A Homily for the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome

Readings: Ezekiel 47:1-2, 8-9, 12   1 Corinthians 3:9c-11, 16-17   John 2:13-22

Here is a phrase you are going to hear a lot in the coming weeks: “Home for the holidays.” Whoever used it first was a genius, identifying a fundamental fact of life: When it really matters, we want to go home.

A solemnity is the highest rank among Catholic holy days. If one falls on a Sunday, it trumps any of the Sundays of Ordinary Time. So every seven years, the Solemnity of the Dedication of St. John Lateran Basilica returns, prompting the question: Why are we celebrating a building?

You might say that St. John Lateran is the first real “home” of the church in Rome. The first Lateran palace was given by Emperor Constantine to Pope Sylvester in 324 A.D. A church dedicated to the saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist has been there ever since, which is why this church—and not the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Basilica—is the cathedral church of Rome. As bishops of Rome, popes go there to celebrate the Chrism Mass for the Diocese of Rome. Thank me the next time you win in Catholic trivia.  

But why are all the churches of the Roman Rite celebrating a church in Rome? A large—though still abbreviated—inscription at the entrance to the church, installed in an 18th-century restoration of its façade, provides the answer: Sacros[ancta] Lateran[ensis] Eccles[ia] Omnium Urbis et Orbis Ecclesiarum Mater (“Of all the churches in the world, the most holy Lateran church (is) mother and head”).

You might say that today—at the start of yet another holiday season—Catholics are thinking about home and about their mother, the church.

Home is not just a part of human experience. It makes it possible. All of us enter life through the portal of a home, the most primordial one being our mother’s womb. 

The church as the home of our humanity lies latent in Ezekiel’s vision of a new and eternal temple in Jerusalem, built upon a mount from which living waters flow. Scholars now suggest that Ezekiel’s understanding of God’s temple as our primordial home is itself constructed upon the foundational vision of Genesis. 

In six days of creation, God builds a home in which we can dwell. First, God creates time itself, separating the day from the night. Then space, parting the sky and the seas. Next comes dry land and vegetation, what today we would call a habitat. And in the following three days, he gives each realm a ruler: the sun and moon over time, birds and fish who traverse the great spaces and finally animals who dominate the land. Man is made steward of all this so that on the seventh day, acting as a great high priest of the cosmos, God might lead creation in grateful worship of its author. 

With Genesis in mind, Ezekiel reminds us that the temple is not something added to the cosmos. The cosmos itself is a temple, a home created by God for us and for all God’s creatures.

Small wonder then that “home for the holidays” resonates. It is, quite literally, primeval. 

Of course, right behind it is the recognition that home is not always all that it seems. Many of us leave the place with at least a small measure of hurt. Hence that other truism: Family, can’t live with them; can’t live without them.

As the church fathers continually suggested, Adam and Eve were cast out of their broken home, but in Christ, humanity is summoned into a new cosmos, a creation that we call the church. Buildings come and go, but no one can live without a place to belong, without a home. 

St. Paul told his flock that they were now God’s home, the place where humanity flourishes, the temple in which God again dwells among us:

Do you not know that you are the temple of God,

and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?

If anyone destroys God’s temple,

God will destroy that person;

for the temple of God, which you are, is holy (1 Cor 3:16-17).

No, this home is not perfect—not yet anyway. But it is holy because it is the work of the Lord. And this time, the grace of God is going to triumph, even if the Lord must sometimes whip us back into shape. 

Despite so much evidence to the contrary, the church is our home, our mother. We were never meant to live alone. Indeed, we cannot. People can change homes. Families can move, and new families constantly come into existence. But no one can become or remain human without a home. 

“Home for the holidays.” 

The Sabbath was created to be that moment in time that we acknowledge and give thanks for the home God created for us. For too many, our secular holiday season is all that we have left of sacred time. Come the holidays, we still yearn to go home, to know that we have a place in the cosmos created just for us. 

A lot of fractured families will find their way to church in the coming weeks. Would that they see it—at least once—for what it is: a promised place to call home, a family created for each of us by God.

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.