"Proper" Readings for Easter V: Acts 17:1-15, Psalm 66, 1 Peter 2:1-10, John 14:1-14

"Philip said, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been so long with you, and yet you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father’."

"The world is redeemed by the patience of God. It is destroyed by the impatience of Man." (Benedict XVI)

Tens of thousands of people were present in St. Peter’s Square in Rome – with millions more "present" thanks to satellite television – for the inaugural liturgy of the new Bishop of Rome, as Anglicans comfortably call him! To communicants of the Roman Catholic Church, he is their Supreme Pontiff. To some, in an often paranoid and self-wounding Christianity at large, he may still be perceived as the "anti-Christ". But this new pope is surely of God; and as Dean of South Carolina I could not but rise early to watch the papal elevation of a fellow Dean, albeit of the College of Cardinals!

Non-Roman Catholic representation was the broadest it has ever been at a papal investiture. Along with many other Anglicans, the Archbishop of Canterbury was present for the first time since the Protestant Reformation. The churches of the Christian East were represented by senior prelates. Billy Graham, although too frail to accept his invitation in person, was represented by members of his Evangelistic Association. The International Bible Reading Fellowship sent representatives. Indeed, although sacramental participation was restricted to Roman Catholics, the occasion was significantly ecumenical.

So, in terms of Christian worship and witness, there was about this historic event something of both the patience and the impatience with which we experience God’s will for His church and for His world: "already/not yet." And the new pope himself expressed this tension. He has taken as his papal name Benedict, reflecting a long view of Christian history, harking back to the first St. Benedict, the founder of monasticism, that great renewal of Christian patience in the face of the lengthening shadows of the Dark Ages. It was St. Benedict and his monks who undertook to preserve and cherish the dogma of Christendom at a time when the historical forces of the world, the flesh, and the devil were closing in. Christian Europe was at risk then, as it is at risk now.

Impatience is never the answer, although always a temptation. Thus, even with Jesus standing before him, Philip is blinded by his own impatience: "Lord, show us the Father" he berates Jesus, who poignantly laments: "Have I been so long with you, and yet you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father."

Human impatience always exposes the pride of our unwillingness to wait upon God, to let God be God, to let God set right the wrongs we bring upon ourselves, to let God do His work according to the mathematics, so to speak, of the fullness of God’s own time (God’s kairos in the Greek). The zealot Saul, even after his conversion as St. Paul, succumbed to such impatience; St. Peter, even after his confession of Jesus as the Christ, allowed his own impatience to deny them both; Judas, even though Jesus called him "friend", betrayed his Master because of political and monetary impatience, disingenuously justifying himself by invoking "the poor"; and Christians down through the ages, in conflict with one another, have all too often given vent to human impatience, to insistence on their own way, their own "truths", their own spiritual "constructs".

As the new pope, the latest in the long line of Benedicts, so accurately proclaimed: "The world is redeemed by the patience of God. The world is destroyed by the impatience of Man."

There is so much in this "fallen" and "broken" world about which we human beings become impatient, so much that we seek to set right, or solve, or change on our own terms, to our own liking, by our own power. We get impatient with injustice. We get impatient with others who are not like us, as they get impatient with us. Like the Hebrews of old, we lack the patience to slog on through the wilderness, even when it is the wilderness that leads to the Promised Land. We become impatient with the pride, hypocrisy, unfaithfulness, self-indulgent appetites, exploitation, dishonesty in daily life and work, all the many negligences and ignorances of others; and thus we succumb to all these sins ourselves. Trying to eradicate the motes in the eyes of others, we are blinded to the beams in our own eyes.

And so Pope Benedict has reminded us that the world is destroyed by the impatience of Man but redeemed by the patience of God.

