Robert Barron - How to Proclaim the Faith
Peace be with you. Friends, we continue our journey through the Easter season. And for this Fourth Sunday of Easter, we have this magnificent first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. It's one of Peter's great kerygmatic speeches. The kerygma means the basic proclamation of the faith. I think it's a master class in evangelization. So we've been talking about that now ever since Vatican II, the New Evangelization. I'm trying to practice it in my own work. A lot of other people are.
What is it? What is evangelizing preaching? Take a look at the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, our reading for today, and you'll find it. See, I think one of the problems, everybody, is Christianity's become so commonplace for so many of us. Old Christianity, it's been around for a long time. "Oh yeah, it means being a nice person". Remember Flannery O'Connor's line that for most people, she said, being a Christian means having a heart of gold? Well see, if that's all it means, the heck with it. Then we should just get honest jobs. Listen now as this chief of the Apostles, this friend of Jesus, begins to preach. This is preaching with fire. This is the spark. This is the energy that should belong across the ages to Christian evangelical preaching.
So Peter gets up, we hear, in the temple precincts. Well, that's like saying in Times Square or State & Madison if you're from Chicago. It's downtown L.A. I mean, he's standing up right in the heart of the society. Well, there is a first clue. Evangelical preaching is not something we whisper among ourselves. It's not little edification for one another. No, evangelical preaching is public. It's out there. It's in the midst of the culture. And I know in a thousand ways our culture today, which is very secularized, wants to marginalize the religious voice. Well, that's not evangelical preaching then. We stand up in the very heart of the culture.
And listen now to what Peter says: "Let the whole house of Israel know", that's shorthand for everybody here, let the whole culture hear, "know for certain that God has made both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified". I said before, there's something uncompromising about this. Begin with the "whom you crucified". "Hey, I'm basically a good person. I'm okay, you're okay. I'm beautiful in every way. Don't blame me for anything. It's all someone else's fault". Well, that attitude rampant today is repugnant to evangelical preaching. "You crucified him. The Author of life came and you killed him".
Now, Peter could say "we" because he contributed to the death of Jesus. But the point is, the declaration of Jesus crucified is ipso facto a judgment upon sin. Don't think for a second that evangelical preaching just avoids the question of sin. Au contraire. If you say, "Hey, I want to be friendly and nice and have people listen to me, so I'm not going to mention their sin". Whatever that is, it ain't evangelical preaching, because Peter is right up front about the cross and what it means. It is judgment upon our sin. I think I said it last week, that if the Lord came back again in the flesh, we'd kill him too, because his presence is always a judgment upon us. But then now look at the positive side here: "Let the whole house of Israel know that God has made both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified".
"Lord". Well, in the Greek of the New Testament it's "Kyrios," but behind that undoubtedly on the lips of Peter would've been something like "Adonai," "the Lord". That's the term used for God. They wouldn't have called him by his sacred name, the Tetragrammaton. We say "Yahweh" as sort of our own little invention. They wouldn't have said the divine name. It was too holy to pronounce. What they would've said, therefore, is "Lord". An extraordinary claim now at the heart of evangelical preaching is that Jesus is not one little teacher among many. "Boy, here's this guy that we all found really inspiring".
Well bore me to death with that. There's a thousand people that we find inspiring. What Peter is saying is "No, no, he's the Lord. He's Adonai. He's the divine presence. He's named him Lord and Christ". So in the Greek "Christos"; in Peter's Hebrew he would've said "Mashiach". "Messiah" is derived from that. Mashiach in the Hebrew, "the anointed one". That means David for them. Remember the prophet Samuel anoints David, and then we hear, "The spirit of the Lord rushed upon him". He's the Mashiach in the full sense in the Old Testament. But then they began to look for a new David who would go even beyond the great David of the Old Testament, would become the anointed king who would gather the tribes of Israel, and through that gathering would bring in all the tribes of the world.
That's what's happened now through the Resurrection of Jesus. He's Lord, yes indeed. He's God among us, and he's David. He's Mashiach. He's the anointed one. Look now, he's the magnetic point which is meant to gather in first Israel but then, through Israel, all the world. Evangelical preaching doesn't present Jesus as one mildly interesting figure among many. No, no, it presents him as the central figure in human history. Period. The still point around which the whole of society is meant to revolve. He's both Lord and Christ. If you see him as anything less than that, you're missing the point. And evangelical preaching, it is not shy about sin, but then it declares this Christ and Lord who conquers sin, conquers death, and is now meant to gather in the world.
