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Homily:
29th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle A
Being a missionary is hard.
My guess is that most of you here would agree with that statement. Let’s just think about the life of a
missionary for a second: He or she is sent to a foreign land—that is, an
unfamiliar place—where it is likely that the people who live there do not speak
the same language as he or she does; they probably have quite unique cultural
practices, too, and live by some moral norms that are strange, possibly even
offensive, to him or her. Yet in the
midst of all of this the missionary has to find ways to communicate the Gospel
message to the people to whom he or she has been sent. In doing so, he or she will probably face a
broad range of reactions: from the extremes of complete acceptance and firm
rejection (even, possibly, to the point of being put to death!) and including
all the shades of apathy that come in between.
Yes, the life of a missionary can be very hard.
And I should know.
I’ve been one for the last two and a quarter years. If a missionary is someone who has been sent
to communicate the Gospel message, then I think that I qualify as a
missionary. In July of 2012 I was sent
here to Cass County—an unfamiliar place for me—to continue the work of bringing
the Good News of Jesus Christ to the people of this parish. When I arrived here I found that the people
here spoke a different “dialect” than what I had been familiar with (for
example, I’ve only recently come to understand the correct use of the term
“reckon”). I also found that there were
cultural practices unique to this place (“I hope that you like fried chicken,
Father, because that’s what we serve at funeral dinners… and we have a lot of
funerals!”); and that there are certain moral norms that I was going to have to
get used to (like the time that I preached to the school children about how
good it is to share/trade food in the lunchroom only to find out that such
practices are prohibited so as to prevent conflicts). Through all of these things (and yes there
have been much bigger challenges than these) I’ve had to adjust, adapt, and
continue to find ways to communicate the Good News of Jesus Christ to you, the
good people of Cass County, while experiencing the full range of reactions:
mainly acceptance, of course, but some rejection and many different shades of
apathy mixed in.
Perhaps we don’t often think of him in this way, but Jesus
was a missionary, too. Just think about
it for a second. From all eternity the
Son of God dwelt in perfect communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit, he
participated in the creation of the universe, and when God’s greatest
creation—man—used his free will to separate himself from God, the Son of God
accepted the mission to go forth from the Father and the Holy Spirit (though he
was never truly separated from them) to take on human nature so as to complete
the work of redeeming man from the sin that separated him from God. In doing so, Jesus—the divine person in human
nature—had to adjust, adapt, and constantly look for ways to communicate the
Good News that the time of redemption had finally come. As he did, Jesus also experienced the full
range of reactions: he was both enthusiastically accepted and fiercely opposed,
including all of the shades of apathy that come in between.
I imagine that most of you here do not see yourselves as
missionaries, however. No, you all are
mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, doctors, nurses, teachers, laborers,
farmers, homemakers, first responders, city council-persons, etc., etc. No, you’re not missionaries, because you’ve
not been sent to some unfamiliar place to communicate the Good News of Jesus
Christ. I reckon that the Pharisees (and
their disciples), and even the Herodians (who were loyalists to the “puppet
king”, King Herod), probably thought the same thing. Each of these groups was concerned more about
maintaining the status quo according to their principles and so each was
challenged by the teaching and works of Jesus.
But these were all Jews, of course, and so Jesus’ reaction to them was
an attempt to wake them up to the mission that they had been neglecting. “You are all God’s chosen people,” Jesus seems
to say, “called to wait for the Messiah, yes, but called, nonetheless, to a
mission to proclaim to the people of the world—from wherever you are—the Good
News that Yahweh, the God of Israel, is sovereign over the entire world, and
thus that salvation awaits them, too.” In
other words, they had become too caught up in issues that were wholly of this
world (for example, about whether or not they should pay the taxes to Caesar);
and thus the point of Jesus’ statement, “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar
and to God what belongs to God” was to tell them, “Even though you must be in
the world, do not be of the world.
Rather, be of the work of God while you are in the world.”
This, of course, is the message that also comes to us. Yes, we are all of those things that we
self-identify with; but above all we are missionaries: that is, those called to
communicate the Good News of Jesus Christ and to make God’s sovereignty known and realized in the world. I mean, it’s right here in the Liturgy, isn’t
it? At the end of Mass, the priest says
(among other options) “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord.” It is a missionary mandate! And if we’ve experienced the joy of the
Gospel, then this should be a welcome mandate to receive; for none of us finds
it difficult to share the joys in our lives, right? For example, we have no problem passing around
pictures of our children and grandchildren, because we feel such joy that they
are, in a way, ours. This is how we
should be about sharing the Gospel. And
so, if this joy for sharing the Gospel is not in you, then find someone who has
it and cling to them until you feel it too!
(I’m speaking figuratively, of course; that is, unless it would help for
you to do that literally. If it does
help then do it literally, too.) For then
you will be ready (and energized) to fulfill the mission that you’ve been
given.
My brothers and sisters, this is the message of World
Mission Sunday: that we are all together called to carry the Good News of Jesus
Christ into the world from wherever we find ourselves; and because of that, we
are also called to support each other in the mission with our prayers and our
material sacrifices—whether that be here in our evangelization efforts at home,
or in the efforts being made in far-off places, like Mongolia. Let us recommit ourselves, then, to this
“mission from God”—that is, of bringing the joy of the Gospel to all those
around us—so that God’s loving plan of universal salvation might soon be
realized.
Given at All Saints Parish:
Logansport, IN – October 18th & 19th, 2014
World Mission Sunday
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