go to hell if they don't attend mass will not work.  In fact, it will have the opposite affect.  Where's the good news in that?  But if they can see and experience the abundant life that springs from our community that is living the Gospel of life, then they will be drawn to that.

Everyone knows what the church is against.  We don't need to be constantly reminding ourselves and others about that.  The question we need to ask is: "What are we for and what are we doing to celebrate that through our pastoral care and outreach?  Is this not the light on a lampstand, that we put out there for everyone to see?  Are we not shutting the doors of the Kingdom of heaven on the faces of the post-moderns if we fail to respond?