I suspect that everybody remembers this line from Paul: "If Jesus is not risen from the dead, then the whole Christian enterprise falls apart". It is important that we understand what Paul was talking about. Paul's understanding of the Resurrection is grounded in his belief that, because God chose to raise Jesus, Jesus thus becomes the great paradigm for what it is to be a human being. Whereas if God has not raised Jesus, then this is not what it is to be a human being. And we are all in trouble again and we had better start looking elsewhere for this ideal paradigm. Thus, we can interpret the Resurrection (as far as we would-be Christians are concerned) as the great clarifying act, in that the Resurrection clarifies who God is and what it is to be a human being. Today, I would like to talk about something else that the Resurrection clarifies: the nature of the Church.

The word "church" is mentioned a couple of times in the text that Geordi read from the Book of Acts. Next, this business about the Church in the last line from this famous passage in John - - "Everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another" - - is intimated. Most likely, the easiest way to interpret these lines is to observe the traditional New Testament understanding of the Church: the Church as the representation of the New Israel. That is, that in Jesus, the mission that God gave to the Jews is now being carried on. What, we might ask, does this mean? Perhaps it would be useful to contrast this understanding of the Church with my understanding of the Church (and maybe you experienced this as well) when I was younger. We were told that when everybody dies and goes to Heaven, all the people who are Catholic are going to walk around with "RC" etched on their foreheads and assume a sort of superior status, and that we would comprise this huge Salvation Club - - a group of individuals who had been delivered to the Kingdom of God on this greased track. This is not right. In fact, it is profoundly wrong.

What does the Resurrection do to clarify the task of the Church? First of all, and most importantly, it indicates that the Church is provisional. It is not some kind of permanent institution that is going to endure throughout all of eternity. Thus, if we return to this business of Catholics running around with special badges that proclaim that they are superior to everybody else, it is easy to determine that this is incorrect because there is not going to be a Church in the Kingdom of God. Well, if this is not the case, then what is the Church all about? This passage from John makes it very clear: the Church is supposed to be the great witness to the reality of God in the present; just as the Old Israel was to be the witness to the universally saving Rule of God - - "the light to the Gentiles" - - that phrase that we hear over and over. Thus in a world in which people are fairly brutal, indifferent, and defensive towards one another, we have these people who are supposed to be open to everybody instead. This was the mission of the first Israel. Jesus is understood to be the very summation and perfection of the first Israel. And because not everybody in the first Israel followed this understanding, there now exists what we call the second Israel - - the Church. In other words, the Church is essentially "mission," it is essentially God's agency for somehow trying to persuade the world that, again, to take a leaf from the First Letter of John, "God really is love". God is not the kind of vindictive monster that she is often depicted as, or, this totally indifferent and remote figure, unaware of and unconcerned with what she has created. Furthermore, in loving one another and coming to understand that this is what God wants, we are also to persuade each other within the Church that this is what God is all about. This is, of course, where things begin to get a little touchy, because this clarifies yet another aspect of the Church in that the Church is testimony to our sinfulness. Whereas, if all this were all self-evident then we would not need a body that is supposed to convert itself, and by being converted, convert everybody else to the belief that God really is love and God really wishes to save everybody. So, this is quite different from the model of the Church that I learned about in my youth. The Church is itself testimony to our deficiency and this is why when we are fulfilled in the Kingdom of God the Church is not going to be necessary anymore. This is evident in that Heaven is simply the transmutation of our consciousness so that we come to say, "My God, we really are loved, we really do belong with each other, and we really are capable of loving each other - - all others".

So, the Church essentially has a tension built into it because it very quickly became institutionalized. As early as the end of the first century this is evidence in the so-called Pastoral Letters to Timothy and Titus. There, the Church was already getting organized and bureaucratized. For example, there are job descriptions in these letters: "A bishop is...An elder is...". Therefore, there is evidence that the formation of a bureaucracy was taking place. And of course, as soon as a bureaucracy is formed there arises this innate tendency of all bureaucracies to act over and against real life. Because all bureaucracies are interested in power, and above all, the power to keep themselves going. This is the case whether we are talking about the University of Western Ontario, the Bank of Montreal, a dynasty, and yes, even little King's College.

This tension in the very existence of the Church, is spelled out in the classic Israel. For example, when the first Israel failed it failed because it closed in on itself. This is why the Prophets - - Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, and Hosea - - had to come and say, "Break down these walls!". The Book of Jonah, this funny text about a man being swallowed up by a big fish, has as its purpose a warning against the Jews which states: "The God who loves you also loves those pagans who are your serious enemies". Yet many of the Jews did not listen. We do not listen very well either. As a would-be community, how exclusionary are we? It is very important to think about the provisionality of the Church, the Church's existence as testimony to the power of sin in the world, and the call to what the Church is really supposed to do. That is, the Church is to be this group of people who are supposed to be weird and notable because they love each other.

Finally, there is a very important aspect of the Church that we should recognize. I keep getting statistics from my home-diocese in the United States, and, I know what is occurring in the London diocese: Mass attendance is falling. For example, out of a student population of eighteen-hundred, half of whom are supposed to be Catholic, King's College Sunday Mass attendance is down to about four students each Sunday. What is going on here? Well, a variety of things are occurring. All institutions, whether it is Jean Chretien's, Mike Harris', etc., have discredited themselves and are now objects of suspicion, if not contempt. And, it should be added, often enough they deserve to be. And so has the Church, as we misrepresent, evade, and run away from our responsibilities as an institution, as we have done so often within the past few years. All institutions do this and, moreover, have done this from the time of the very first institutions. But, in today's world, there is an even more nefarious aspect of this: a profound and pervasive suspicion of institutions, the near-conviction that institutions never work. So, we think in this manner: "I do not need anybody else. I will do this all by myself, or with the help of my friends, over and against everybody else. That is, we will succeed against this great alien world that is opposed to us". This is the radical individualism of our time. We believe that "there is only one way and it is my way". This basic self-contained and fear-based individualism has as its major presumption the belief that we really cannot trust anybody. I have been teaching at this institution for twenty-five years and I see this more and more among the students. If it is the case that only "we" can construct out of whole cloth the meaning of our lives and our destinies, then what is the Church? It would seem that the Church is a waste of time, or that the Church is simply reduced to bureaucracy. As I stated earlier, Easter clarifies what the Church is supposed to represent. This form of representation is laid out very clearly at the end of this passage from John: "By this everybody will know that you are my disciples, that you constitute this Church if you love one another". And you only learn how to love somebody else with somebody else. Love is not some kind of virtuoso performance comprised of an individuals' appearance on a stage and their statement: "I am going to love you all". No, it does not work this way. It only works this way in Hollywood or at rock concerts, and, as we all know, it does not even work in these situations. In other words, if we cannot deal with the frailty of each other and ourselves, we are dead in the water. And, because the message of frailty is written so large and so deeply in our consciousness, especially for the young (for example, the people who attend university in today's world), we are not going to go anywhere. This is why it is so essential that we understand what the Resurrection clarifies about the nature of belonging to the Church, because the alternatives do not work, not even pragmatically. Whether or not an individual believes in God or the Resurrection, etc., nobody can live all by her/himself, no matter how much we would like to whistle past the graveyard and make the great proclamation that we do and can live this way. For better or for worse we are stuck with each other and the beauty of the Resurrection signifies that this is not such an awful thing; in fact, remaining faithful to this vision is the only way to reveal our wholeness as human beings.