30TH Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle A
World Mission Sunday
Well, Mitt Romney is running for president again, and it hasn’t taken long for religion to become a central controversy of his campaign. Pastor Robert Jeffress from the First Baptist Church of Dallas has weighed in, calling Mormonism a cult and declaring that Mormons are not Christians. Nothing really new there. And, as usual, the news hasn’t gone over well in Utah. It seems that the subject of Mormons being Christians or not rears its ugly head periodically. Baptists seem to make that claim every year during LDS conference weekend. Both the Evangelicals and the LDS get their hackles up, and the argument devolves into “Yes we are” versus “No you’re not.”
We Utah Catholics don’t usually get involved in these discussions, I think partly because of our own history of being persecuted here in America, and because, heck, the Baptists really don’t think we’re Christians either. No big whoop.
We have a lot of theological differences with our LDS brothers and sisters, and this is not the time or place to discuss them. However, today’s readings get to the heart and soul of what it means to be a Christian, so I think we do need to look into that a bit, because it means something when we claim to be Christian. The way we define ourselves is important. What exactly is a Christian? What is the criteria? And are we Christians simply because we claim to be?
In the gospel today we hear Jesus going up against the Pharisees, the Evangelicals of his day. They, like a lot of folks these days, claimed that their interpretation of the law and scriptures was the correct one, and it was ladened down with hundreds of strict rules and regulations. If you didn’t follow the letter of the law you really weren’t a good or true Jew. They came to test Jesus’ interpretation of the law, thinking that it wasn’t exactly kosher. They would get all worked up because Jesus cured people on the Sabbath, when the law said that no work was to be done. The conundrum was, which was more important, mercy or adherence to the law.
In reply Jesus distilled their entire interpretation into two simple commandments. Love God and love your neighbor. In that statement, Jesus brought the two sides together. The law must be followed, and that law said we were to be merciful. You need to have both.
We Catholics also seem to have a lot of rules and regulations. Come to Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation. Go to confession at least once a year. Fast and abstain on certain days during Lent. Does being a Christian mean you have to follow all the rules and regulations to a T, or can it simply be boiled down to love God and love your neighbor? Is it as simple as that? The Mormons have just about as many rules as we do. And like us, most of their rules are there to help them live up to the challenge of loving God and our neighbor.
The Mormons do not share our concept of God and his plan for our salvation, but if being a Christian means loving God and our neighbor as ourselves, then who’s to say that they aren’t? And what about those folks who don’t profess to belong to any particular church, but live their lives according to these two great commandments? Are they Christians in practice if not in name? Jesus himself told his disciples, “If someone is not against us, they are with us.”
Believe it or not, one of the practices we share with our LDS brethren is the concept of mission and missionaries. In fact, we thought it up two thousand years ago. What do you think Paul and Barnabas were doing walking all over the countryside? And who do you think those young men and women walking two by two throughout your neighborhood are modeling their activities on? If you truly love your neighbor as yourself you would want to share with them what is most precious to you, your faith. What greater sign of your love for your neighbors than to want to share eternity with them?
Today is World Mission Sunday, when in every parish church in the world we focus our attention on the needs of the missions. I remember sitting in Mass as a kid when once a year some guy in a funny looking outfit would appear and give the homily, usually a story of his life working in some far off country with an unpronounceable name with desperately poor people whose main goal in life was having drinkable water. Usually the missionary was barely understandable his English was so bad, and I never got his full message, just the feeling that I really had it pretty good here in comparison.
That was my impression of the missions and missionaries. So very far removed from the reality of my world. But do you know which has been the largest mission field in the world? The North American continent and specifically the USA. The Spanish and the French brought the Jesuits and Franciscans along on their voyages of conquest. The French went north into Canada, the Spanish to the South into Mexico and Central and South America. California was discovered by missionary priests, and Fr. Escalante was here in Utah before the Mormons arrived.
America has always been mission country. Utah continues to be so. We have 13 missions in this diocese, one right next door in Heber. America has rarely been served by native born priests in the past and this will not change in the future. First they came from Spain and France, then during the great migrations of the 19th and early 20th centuries from Ireland and Italy and Germany and Poland. Then in the later part of the 20th century from Africa and Asia, Southeast Asia and the Southern hemisphere. For our entire history they have come here, to the United States, the largest mission in the world. Why? Because they have chosen to love their neighbors as themselves. A true lover of neighbor is a missionary.
We are privileged to have two outstanding missionaries in our midst here at St. Mary’s and St. Lawrence. Both our priests have left their homelands, their families and heritage, to come here to serve us. We oftentimes think of the sacrifices our priests make for us; it is even more so with our missionary priests. They come here and stay with us out of love for us. They leave their families in order to join our families. And we embrace them as our own in return.
On World Mission Sunday we are called to think about the far flung missions of the world, but we need to recognize that we are also in need of “missioning”. We may think we have no need of missionaries because we have money and resources to give, but we need to humbly recognize that we are also poor children who need missionaries to show us God’s love.
We need to not only learn to act as missionaries, but as mission. As mission we need to first be grateful. We need to thank God every day for the gift of the missionaries he sends us. When we do not have men answering the call to priesthood from our own parishes, God sends us willing and dedicated men from around the world. We also need to show our gratitude to those men themselves and never take them for granted, or treat them differently because they are from another country.
As mission we need to be patient with our missionaries. Part of our rich history is all the thousands of immigrants who have brought their faith, and their priests, here to build the wonderful melting pot that is the Catholic Church in America. Just as it would take us time to fully assimilate into a foreign culture, we need to ease the way for our missionary priests into our culture.
Unlike the LDS missionaries of whom only a certain number are called to serve a mission, we are all called to serve a mission. We all need to be missionaries and we all need to be missioned to. Sometimes that mission is in our own homes. Sometimes our mission is in the workplace. Sometimes the mission is to our own hearts. But if we are to truly love our God and our neighbor, we must reach out to everyone with the love of Jesus Christ, welcome and honor them, and allow them to welcome and honor us.
Jesus said to go and make disciples of all nations. Sometimes that nation is our own.