Not even the naming of St. Benedict as Patron Saint of Europe by Paul VI could stem the tide of what Benedict XVI has called the "salt waters" eating away at Christian civilization. Perhaps, amidst the cumulative ravages of the century just past, there was no more poignant or powerful literary expression of human impatience than the novel by André Malraux, La Condition Humaine. In the face of a view of life as nothingness, Man’s "fate" (according to Malraux) was to invent himself. And yet at the end of that serial self-inventor’s life, in the tragically banal circumstances of his self-disillusioned death, there was found at his bedside the scrawled words, barely legible: "It should have been otherwise."

But things went wrong long before the twentieth century! According to the biblical narrative of Man’s impatience with God and Man’s inhumanity to Man, things have been out of kilter from time immemorial. The church at least used to understand this. Orthodox Christianity, Eastern and Western alike, Catholic and Protestant alike, when still rooted and grounded in God’s Word Written (Holy Scripture) and God’s Word Incarnate (the Person of Christ) understood this. The perennial philosophy of credal Christendom reflected this. Even classical, pre-modern mathematics presupposed this! Such math was about God, too!

But the "new" math" is not so "new". When I was an undergraduate at The University of the South (when that Christian liberal arts institution was still residually rooted in the trivium and quadrivium) its Vice Chancellor was Edward McCrady, scion of an old Charleston family, scientist, classicist, Episcopal lay theologian, Renaissance Man, who was still holding the line in the face of the 300 year-old "new" math, beginning with René Descartes.

Dr. McCrady was among the truth tellers about the emperor’s "new" clothes! Those "new clothes" are well symbolized by the concept in modern mathematics of Number as no longer tied to things out there, no longer descriptive, no longer a way of counting the "many", the multitude of God-given actualities, no longer reflective of a reality extra nos – outside of ourselves or our own minds – but rather a symbolic "calculus" of self-invention, so that even Zero is now conceived as a Number yet does not identify any number of things!

Since Descartes, mathematics, like everything else, reflects his dictum Cogito ergo sum: "I think therefore I am." Or, as the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger often put it: "Reality" has become what Man "simply thought up." Or again, as the erudite Dr. McCrady, in uncharacteristic lingo, once said about Zero: "There ain’t no such thing." Or as Flannery O’Connor expostulated about the "symbolic" understanding of Holy Communion: "If it’s symbolic, I say to hell with it!"

In contrast to human self-invention, credal Christianity affirms dogma about God the Creator and Man made in God’s image but, because of sin, self-wounded, self-shattered, self-destroying.

Dogma is the opposite of the impatience of Man, of Adam, to make the world over on his own terms, by his own power, by projecting himself, in Man’s not God’s image. Dogma is the opposite of the post-Cartesian impatience to "master" nature, the impatience that leads to the modern world’s cultures of death. Dogma is the opposite of the human impatience that leads to what the new pope has called "the dictatorship of relativism". Dogma is the opposite of the impatience that wants to say "anything goes" or that there are as many options of salvation as may satisfy the diversity of our multi-cultural longings and lusts. Credo in unum Deum is the opposite of Cogito ergo sum.

Dogma defines and reflects the patience of God over the long haul, redemption the One who alone can create ex nihilo and redeem from nihilism, who has the "patience" that expresses itself in the "passion" with which Christ endures the wilderness, sets his face towards Jerusalem, surrenders his own will in the Garden of Gethsemane, carries his Cross on the Via Dolorosa, sheds his blood and implores his Heavenly Father’s forgiveness for his crucifiers, even for us, from that Cross, descends from that Cross to the tomb and thence to the darkness of the place of departed spirits, and who there awaits the power of God’s own Spirit to be raised and to return to His Father in Heaven, bearing the marks of his patience and his passion in our human flesh, transfigured and glorified in light eternal.

Serial self-inventor that he was, André Malraux learned the futility of impatience only at long last, at his own tragic death: "It should have been otherwise." But those who have witnessed the inauguration of Benedict XVI have the advantage of being reminded by the dogma of credal Christianity that salvation is of God, that the Way, the Truth, and the Life are of Christ, Crucified and Risen, and that the destruction of the world by Man’s impatience can be, is, and ever shall be "otherwise" for those who receive redemption through the patience and passion of the God-Man, Jesus.