We're not just playing around here with nice little moralisms. No, no, this is a very dramatic and altogether revolutionary message. And then I love this. I love this phrase, and I think anyone doing evangelization should be mindful of it. It says, "Having heard all this, the people were cut to the heart". Cut to the heart. These words pierced all the way down to the very center of their being. I think, everyone, you know the difference between rhetoric that doesn't do this and rhetoric that does. I remember years ago there was a wonderful homiletics professor I had, and he said most homiletic language is what he called moralizing catechesis. That's to say it's kind of teaching us how to be good people.
Now look, I'm all in favor of being good people. And if a little moralizing catechesis helps you with that, I'm all in favor of it. But see, moralizing catechesis, even at its best, does not cut to the heart. It might be something that kind of beguiles the mind and, "Oh yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that might be a helpful application in my life". Well, great, but that's not going to cut to the heart. What cuts to the heart is this announcement that Jesus whom you crucified, God raised from the dead and has made both Lord and Christ. He's the center of your life. Everything about you, your mind, your will, your senses, your body, your private life, your public life, all of it belongs to him. He's the Lord of your life. Well, I'll tell you that message cuts to the heart.
Now, you might say, "Hey, I don't want that," but trust me, those words have cut to the heart. That's a sign of evangelical preaching and not the sort of watered-down wimpy Gospel that we often get, yes, even from a lot of Christian pulpits. Now, take one more step as we're doing this evangelical preaching. Being cut to the heart naturally prompts a question. So the people ask once they've heard this, "What are we to do"? Now, mind you, Christianity is never simply a question of getting our minds clarified, as important as that is. I mean that's going beyond the mind you have, that's the fundamental meaning of "metanoia" in Greek, or "conversion". Getting the doctrine straight, knowing who Jesus is. Absolutely, you bet. But having come to that knowledge, having been cut to the heart, we naturally ask, "Okay, all right, well then what are we to do"?
Listen to the answer that St. Peter gives. Here's how evangelical preachers sound. He says, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins". "Repent". Well, that's the first word out of the mouth of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, when he emerges from the hills of Galilee as a preacher. The first thing he says is "repent". I just wrote something recently about this because there's so much talk today about being welcoming. And look, in principle, I'm all in favor of being welcoming, but the first word out of the mouth of Jesus is not "welcome," it's "repent".
And so here, the first word out of the mouth of St. Peter, when they say, "Hey, what should we do if Jesus is Lord and Christ?" is "repent". Change your life. And just what I said a few minutes ago, it means give the whole of your life to him, not part of it. Not, "I guess my private life, I'll let him have that," or "I'll let him have an hour once a week". No, no, repent. Turn around. Your whole life belongs to him. "And be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins". It's so basic, everybody. Now, I imagine most people listening to me are probably already baptized, but if you're not, that's essential to it, because Baptism is the means by which we are grafted onto Christ. We become members of his Mystical Body. Change your life and get baptized. That's the key once you've heard the Word.
Now, what happens from Baptism? Well, Peter says, "You will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit". As I record these words, I'm in the middle of Confirmation season, so I'm doing a lot of Confirmations around my diocese. And Confirmation doesn't give the gifts of the Holy Spirit, because they've already been given in Baptism. It confirms them. "Confirmari" means to strengthen. It stirs them up again and confirms them. When were they first given? In Baptism. That's when the Holy Spirit comes surging into our lives, bringing his gifts. He never comes empty-handed, bringing his gifts of wisdom, knowledge, understanding, counsel, fortitude, piety, fear of the Lord, all the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
That's the most important thing, everybody, in your life, is how will you cooperate with the Holy Spirit? How will you cooperate with these gifts? How will you use them now for the building up of the kingdom of God? People who've gone through real repentance, people who've really been evangelized, know, "My life is not about worldly success. If I get worldly success, fine, then Lord, tell me what to do with it". It's not about fame, it's not about power. If I get those things fine. It's "Lord, what do I do with them"? But what it's fundamentally about is using these gifts of the Holy Spirit that have come to us through Baptism, which is followed from repentance, which has come from the proclamation of the lordship of Jesus. That's the evangelical rhythm that's on display here. And just one last thing. Peter says to them, "Save yourselves from this corrupt generation".
See, Christians are never meant to fit in. Jesus said, "You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world". You're meant to be different. Every generation from the first century to today falls short of what God wants. We Christians, we baptized, we evangelized people, we who belong to the Lord Jesus, we're meant to look and sound and act differently than the world, to stand apart from the corrupt generation.
This is disturbing stuff, everybody, but in study after study, survey after survey, Catholics do not profile any different against the general trends of the culture, issue after issue. Catholics pretty much are right in line with the culture. That's a problem. That means that we've not saved ourselves from the corrupt generation. It means we've not been evangelized. It means we've not accepted the lordship of Jesus. So I guess here's what I'd say to you. Pick up your Bibles, open them to chapter 2 of Acts. Read this speech of Peter and let yourselves be cut to the heart by it. And God bless you.