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Day: March 30, 2008

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Homilies,

Low Sunday

They devoted themselves
to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life,
to the breaking of bread and to the prayers.

Christ is risen, alleluia!

The way Easter falls this year we celebrate Low Sunday just before the observance of the birth of our founder and first Prime Bishop, Franczek Hodur.

One-hundred forty-two years ago Bishop Hodur was born in Zarki, Poland. By the time of his repose in the Lord, in 1953, the Polish National Catholic Church was well established, first here in the United States, then in Poland and Canada. Today the Church and its sister Churches in Poland and Norway continue to proclaim God’s truth as revealed to us by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

When we read of the early Church we see their communal life as a sort of ideal, people living and working together and ultimately bound in the breaking of the bread and prayer. People gave everything they had to join with that band of believers. They didn’t give to join, there was no buying in, but they gave freely to build up the community. Their life together, their faithfulness to carrying out and proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ, was an outward mark of their shared faith. Because of their faith – and for that reason alone, they were blessed.

And every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

As members of the PNCC we hold the same faith and work in the same manner as the early Church. We come together in the breaking of the bread and in prayer. We live as the very same one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. We bind ourselves together in our democratic Church – sharing in the ownership of our buildings, lands, and of all the gifts God has given to us. We share not just in common ownership, but also in the common decision making inherent in our democratic form of governance.

As members of the Holy Polish National Catholic Church we give of ourselves, of our gifts, of the work of our hands, all focused on upholding the Holy Faith, and our motto – through truth, work, and struggle we will be victorious.

As Polish National Catholics we continue to welcome all who seek Christ. We hear same voices Bishop Hodur heard in 1897 as they cry out today. Help us find Christ. Bring Christ into our life. Help us to live and work together as a community. Build up the poor, the weak, the uneducated. Teach us about Jesus – who liberates us from sin. Help us to work with fellow believers and clergy – standing side-by-side in God’s field. Hear our voices. Be accountable to Holy Scripture, Tradition, and the people who build-up and support the Church.

Brothers and sisters,

St. Peter proclaimed the blessings God the Father has bestowed on us. These blessings are an inheritance for us – an inheritance that is:

a new birth to a living hope—¨through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead

We have an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for us. By God’s power we have been granted faith in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Because of this gift, because of faith, because we are joined together as a community, as the Holy Church, as brothers and sisters to all who proclaim the name of Jesus as Lord and Savior, the words of St. Peter ring true for us:

Although you have not seen him you love him;
even though you do not see him now yet believe in him,
you rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy,
as you attain the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

Today we rejoice because eternal life has been won for us. We rejoice and are glad because of the tremendous gift of faith that we proclaim, as brothers and sisters united in the self-same Church that the Lord Himself gave to the Apostles.

When Jesus entered the room He told His followers:

—Peace be with you.—

Let us resolve to carry that as our message to all. Jesus says: —Peace be with you.— The world is longing for that message. The people next door, your co-workers, the folks in the malls and on the street. They are struggling. They are crying out, and this Holy Church – the Polish National Catholic Church has the answer.

Jesus expects us to bear that answer to all who call out, to all who do not know Him, to all who seek answers, to all who are in need, to all our brothers and sisters. He told us:

—As the Father has sent me, so I send you.——¨
And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them,
—Receive the Holy Spirit.—

We have the deposit of faith, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the words of Jesus Christ, and the very same strength evidenced in the early Church. We have faith! Show the world His Word. Teach the world about Christ and tell them:

But these are written that you may come to believe
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,
and that through this belief you may have life in his name.

Amen.

Fathers, PNCC

March 30 – St. Leo the Great from a Sermon on the Occasion of the Resurrection of Christ

For when the whole body of mankind had fallen in our first parents, the merciful God purposed so to succour, through His only-begotten Jesus Christ, His creatures made after His image, that the restoration of our nature should not be effected apart from it and that our new estate should be an advance upon our original position. Happy, if we had not fallen from that which God made us; but happier, if we remain that which He has re-made us. It was much to have received form from Christ; it is more to have a substance in Christ. For we were taken up into its own proper self by that Nature which condescended to those limitations which loving-kindness dictated and which yet incurred no sort of change. We were taken up by that Nature which destroyed not what was His in what was ours, nor what was ours in what was His; which made the person of the Godhead and of the Manhood so one in itself that by co-ordination of weakness and power, the flesh could not be rendered inviolable through the Godhead, nor the Godhead passible through the flesh. We were taken up by that Nature which did not break off the branch from the common stock of our race, and yet excluded all taint of the sin which has passed upon all men. That is to say, weakness and mortality, which were not sin, but the penalty of sin, were undergone by the Redeemer of the World in the way of punishment, that they might be reckoned as the price of redemption. That which therefore, in all of us, is the heritage of condemnation, is in Christ ‘the mystery of godliness’. For being free from debt, He gave Himself up to that most cruel creditor, and suffered the hands of Jews to be the devil’s agents in torturing His spotless flesh. Which flesh He willed to be subject to death, even up to His speedy Resurrection, to this end: that believers in Him might find neither persecution intolerable, nor death terrible, by the remembrance that there was no more doubt about their sharing His glory than there was about His sharing their nature. — Homily 72, Part II. Christ took our nature upon Himself for our salvation.

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