November 9, 2008, Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome

This is an odd feast–celebrating the first church we ever built as a Christian religion. Before this, anything we used as a church was, in reality, a hiding place, for our religion was illegal. The emperor Constantine with the Edict of Milan made us a “legal religion,” and thus we were able to “build” in the open a place of worship for ourselves. We got this property in Rome from the Laterini family, and dedicated the church to the memory of St. John. So the readings are about the holiness of space–with the Prophet Ezekiel, in the first reading, speaking of the Jerusalem Temple as being the epitome of sacredness in the world–not a place “walled off from human traffic,” but rather a place from which “Life Energy” symbolized by “water in a desert,” flows forth to water all the earth. St. Paul reminds us that while there are sacred places, the Church is more than brick and mortar–it subsists in the hearts and souls of the believers, ourselves, as we make up a “spiritual Temple” of wonderful holiness. And the Gospel is all about Jesus’ “cleansing” of the Temple wherein He simply “symbolically” restored the “court of the Gentiles” as a place free of clutter and commerce, so that the Gentiles might, also, worship God in their assigned place. This latter act of Christ reveals His openness to the vague and the different of the earth–calling them to the “center of the world” (which the Temple was mystically thought to be) and recognizing them as worthy of God’s service--no matter how "far off" others thought them. So, what do we learn? We learn that “holiness” is always “life giving,” not sanctimonious, and that it resides throughout the earth, for God is everywhere, but especially in us, His people, and that with all our goofiness, we are, indeed, invited to experience the Grace and Goodness of God. Such is our celebration of our first building–celebrating “ourselves and our mission” as much as that ancient construction.